Goose Breasts and a New (to me) Blog

It was a busy week of pickling, socializing, working, eating, and being weirdly emotional, but now I'm setting my sights forward for a dinner involving breasts of Canada geese on Thursday. A friend of mine has come into these via a hunter neighbor that shoots them, but doesn't really like to eat them (his relatives do eat them, so it's not like they just blast animals out of the sky and let them rot). The challenge now is to figure out how to cook them (the breasts, not the relatives).

Having French cuisine as common ground, we both envisioned some variation on a duck preparation, like a magret ... BUT these are already skinned. So without the fatty skin, you can't really sear these and get the moisture and fat you need to make a gamebird's breast palatable. A newly found blog indicates the same thing in this post:

Be sure to have breasts with skin on them. Skinless breasts are not good candidates for searing, as they are boring. Use them for something else.

What that something else is is my current preoccupation. A marination in red wine might destroy all the goose flavor. My friend has decided to defrost one tonight, and then tomorrow take a little slice and sear it both to see how it reacts and figure out exactly how gamey it is and in what way, so that we can think about spices, fruits and liquids we may add.

These breasts are the color of ox blood or liver, by the way. Very beautiful.

Rock!