Kitchen Tips on perfecting your favourite fowl recipes
Kerry McCluskey
Northern News Services
Rankin Inlet (Jun 06/01) - As the snow slowly melts away and the daylight grows longer, Nunavummiut revel in the return of spring.
While the dawning of the season brings many simple joys, surely one of the most pleasurable and anticipated signs of the warming season is the return of geese.
It's true that the revered symbol of Canadian culture is indeed appreciated for its beauty, but let us not kid ourselves. The thing that makes us the happiest about the return of the Canadian waterfowl is the fact that it will soon be in our ovens and on the end of our forks.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the goose is one of the finest specimens gracing our spring tables.
Some cooks prefer to fancy up the fare with a herb crust or crushed garlic, while others keep the recipe simple enough to allow the succulent flesh of the bird to sing its own praises.
Rankin Inlet resident Andrea Duffy falls into the second category. Salt, pepper, an onion and the occasional soup mix are the only ingredients to join the goose and the dumplings simmering in water on top of the stove.
"Just like Grandma made it," said Duffy.
Along the same family lines, Duffy said her generous relatives also spoiled her and continued to send her Ziploc bags of goose meat already cut up. All she has to do is dump the packages into the soup pot.
"It's all cut up and ready to go," said Duffy. "It's yummy."
Preferring her goose skinned rather than plucked -- a preference shared by many Nunavummiut -- Duffy said the choice came down to esthetics.
"Have you ever seen a plucked goose?" she asked. "I don't find the look of it appealing. It icks me out," she said.
Karen Nakoolak of Coral Harbour agreed with Duffy on the skinned-versus-plucked debate. She said the absence of skin cuts down on the fat content of the bird.
"Sometimes they have so much fat and I'm not really into fat," said Nakoolak.
She, too, likes the stove-top boiling method and said the secret to dumplings -- a concoction of flour, baking powder, chopped onion and salt -- was to add them to the water just before the goose was cooked.
Nakoolak also said her mother often added oatmeal to the water to bring out extra flavour in the bird.
When it comes time for Baker Lake's Boris Kotelewetz to serve goose, he goes the popular route of throwing the bird into a pot of water. He's also had them roasted in the oven -- skin on.
But his favourite recipe was prepared for him by a woman who used to cook at the lodge he owns in Baker Lake. "I had a fantastic cook here for one year whose name was Kyra Fisher," explained Kotelewetz. "She cooked me a Peking goose. Man was that ever nice. That's my suggestion," he said.
"I also had a tablecloth and a glass of wine."
