The Kitchen Reader: Memories Around the Holiday Table

The Kitchen Reader group is taking the month off - instead of reading, we're posting a memorable holiday recipe. 


Christmas to me isn't turkey. We never developed the taste for turkey, so my mother always roasted a goose or a duck for our holiday meal. Both are definitely rich (aka fatty), but both are so much more flavourful in our view. 


Fast forward to 2010, where the husband and I spending our first Christmas at home in Boston with my sister joining us from Toronto. The only goose I found to roast was at Savenor's, but at $130 for the bird, I couldn't bring myself to buy it in the event that we screwed it up. They didn't have a whole duck either, so I bought two of these:

That is a poussin, otherwise known as a young chicken. This baby was a pound, which I thought would be fine for one person. It looked like a small supermarket chicken in the package, but when we pulled it out of the wrapping, we found it had both its head and feet attached. My sister isn't particularly squeamish, so she hacked off the head and feet in short order and continued preparing the birds as per a Thomas Keller recipe from his Ad Hoc cookbook. I now have 2 chicken heads and 4 chicken feet sitting in a ziploc bag in the freezer, ready to be used to make stock. 


Incidentally, the poussins were delicious - it's hard to go wrong when they're coated in butter!