Wild Goose Lemon Stew

Wild Goose Lemon Stew
A wonderful dish for stormy nights in fall or winter, where a good stew warms you up both physically and mentally. You can serve it with rice if you keep it rather moist, or with mashed potato if you let it thicken a bit more. Whatever the way you serve it, make sure you don’t finish it by continuous tasting, as I almost felt like doing after the first spoonful of it during cooking. The different ingredients combined with the fresh meat give it different depths and a velvety and meaty feel in the mouth. Then the anis taste and the other herbs start releasing their flavours with in the end a very distant but still distinct lemon taste. To finish each spoonful, the piment d’espelette gives a warm tingling in the throat, just hot enough to make you enjoy it and wish for more.
INGREDIENTS	Ingredient	Amount/how to
	Butter	50 grams
	Olive oil	2 table spoons
	Sweet onion	1 big sweet onion cut into 8 parts
	Star anis	1 star anis
	Fennel seed	2 teaspoons crushed in pestle
	Coriander seed	2 teaspoons crushed in pestle
	Lemon rind	Grated outer rind of half a lemon
	Lemon juice	Juice from 1 lemon
	Soy sauce	1 table spoon of Kikkoman soy sauce
	Honey	2 table spoons of linden honey
	Piment d’espelette	2 teaspoons of piment d’espelette
	Chicken stock cube	1 chicken stock cube
	Salt	2 tea spoons of salt
	White wine or rosé	125 cl of (lightly sweet) white/rosé wine
	White grapes	20 white grapes
PREPARATION	How to
Clean wild goose	You can buy wild goose filets and legs from good poultry providers and some butchers, or you may be lucky like we are and know a hunter who know and again provides us with beautiful and fresh game, of which wild geese. If you have a whole goose, pluck some feathers away around the breast bone, then cut the skin from the bottom of the breast bone up to the top of it. Start on either side by carefully pulling the skin outward and cutting it along the filet, until all the skin is loose from it. Then carefully cut the filet from the breast bone along the ribs until the whole filet is loose. Then continue cutting the skin away along the leg, until it is fully exposed, and you can turn it and cut it loose. Do the same on the other side. Cut or hack off the lower part of the leg, rinse the filets and legs under cold water while feeling for eventual pellets (killing for teeth), pat them dry and put in a dish for further use.
Stew basics	How to
Prepare stew	Put the butter and oil in a big enough (cast iron) pan on medium heat and let the butter melt. Meanwhile, cut the onion in 8 parts and when the butter has melted and stopped fizzing, add the onion and let it slowly become glazy. Add the wild goose filets and legs and fry on all sides on high heat with the onions for about 4 minutes, then turn the heat down again and add all the other ingredients. Top up with water until the meat is just submerged, put a lid on the pan and simmer for two to four hours on lowest heat possible. It should simmer, not boil!
Longer cooking	When using fresh wild goose in a stew, I like the meat and sauce and ingredients to melt together for many hours. In this case I used my simmering oven and put the pan with the lid on for 12 hours on 80-90 degrees Celsius. This completely changes the consistence of the meat and it falls apart in delicious fibres which still have that gamey taste. The herbs, spices and other ingredients have melted into a combination of different tastes which are layered when you eat them, from the smell to the different appearing taste and feel and what remains after swallowing it. Always a recognisable but still mysterious “hint” of this or that.
Serving with?	Ingredient	Why?
	Rice	Because this stew can be quite liquid, an almost neutral ingredient like rice will emphasise the strength of the stew while offering an extra byte. Use long-grain rice for best mouth-feel
	Potato mash	If you let the stew get thicker, you could put it in a receptacle and put potato mash on top in nice patterns, then grill it in the oven.
	Veggies	Sprouts are perfect with this dish, especially if you stir-fry them with a bit of soy sauce and some honey. Roasted parsnip goes well with it, as do crispy green beans.
	As a pie?	If you thicken the stew even more with some flour first diluted in cold water, you can make a (hunters) pie. In that case add boiled carrot and potato pieces, some spring onion and maybe an extra clove before putting the pastry lid on top and put in oven for 20-25 minutes.
Enjoyed this recipe? Need some advice? Just let me know.