Braised Goat Shanks

First of all, what? You can buy goat meat and cook it and eat it? Well, probably not everyone can. But we are lucky to have a purveyor of fine, young, succulent goat from Marin County.
Second of all, succulent? Isn't goat meat like Charlie Chaplin's boiled shoe? "No, my goats are tender," says their shepherdess (goatherdess?), Julie. And they are.
So just what exactly did I want to do with a couple of sinewy, meaty leg bones? Braise, of course, to coax out all that sticky collagen. And the resulting liquid in the pot is pure gold.
But. I had this sort of chile verde thing in my mind.
So after the initial browning in oil, and about an hour of simmering in a bottle and a half of Pacifico cerveza, I tossed in a chopped melange of tomatillos, mild green Anaheim peppers and some unripe green tomatoes out of the freezer (from when last year's crop finally refused to ripen). A little cumin, diced green garlic, dried Mexican oregano, salt... that's it.
The fantastic juice that leaks out of braised meat went straight into the green stuff. This simmered for maybe another hour, hour and a half. I didn't want to cook the hell out of the green stuff; I wanted natural texture.
And the flavor was insane.
I kept thinking, "Should I add jalapeños? Heat it up a little?" And I kept thinking, "No."
My initial plan was to serve this with dried hominy from a vaunted, legendary, local proprietor of dried beans. After soaking and a little time on the stove, though, it became obvious that the hominy was horribly rancid. I wasn't going to put that on the plate with the beautiful goat verde.
So we got some perfect corn tortillas. Which was cool, because we made impromptu burritos at the table.