Slow Cooked Goat Shanks: Pt. 1

I’m going to go with the first recipe Google eyeballed my way. A rare departure from my same old, same old “I’m an okay cook” but so predictable. Adventurous in the kitchen – not so much. But it’s been known to happen. And when it does, my method is to run at the recipe books, or more likely these days, the mobile phone, in a hurry to stumble upon something that’ll do.

It’s not like I’ve never cooked goat shanks – I’d use a recipe for lamb shanks. The meat needing more of a chew than I was looking for, and a sauce needing more distance from a bog standard gravy. This time I abandoned lamb and book and went online in search of the shanks of a goat.

Came across Colleen Doughty’s Slow Cooked Goat Shanks straight off. Looked promising, especially:

• Category: game meats
• goat shanks (not yet another recipe for lamb shanks)
• 10 minutes to prepare
• 7 hours to cook
• garlic
• tomatoes
• Worcester sauce

The category ‘game meats’ was a plus for starters (despite ours being domestic goats): I associated ‘game’ with thick sauces and intense flavours. The recipe looked simple – a big tick there. Ten minutes to prepare? I’ve either never found a cookbook writer honest about how bloody long a quick meal takes to prepare or I’m a slow mo cook. I suspect both.

I like the idea of slow cooking it in our woodstove’s cast iron oven – no electric slow cooker pot round here. And for good measure, I’ll toss in a few flourishes of my own in the ingredients department.

I’d definitely be tossing in lashings of Worcester sauce. And using Marmite instead of the recipe’s chicken stock. Used to be a standing joke in our family: “Dad’s secret recipe.” The joke being there was nothing secret about it and all it involved was lots of Worcester sauce and a generous dollop of Marmite.

There are goat shanks in the freezer that have been there longer than recommended. And if you include more recent additions, that’s a lot of shanks needing something I’m not crash hot at – forward planning. For starters, getting them out the freezer the night before.

June’s mum and sister are here and they’re big fans of lamb shanks. The time is ripe. Think I’ll get six out and that’ll leave two for a meal by ourselves sometime.

Just got them out to defrost. I’m gonna do this. No backsliding now!

That’s all on modern-day homesteading at Little Owl Gully for this week. Next Monday I’ll let you in on recipe tweaks, and how I went about cooking it forever in the woodstove. All going according to plan, it’ll be bon appetit!

Thanks for your company. Bye for now.