Any farmer’s market regular knows you've gotta get to the stands early if you’re shopping with a list. On mine this past Saturday? Asparagus, tomatoes and raspberries. None of which was left for the taking when I arrived at the
Tower Grove Farmer's Market an hour before closing. Instead I plunked down $7 and left with a bag full of goat brats.
It seemed only fitting after listening to my significant other wax poetic for the last year about the “goat grabs” he got to attend during a military tour in Iraq. Living with the Iraqi Army, he got to stick his sand-soiled hands into heaping family-style piles of spit-roasted goat every time someone of note came to visit the camp. (That was after the animal had been slaughtered and hung outside for a few days; apparently, the more bugs that feast on the drying meat, the more tender it becomes.)
The goat we ended up eating for Saturday lunch was known as Big-Boob Betty. She was raised on locally grown hay, grain and oats on a farm called Our Garden in New Florence, and originally she was meant for milking.
Voluptuous though she was, Betty hadn’t a drop of milk for her babies. “She wasn’t a very good mother, so I decided not to breed her again,” explains Annette Beach, Our Garden’s owner. “We went ahead and butchered her.”
She was delicious.
