Tenderloin Sauce

When you raise your own meat , you don't worry about cooking until you've achieved shoe leather status in order to kill unwanted bacteria. You cook it to perfection with the center still pink but the juices not running blood red instead brown with a slight pink cast. This gives you the most tender level possible. Kirk did an awesome job on this tenderloin. We chose to serve it to some pretty adventurous friends of ours. At first we thought about dishing it up and after they'd had a few bites announcing what they were eating. But, Kirk and I thought even if they hadn't eaten it before, they could handle it. Sure enough Roger said he'd eaten beaver and a raft of other unusual meats making what we served tame in comparison.

Even if Roger had eaten things we'd never touched and Kirk had eaten things Roger had never tasted, we all felt the meal was an new adventure. A bit of a disappointing one but fun none the less. The let down started just 40 minutes before Diane and Roger were to arrive, Kirk brought in tenderloins he'd just cut off the carcass hanging in the garage and declared them a bit tough due to the way the knife sliced through the meat, not because he'd been gnawing on it. Now if the tenderloins are tough, you know you are in trouble because that's the most tender meat of the whole animal. Oh well we decided and charged ahead full bore anyway, figuring if we couldn't salvage it, we could always grill up the hamburger meat we had thawed in the refrigerator.

I've kept the meat source a secret up until now because well, I wasn't sure you soft hearted souls could handle it. But it is a part of the real world and so grab some Kleenex if you are so inclined but I've got to tell you we served Cracker Jack. No, not the caramel coated popcorn but the wether goat that I thought several times over was going to end up in someone elses pen. Not that I minded serving him for dinner but you put a lot of feed into a goat and don't get much meat back. The flavor of this particular goat was the best we've ever eaten. Mind you we've only eaten a few goats in our day but we had to declare orchard grass/alfalfa fed goat was mild, not at all goaty and we were really wishing it had been tender because it would have been a real treat. Not all was lost for our guest assured us they had good strong teeth and proved it by having several helpings of the tenderloin. The best part was the new concoction I made up just for the occasion.

Yes, I did my usual and hit the Internet trying to find a recipe for goat tenderloin. Nodda, zip, zilch. Oh there was goat stew and roast but no one was going all out and serving tenderloin. Who can really blame them as a goat produces very little meat and they were just trying to stretch it, something we weren't really worried about since we'd just put a whole beef in the freezers and we don't have a lot of room left in them.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I probably could have found more than two sites if I had really searched and yes, I should have started looking well before the forty minutes left until our guests were to arrive and well before my husband was out in the garage cutting the loins off the carcass to bring them in for me to trim the fat off of before grilling.

So I've got to tell you just how impressed I was with myself at coming up with this recipe at a moments notice. I've never made a marinade sauce from scratch in my life. After this easy success, store marinades may just become a thing of the past because I've some new ideas to try.

Mind you I was throwing this together in a hurry and not doing any measuring but I kept approximate amounts in my head.

1/3 cup Dijon mustard

1 Tablespoon worcheshire sauce

1 Tablespoon Basalmic vinegar

1 Tablespoon lemon juice

1/2 teaspoon sugar

1/2 teaspoon garlic granules

Then today, I mixed it together once more and sliced the left over loin into a crock pot with the sauce and more water to simmer over night. Hopefully, the low heat and long cooking time will tenderize the meat. We shall see tomorrow.

But before the tenderloin went into the crock pot and after we'd cut up the rest of the carcass, Kirk fried up some liver and heart. Now I am not a fan of liver and consider beef liver to be the worst yuck, yucky, and tongue parching meat with a horrid after taste that there is. So you'd be really proud of me because I braved a taste of the goat liver after Kirk declared it sweet and pretty good. Of course he eats chicken livers so I'm not sure how good a judge one can declare him to be. To my surprise, the feeling that all the water was being sucked out of my tongue wasn't there but a slight after taste was. Not nearly as bad as beef and if it hadn't been for that last minute bite, I probably wouldn't have minded eating the rest of the piece. Not a second piece. Just the first.

Though the goat meat is a bit tough, it isn't a loss because we cubed it up and are planning tomorrow to mix cubed up pork roast from our freezer and grind the two meats together with spices. Then we'll make sausage patties and the tough goat won't be tough anymore. Besides, it will be another adventure and you know how we love adventures.