Little Fluffy Bunny Rabbit - Two Ways

The only reason this rabbit found it's way into my kitchen in the first place was because of a quirky weekly challenge. The males of the household come home with a selection of random ingredients every Friday night, and I have about an hour to come up with and cook a meal using the ingredients. It keeps it interesting and forces me to use different ingredients and methods, and I get the little buzz of adrenalin I remember from working in commercial kitchens.

But this wascally wabbit didn't get used that week, I had NO idea what to do with it, I'd never cooked with it and never even eaten it before. Challenge F A I L E D. So into the freezer it went. And stayed. For months... and (you guessed it) months. Finally, faced with the challenge of selling a house, moving interstate and clearing out the stockpiles of food - it was time.

Inspired by Jamie Oliver - Queensland Fried Rabbit it is. So basically, the rabbit pieces are simmered for a couple of hours in a stock with rosemary, garlic and olive oil, until it's tender and moist. Then chilled overnight in the liquid. Next morning I made a stock from the roasted carcass. Come dinner time, it was just a matter of making a quick risotto with peas and Parmesan and crumbing and frying the rabbit pieces.

Rabbit will be a regular on the menu from now on. It's tender, juicy, not at all gamey and like all those "other" meats - tastes like chicken. Beefed up chicken.

Fried Rabbit with Rabbit and Pea Risotto
Serves 4

For the Fried Rabbit:
1 whole rabbit
1L chicken or vegetable stock
1 head of garlic
3 large stalks of rosemary
100ml extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper
1 cup flour, seasoned
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup breadcrumbs, seasoned
handful of thyme leaves, finely chopped

For the Rabbit and Pea Risotto:
1 rabbit carcass
pan juices from fried rabbit recipe
1 cup mirepoix (diced onion, carrot, celery)
1 onion, diced
500g arborio rice
2 cups peas
parmesan & butter to finish

Cut the rabbit up into pieces. Youtube has a great tutorial on doing this. In a frypan, add the rabbit, stock, garlic, rosemary, olive and salt and pepper. Simmer over a low heat for about an hour and half. The rabbit should be tender and soft, but not falling off the bone. Chill in the juices overnight or until cool.

Roast the rabbit carcass until lightly coloured. In a saucepan, add the carcass, pan juices and mirepoix with enough water to cover, and simmer for 2-3 hours. In this time, get the rabbit pieces floured, egged and crumbed in the breadcrumbs and thyme.

In a frypan, add some olive oil and butter and sweat off the onion until soft. Add the rice and cook for a few minutes to 'toast'. Add in the hot stock, a ladle at a time, stirring constantly until tender. Just before serving, stir in the parmesan and butter to taste. Taste and season well.

While the risotto is cooking, fry the crumbed rabbit pieces until just golden and heated through, about 6 minutes. Serve on top of the risotto with some fresh parsley and a squeeze of lemon juice.

Waste Nothing: Making Stock

It's rather chilly on the mountain today and rain clouds are looming. Perfect excuse to crack out the woolly socks, the snuggly jumpers and the stock pot. There is nothing like walking into a house that has a soup or stock simmering away on the stove. Walking in from outside, being hit with that homey smell will warm the soul from the nostrils out. But, a stock of course has a myriad of uses aside from making the eyes roll back upon inhalation.

Any professional kitchen will start the day making various stocks, many left to cook all day or overnight. In French kitchens, stocks are referred to as fonds de cuisine or "the foundations of cooking." Stocks are indispensable when making sauces, soups, risottos etc. By using offcuts of meat and vegetables, bones, seafood and aromatics, a liquid bursting with flavour, aroma, colour and nutritive value is born.

Stocks are incredibly cheap to prepare and use up kitchen scraps that would normally be thrown out. In this kitchen, I save up all of the carrot tops, onion tops and bottoms, parsley stalks, mushroom stalks, celery leaves, bones from roast dinners, supplement with bones bought from the butcher and pop them all into a bag and freeze it, ready for a day like today. Then its just a matter of throwing it all in a big pot, covering with cold water and simmering gently for as long as possible. The water should be just moving, not bubbling.

A proper commercial stock would then be checked for clarity, strained, filtered, defatted and probably reduced to a glaze or jelly. In this place it gets no such treatment and it's lucky to survive past the first night of checking to make sure it tastes ok (read gorging on huge chunks of bread dipped in stock). What's left is made into risotto or soup, and even sometimes a small portion makes a run for it to the freezer to be used for gravies and sauces.

A risotto made from great stock needs little other than a generous amount of butter and good Parmesan grated over the top. A handful of fresh herbs, some fresh sweet corn and a slush of dry white wine will catapult it to a new level again. You just got yourself a top notch meal that costs around $4, and feeds up to 8 people (if those serving sizes on the arborio packet were realistic), or 4 people and a little bit left over in this household.

Toasting the grains - essential for a good risotto...

The little bit left over...