Grilled Goose tenders
 

Well, you've propably had chicken tenders but perhaps never goose tenders. Last week I cleaned 22 geese and a sand hill crane that I got over 2 days of waterfowl hunting. I usually breast out the geese and take the legs on the bigger ones. The legs are small and can be tough so I do them like duck confit. But this was the first time that I sepeated each goose tender (the small tender strap of muscle right near the breast bone on each side) from the breasts before freezing. I made up a little marinade of olive oil, balsamic vinegar and mixed in salt, pepper, thyme, rosemary and some crushed juniper berries. Grilled them medium rare. They were really tasty and incredibly tender!

Radical. Are they gamey at all; do the juniper berries cover that?

Wow that sounds great Chris! We had some really great pheasant last month. My first in a very long time. It was grand. I need to buy a goose gun.

I recomend a 10 gauge, but that is from my experience.

I didn't know what tenders were, but following your description and googling...
I still don't know what the UK equivilant is!

Nice recipe though.

The USDA defines a poultry Tenderloin as "the inner pectoral muscle which lies alongside the sternum of the kind of poultry indicated." Which is to say, a strip of muscle that runs along the inside of the breast, the part of the breast closest to the bone. It separates easily from the rest of the breast. It has a tendon running through it. The tendon is basically gristle that needs to be removed and discarded.

You'd sort of have to debone a chicken or other bird to see it. But they generally are very tender.

Cows and pigs also have tenderloins. They are also very tasty.

Have had beef & pork tenderloin, just never seen that cut on sale here in fowl.
Obviously I don't hunt (quite a specialised action in the UK) so that might explain it.

Isn't beef tenderloin very much like filet, if not the same thing?

If so, yeah...best food EVAH. :yum:

I didn't know this. wiki says filet mignon comes from the narrow end of the beef tenderloin.

It is rather interesting to see where on the animal the different cuts come from - Beef Chart

What does sand hill crane taste like? I have a mated pair that lives near my apartment complex. The birds are huge and I can't imagine myself actually eating one -- they're so beautiful! -- but I have often wondered what they'd taste like.

We had cuts of meat posters up in out Food & Nutrition room at school. Without the jolly cartoon animal advising you that eating meat is fun for both of you, though.

I imagine cranes would be quite tough. And taste fishy. You are what you eat after all. And there doesn't seem to be a lot of extraneous flesh there.

I've watched programmes where they try cooking and eating seabirds. They are generally considered the grimmest of the grim. That's why early settlements existed on fish and bird's eggs rather than birds.