The great pestilence has caused me to up my online purchasing. I recently discovered that Premium Game have a webstore. I used to enjoy cooking with wild meats when I lived in town and could source them from Moore Wilsons. Finding I can get deliveries of game to my door is a bit of a game changer. Wild game is about as far from the industrialized meat system as it gets and its delicious. So I placed an order and wild boar, wild goat and wild bacon all arrived.
Continuing my current passion for hearty Belgian cooking I have refined a tangy sweet sour carbonnade recipe using cornichons and grape jelly to cut the richness of the meat. For this one I used goat shoulder but I’m planning on doing it with boar for our Wassail at winter solstice.

Ingredients

1 x shoulder of goat or pork cut into cubes
330ml tart beer like Flanders Red Brown , or a Lambic. Kriek would be interesting.
1 cup of beef stock
2 onions sliced fine
And equal amount of fennel sliced
1 small handful of mirepoix
A generous handful of cornichons sliced
1 teaspoon each of coriander seed, fennel seed and peppercorns toasted in the skillet and ground
1 teaspoon mustard powder
3 slices of sourdough buttered and and spread with mustard
3 tablespoon of grape jelly or cherry preserve
3 bay leaf
3 sprigs of thyme
Splash of olive oil
Splash of malt vinegar
Salt

Preheat oven to 150c

Rub spices and mustard powder into the meat

Heat oil in dutch oven on the stovetop and add onion, fennel , and mirepoix. Add a little salt and saute till translucent

Scrape to the side and add the meat , brown a little .

Add herbs , beer and stock. Cover and place in the oven for 2 hours.

Raise oven temp to 180c . Uncover , stir in the grape jelly, and a splash of vinegar . Cover with the slices of sourdough butter and mustard side down. Return to oven for 30 min to thicken.

Stir in cornichons and serve with frites or stoemp and some Flanders Brown Ale or Abbey / Trappist Dark Ale.