Your goose is cooked!

Late last year we found ourselves alone at Christmas; the entire clutch of family members had flown the coop, obviously a pay-back for us spending over 4 or 5 months during the year either overseas or over east.
The McInnes’ and Stewarts took their respective caravans to Esperance, for Dave and Erin, like Stu and Jas visiting from Melbourne for the festive season, the call of Jas’ and Erin’s individual maternal nests took presendence on Xmas day.
Undaunted, Isabel and I were cock-a-doodle-do over a pork loin roast with all the trimmings and not a kid or grandkid in sight to fight over the exquisitely crunchy crackling.
By Boxing Day all had been forgiven as half the family members flocked to the Dunsborough holiday home. And how perfect with Sophie and Frankie (and Sascha the dog!) getting to spend quality time with Grandma and Grandpa.
While I am more of a gourmand, Stuart is a well defined gourmet and following roast duck cooked and served for his in-laws Xmas dinner, Stu reserved the epicurean delights of roast goose for us over New Year.
If you cast your mind back to the recent festive season the days were energy zappingly hot and the normally temperate Dunsborough decided to join in with a series of daily 38c
So our quality time was lengthened somewhat, sitting around the air-conditioned lounge room instead of the usual family luncheon setting at the Bootleg Brewery complete with rock bands.
But we did get to marvel at 6 month old Frankie’s mobility skills, Sophie’s articulate communication and door opening skills letting in the heat and allowing Sascha’s preferred option of barking at the neighbours wandering by.
New Year’s Eve arrived and time to turn our attention to matters of a poultry nature as the grand goose had been in the frig thawing for 48 hours and time for it to salute the recently cleaned and especially prepared oven.
At 5.30 pm the kitchen lighting took a serious dim view while the oven was taking an age to heat up. We had struck a ‘brown out’ which is apparently less severe than a ‘black out’, but none-the-less harmful to a ready prepared goose.
I rang Western Power who advised there were no outages for the south west and had I checked if the problem also existed with any of the neighbours. A quick check with Jenny in 13 found her half sized fluorescent circle globe in the kitchen flickering like they usually do. “Just use my oven if your like” she generously proffered, “I am going out, but you are welcome to use it”
After calling a couple of local electricians, who politely laughed at me calling on new year’s eve, one told me it was back to Western Power for me.
Calling the power generating giant, this time I was advised that they had received 780 complaints and that the matter would be rectified by 8.30pm that night.
What a good thing Isabel had a stockpile of yummy left-overs in the little frig to enable us to celebrate the arrival of yet another year.
The following day–still a rather auspicious day– the goose finally joined in the celebrations giving the many unitiated diners the taste of a bird usually the favoured domain of European royalty.