A Delicious Wild Goose Chase

A wild goose chase is defined by Meriam Webster’s dictionary as “a complicated or lengthy and usually fruitless pursuit or search.” Jump shooting Canadian geese in the Rocky Mountains is absolutely complicated, lengthy, and usually fruitless.

It is surprising how difficult it is to kill a Canadian goose. Yes, I mean those large birds that attack children in parks and men on golf courses. The same birds that saunter across the street in city parks, without any regard for people in cars, are elusive in the forest.
​
Maybe all species change in nature: I become calmer and more at peace; geese become skittish and unpredictable. It is easy to approach a goose in a park, where their mere presence is often annoying.  In nature, approaching a goose takes strategy, planning, and quite a bit of luck. 

I have been hunting geese for two years now and have not yet killed one. It is  a lot harder than I thought!

​Frequently, if one goose spots you, they start sending out an alarm. An entire flock of one hundred geese can lift and fly out of sight before I can even load my gun. Sadly, this happens more often than I would like to admit. 

​Luckily, my husband has killed quite a few geese during our hunting quests. 

But, once the goose is down, a whole new dilemma is presented: what should we do with it?

We do not kill animals unless we eat them. So, we have been learning how to cook geese. We have made quite a few mistakes – for example, do not marinate the geese in citrus. It tastes absolutely terrible. We were fortunate  to find a Hank Shaw recipe for French Goose Stew. This was a complete game changer. Here is a link: https://honest-food.net/duck-stew/

The ingredients are not complicated or fancy. I was able to purchase everything at my local grocery store. 

​The recipe calls for duck fat, which shows why it is important to use all parts of an animal. For Christmas, we roasted a duck and saved the fat. I froze the fat and had a pint of duck fat for cooking. You can see the duck fat melting in the cast iron pan below on the left.

Although Hank Shaw’s recipe requires quite a long cook time, it is on the stove and not active cooking. The recipe is great because it uses the goose legs, which are very difficult to cook.
​
The end product was a delicious, savory, French goose stew. Although jump shooting a Canadian goose in the Rockies is difficult, it is absolutely worth the chase when it ends in French goose stew!