Thanksgiving Goat

This Thanksgiving, I toyed with the idea of a nontraditional meal, namely replacing the traditional bird with: Goat.

To test our goat's meat cooking abilities before the big day, we purchased goat ribs from the local halal market, and I unwrapped them for cooking later in the evening and I was surprised to find that raw goat meat has no detectable odor, something that cannot be said for live goat. I heated some butter in a pan set on medium-high heat and placed the ribs in the pan. Goat needs less heat than beef, so turned the burner down to medium. After five minutes, I flipped them and after ten minutes, they were done. I will admit that while odorless when raw, goat meat has a strong smell when cooking. Like amplified lamb.

Goat is good. The flavor is a cross between horse and lamb. The ribs are much fattier than horse, and are are much tastier than horse steak. Have lots of napkins ready to wipe the goat grease off of you lips. This is never a problem you have with horse, have you ever seen a fat horse?

When I lived in Europe, I survived on horse steaks. When eating horse, the only problem I encountered is large amounts of gristle. After a particularly stringy horse steak, I would end up with a little pile of horse gristle spitballs on my plate. I always thought that this horse gristle is probably from a work-horse or race-horse, or the pet pony of a 300 pound kid who rode the pony ever day, until she killed it. Now after the poor pony suffered for years under the obese child, the final insult is on my plate as a bad horse steak, rendered inedible due to the strain of carrying the fat kid. I always thought that they should have little stickers on the horse meat that rated the toughness of the meat.

Like the Fujita Scale for Tornadoes, below is the LiberalCCW Horse Meat Toughness Scale (LHTS):

Soft
Medium
Tough
Man 'O War
Amish Work Horse
Fat Kid's Pony

Back to the goat ribs, the were so good that I cooked seconds. The next day I kept thinking of the leftover uncooked goatsribs in the fridge. Mmmmmmm. When I got home, I cooked them up. Man, they were good.

Thanksgiving rolled around and we went to the halal market and I bought goat shoulder. Not ribs, I figured were were ready for the big time. We made a BBQ of shoulder and had it ready when the guests arrived.

The trouble started when I tried to stick a plastic fork into a chunk of goat meat and broke the tines off of the fork. I crossed my fingers that the plastic moldsman had had gone to work drunk and produced a bad batch of forks. I tried another fork and tried to get meat off of the bone. No luck.

Only by biting and chewing with extreme malice, could I get any goat meat from the bone. I was afraid that I would pull on the bone, and hear a snap and find the roots of my incisors sticking from the goat shoulder.

The goat was the consistency of Pykrete reinforced with Spectra, even worse in toughness than fat kid's pony, if such a thing were possible. Suitable for ballistic armor tough.

But it did taste good.

One of our guests, a Saudi, through a mouthful of goat said: "You know that you have to boil goat for 3 hours or it will be tough".

"How long did you cook it"? He asked.

"About twenty minutes". I replied.

"That explains it". He said, and continued his furious chewing.