Goat Italian Meatballs & Goat Chorizo Bowls, Duck Mushroom Stroganoff, Ginger Garlic Pork Roast, Matcha Cake & More!

This What’s Cooking round up includes trying out some spice blends for our new goat sausages, plus a duck mushroom stroganoff meets marsala dish with pasta, cauliflower mash and crispy roasted mustard greens, New Year’s pork and cabbage, lacto-fermented veggies and a matcha cake with elderberry and strawberry!

Italian Sausage Seasoned Goat Meatballs

We’ve grown our goat herd in recent years and therefore, we have a lot more goat meat and have been eating more goat ourselves, too!

And now so we’re also rolling out some goat sausages made by our USDA meat processor. Before choosing the spice blends, I wanted to try out similarly seasoned goat myself.

Hence these Italian goat meatballs (and the goat chorizo below). We ended up doing hot Italian linked sausage, but to create a similar experience at home, I made them into meatballs with breadcrumbs and eggs. And I do highly recommend recreating these with plain ground goat, too!

I used fresh oregano, rosemary and parsley, plus anise and fennel seeds, dehydrated onion, garlic powder and paprika. They came out so tasty! I really prefer goat with bright seasonings like herbs, lemon and garlic, but had never used fennel before and it went so well with the flavor of the goat meat.

And they were so good, I made another round stuffed with mozzarella cheese for our Christmas Eve spread with my family.

The first round were destined to be crumbled onto pizza with tomato sauce, mozzarella and provolone cheeses and topped with minced garlic chives. We also had a salami olive salad pizza with it, along with roasted broccoli and a salad with greens, persimmon, manchego cheese and fried scallions.

Goat Chorizo Breakfast Bowls with Potatoes, Black Beans & Broccoli

I seasoned another pound of ground goat with seasoning blend that seemed closest to what the processor uses — coriander, chili powder, cumin, garlic powder, onion salt, oregano and smoked paprika. I have a go to recipe for pork chorizo that uses cinnamon and cloves as well and we’ll that sweet, earthy hint amplifies the chili in a nice way and goes well with pork, I personally do not think warm, earthy spices go well with goat.

So it works out that the butcher’s spice blend does not include them — and this spice blend was delicious!

I made the first round for brunch on a Sunday and used some already cooked potatoes, crisped up in a cast iron pan and then added the chorizo and scrambled eggs and topped with avocado, leftover cilantro vinaigrette, jalapeño hot sauce, fermented radishes and garlic chives.

Then I made a batch of Instant Pot black beans and oven roasted potatoes, so the leftovers all had some combination of those ingredients, plus leftover roasted broccoli, fermented jalapeños and almond cashew sauce. You know your day is off to a good start when you start with that much protein, fiber and probiotics, right?

Duck Mushroom Stroganoff with Cauliflower Mash & Mustard Greens

We were way overdue to process some of our old bachelor muscovy ducks in November!

Because they were five or more years old, you can’t exactly cook the breasts like a succulent, tender young duck breast, but you can cut the breasts up for things like soups, stir fry, curry and stroganoff.

I did kinda of like a combination of traditional beef and mushroom stroganoff and a marsala dish here. I tossed the cut up duck breast with cornstarch and black pepper and mushroom seasoning and then sautéed it in two pans to brown it. I then combined them and used the empty cast iron to sauté onions and garlic in the remaining fat and then added pioppino and shiitake mushrooms. Once the mushrooms released some of their liquid and softened, I deglazed the pan with marsala, making sure to scrape the brown bits from the bottom of the pan.

Then I added bone broth and transferred all of that to the deeper pan with the duck. I cooked that together for a bit and finished with some cream.

Meanwhile, I steamed a cauliflower and pureed that with some cream, parmesan and nutritional yeast and we ate the duck and cauliflower with creste bucca pasta with crispy roasted mustard greens, topped with more parmesan.

Garlic Ginger Pork Roast with Rice, Cabbage, Squash & Yum Yum Sauce

New Year’s Day pork and cabbage, Asian-fusion style!

My parents stayed through January 6th and of all the things we cooked in their two and a half week stay, my mom said this pork may have been her favorite.

I did fairly simple seasonings on this picnic shoulder roast: minced ginger, garlic powder, onion salt and a little brown sugar to start and I had the oven temperature fairly high (425 degrees) to brown it a bit before turning down to slow cook. Once it was browned, I added lemon, lime and orange juice, fish sauce, coconut aminos and soy sauce to form a little braising liquid/sauce and cooked for several more hours covered in foil at 300 degrees, turning down to 250 degrees towards the end.

Once it was falling apart, I poured some of the liquid and fat over chopped cabbage and roasted that until it was soft and caramelized in spots.

We had the pork and cabbage with roasted Autumn Frost squash, basmati rice, arugula, kimchi and gochujang pickles and a homemade yum yum sauce. The combination of rich pork, caramelized cabbage, sweet squash, plus peppery arugula, sour kimchi and pickles and the sauce was pretty dreamy!

And the next night, we chopped up most of the remaining pork and cabbage and made a quick fried rice that we ate with more squash, arugula and pickles, also very good!

Favorite Ferments

It’s kind of a terrible feeling when you’re low on both of your favorite ferments at the same time!

So despite everything else going on in my kitchen leading up to the holidays, I made sure to get another batch of my cabbage and beet kraut with caraway, coriander, garlic and chili pepper and my fermented radish salsa with lots of lime, red onions, garlic and garlic chives and cilantro stems going before my family arrived.

I used to not do an additional brine for kraut because the cabbage releases enough liquid on its own. But I have learned that it bubbles SO much that if you fill the half gallon jar full, you lose a bunch of liquid to overflowing and once it stops fermenting in the fridge, then you’re left with kraut that isn’t submerged in liquid and it loses its vibrant color. It’s still delicious and safe to eat, just isn’t as visually appealing.

So this time, I started with a half gallon jar to make sure I made the quantity I wanted filled it with a saltwater brine and then transferred some to a quart jar, topping both with fermentation weights. I must have forgotten to get a finished kraut picture, but it did indeed bubbly up and expand so much! It had a couple inch gap at first and rose almost to the top of the jar.

The kraut is quick and just ferments for about a week at room temperature (whereas you can also slow ferment it in colder temperature for much longer). The radishes take a bit longer. I’ve done them for just a week or so in the summer and usually around 9-10 days. This time was a full two weeks and they’re salty and funky and perfect.

Both of these ferments I add to lots of things (salads and sandwiches and rice bowls especially), but most frequently eat them for breakfast! The radish salsa is perfect with breakfast tacos and bowls and the kraut is great with avocado toast and other egg toasts, though in a pinch I will also eat them with breakfast tacos, too!

Madison’s Hollyberry Matcha Birthday Cake

Our shop staffer Madison and I both love the Hollyberry Matcha Latte from Evolve Matcha in Metairie, so when I was trying to think of a fun birthday cake to make for sure, this idea came to me when making matcha white chocolate cookies!

The latte is matcha with a little of their Hollyberry syrup, made with strawberries, beet powder and almond. It’s the loveliest strawberry matcha with a deeper shade of pink/purple from the beet and a sweet contrast from the almond.

So I set out to create a cake with similar flavors!

I did a take on this recipe for the cake and the biggest tip I will take with my/look for in other cake recipes in the future is whipping the egg whites and adding them separately to the batter. It made the cake so light and fluffy and perfect! I added almond extract with the vanilla extract for the wedding cake flavor profile and to match the latte flavor.

I didn’t think juicing beets was really quite necessary for the icing, so I used unsweetened elderberry juice instead and it gave it a lovely purple hue and probably an even better flavor than beets.

I had some roselle strawberry jam still, so I added that between the cake layers and on top and also made half the icing with more matcha. It turned out to be one of the best cakes I’ve ever made and one I will definitely be repeating!