Mamamontezz's Mental Rumpus Room

Smothered Rabbit

We have a great little grocer in the area where you can get your meats cheap and where you can get unusual meats. That's where I get my rabbits. Kroger and the other chain stores have PetRitz brand rabbits for $10 a pound, cut up all crazy like some wildman with a cleaver just whacked them up to make the packages weigh the same. What a mess, and they just don't taste, well, like rabbits. These little beauties are whole, clean, and only cost me about $3 a pound, and they do taste like rabbit.

I dig out my Lodge™ cast iron dutch oven and set it on the stove. Drop in a few tablespoons of olive oil to cover the bottom of it, and start it to heat. Use olive oil, and you won't have to drain it when you're done unless you use way too much. You'll know.

Clean and slice a couple or three of those little yellow onions that come in the red net bags, and toss them in the pot. While they're cooking, rinse off and cut up that rabbit you've had thawing in the fridge. Cut him up a lot like you would a chicken. Set your oven for 220 degrees.

Season up some flour and dredge old Mr. Rabbit's bits through the flour to coat him good. Then slide your onions over to the side, and drop the rabbit into the oil. Take the remnants of your seasoned flower and sprinkle it onto the onions and kind of mix it in. Brown the rabbit good, turn him once, and brown him good on the other side.

While ol'rabbit is browning, grab a bag of those little finger carrots that you can get all scraped and clean, and peel yourself a couple of big potatoes and cut them in chunks about an inch or two across. You don't want too many veggies, just enough for a couple of people.

When rabbit is brown on both sides, cover him with those onions, drop the veggies in, salt them and pepper them, pour water up over the top of the rabbit but not completely over the potatoes, cover the pot, and slide it into the oven.

Walk away. Do not molest the oven. Don't be lifting that lid and peaking. You can leave that in all day if you want. Don't even think about eating that in less than 6 hours. This is the kind of thing you cook when you're going to be out working hard in the yard all day and need something that will warm your kitchen and give you something to look foward to when you've finished accumulating your monthly allotment of bruises, blisters, and scrapes, and sore muscles.

That flour you sprinkled over the onions should have set up and made you a delicious rabbit gravy. The potatoes and carrots will be tender and will have given their flavors to the pot. The onions? Melt in your mouth. And old Mr. Rabbit will fall off the bone. Mix up a batch of Bisquick biscuits and drop them on a cookie sheet to bake after you set the dutch oven back on the stove.

Don't have a deep dutch oven? Use a 4" deep iron chicken-fryer if you have a lid for it. Just remember, you don't want this piled too deep. Spread out a little bit in a bigger pan is better than cramped in a deeper pan. Got it? Knew you would.

Posted by Mamamontezz at August 22, 2004 01:26 PM