OK, so the expression is really “what’s good for the goose”, but I have a feeling that our dinner a couple of weeks ago was not so good for the goose. You see, our dinner was a seasonal speciality served here in Tübingen: roast goose with all the (local style) trimmings.

It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving in the US. that we decided to try the special meal for two at our favorite restaurant here in Tübingen. In general here in Tübingen, goose is a seasonal specialty. It’s supposedly somehow connected to St. Martin’s Day, which is Nov 11, but our favorite restaurant didn’t start goose until well after that.

This was the first time either of us had ever had goose. I think of it as a British tradition for Christmas, but that’s probably only because of the Dickens’ Christmas Carol story, where Scrooge — after he sees the light and becomes nice — sends the biggest, fattest goose to his employee’s house for Christmas dinner. Whether or not that’s really true in terms of what they eat on Christmas in Britain, I don’t know. But I do know neither Chris nor I ever had it as kids. Since we were vegetarians for much of our adult life — prior to living in Europe — we didn’t run across much opportunity to try goose before now.

Overall, the goose was pretty good. It didn’t taste anything like turkey, which in my opinion is a good thing, since I’ve never been a big turkey fan, for all that I grew up in a country where holiday meals are all about turkey. The goose meat was quite flavorful, and was all dark meat, at least what we had.

The “trimmings” did not include stuffing – maybe you don’t stuff a goose in general? I’m not sure. One side dish was warm red cabbage salad. In the U.S., this is NOT my favorite dish. But, just as I’ve discovered with sauerkraut here, when properly prepared, the red cabbage dish was really rather good.

The highlight of the trimmings, though, was a baked apple with some kind of chestnut, walnut(?) and spice mixture on top. That was really yummy and kind of like dessert. There were also some kind of steamed (roasted?) chestnuts as another side dish, and they were pretty good as well.

The other side dish was the way the potatoes were prepared. It’s called a Kartoffelknödel, which roughly means potato “dumplings”. The potatoes have been pounded into a glutinous, starchy mass, which is then shaped into a balls. They really reminded us of the texture of the starchy dishes served in Africa, but made out of potato instead of rice or millet. We had to wonder why one would waste perfectly good potatoes by making them into gelatinous balls. The only good thing I can say about them is that they were a convenient vessel for the very good goose gravy.

But really, mashed potatoes would have done just as well. I’m just saying. 😉