chromedome

If you're following along for the cute bunny pictures you may want to close your eyes and hit Page Down a few times, because a couple of days ago we harvested the white bunnies from the original post. I remember several of us taking interest in the breaking down of a deer in the 'Tis Hunting Time blog a year or two ago, so I'm going to post a short series of pics to document processing a rabbit. It's similar, though on a much smaller scale (and I don't typically break down the carcass into component parts before freezing them, because rabbits are obviously a more freezer-friendly size). I've already explained the method we use for the distasteful-but-necessary step of actually killing the poor wee beasties. I haven't got photos of that part, because a) it takes all of our hands; and b) I didn't wanna. So we'll start with a rabbit hung up for skinning. I've taken a piece of twine left over from a bale of hay and hung it from a nail, and then created loops at each end with two slip knots. Those hold the feet, and make it much more convenient to do the rest of the job (you'll note the fatal dog collar at the top left). At this point I've cut around the front of the ankle with a small, sharp knife, have cut partway down the front of the leg, and am coaxing the pelt away from the leg muscles. Rabbits' skin is fairly loose in most places, but the actual ankle is not one of them so it needs to be pulled away and carefully aided with the tip of the knife. When I first started doing this I would girdle the entire ankle with the knife blade before starting the downward cut, but that way there's a high risk of cutting the bunny equivalent of the Achilles tendon, which makes it more complicated to finish the leg. So now I cut around the front 3/4 of the leg, then loosen the skin all round, and finally insert the tip of my knife between the flesh and skin and cut upward and outward to free the pelt. That way there's no risk of cutting the tendon, and the leg meat stays where it's supposed to. At that point I make quick incisions down the front of each leg to the hip, and peel away the skin much as one would remove a sock. Once I've exposed about this much of the groin and belly (barring a small "Speedo" of fur around the various orifices), I loose the skin around the hips and gather it up in a bunch in my non-dominant hand. Then I cut through the tail to free up the whole hind portion of the pelt and leave it hanging as you see here, and then remove the "Speedo" with another couple of quick cuts. I really should have taken a photo of that stage, to make this visual record more complete, but didn't think of it until afterwards. Then I pull down on the skin and basically turn it inside out from hindlegs to ankle. Unfortunately, I missed getting the "business end" of the bunny into the frame while taking the picture, and left out the important part which is the skin still covering the forelegs and head. By the time I realized my error I was already finished, so here we are. At this point what I do is take each foreleg by the "elbow" and pull it out of the skin, then cut off the forepaw to free the leg entirely. With those removed from the skin I'll pull the skin down to the neck, sever the head, and set the whole pelt aside for later handling (my father used to eat the heads occasionally just to get a reaction from my Mom, but I don't bother because of the risk of Creutzfeldt-Jakob). ...annnnd, this is the final stage of the skinning process, with the head and forepaws removed. The blood comes from the neck-breaking process, which among other things causes a significant degree of internal bleeding at the neck. I usually put down a piece of corrugated, covered with random scraps of hay and straw, to soak that up. Now that I've "undressed" the rabbit in the physical sense, I'll move on to "dressing" it in the culinary sense. I start by pinching the thin flesh of the abdomen and pulling it away from the underlying plumbing, and then making a careful incision from groin to ribs. Again I probably should have taken a photo at that step, but didn't think of it until afterwards. Once that's done, I reach in and grab a handful of viscera starting with the stomach, which is the sturdiest part of the whole apparatus. If I pull that out in one big handful, everything should (and usually does) come out in one piece. Here's that stage of the process. I apologize for the middling quality of the photos; it was late in teh day and the light was poor. In the upper part of the cavity the dark mass you see is the liver, and directly below the liver on the right you'll see one of the kidneys nestled in along the back. Ordinarily they'd have more fat around them, but this bunny was an outlier. Here's a better look at the liver and kidneys in situ. I remove those and set them aside in a steel bowl that I keep handy for the purpose. At the top of this image you'll see the diaphragm and lungs, which constitute our next destination (again, my apologies for the image quality). That's the heart you see behind the lungs. I save the heart but discard the lungs. On a given day the hearts, kidneys and livers may get bagged and go into our freezer for the dogs, or simply pan-fried and go into me. On this particular occasion, because the freezer is already well-stocked, they went into me. At this point I put my dressed-out bunnies on a baking sheet and bring them to the house, where I rinse them thoroughly in a food-safe plastic bucket filled with salted water. Then they're patted dry with paper towels, bagged, weighed and frozen (in this batch two were right around the 3 pound mark but one weighed 3 pounds 10 ounces, so that's the one that went to pay for our new bathroom countertop). So that's the process. I have to feed the critters and set to work now, but I'll be back later in the day.

Yesterday got away from me, but I'll try to come back with a proper followup post later on. Fun bunny fact in the interim: rabbits are coprophages. In times of famine/poor forage, or when circumstances militate against leaving the den (a life-threatening storm, a predator parked outside the burrow waiting for a fuzzy head to pop up), they can - so to speak - "stretch the grocery budget" by eating their own droppings. It's actually a very clever evolutionary ploy for a non-ruminant herbivore, since their plant foods are only partially digested on the first pass. It is, in effect, a rabbit's way of chewing its cud. The fibrous cells of the grasses and leaves are already partially broken down, so more nutrients can be released during a second pass through the rabbit's gut. I'll add that all three of our dogs find the droppings to be an irresistible snack. Dogs are opportunistic omnivores, like humans (admittedly skewing more to the carnivore side) and presumably the partially digested greens are similarly easier for their intestinal microbiome to manage as well.

At my restaurant, many years ago now, a very nice lady from Georgia made my day by asking "How do y'all get the asparagus to curl up like that?"

The "Simply Hot" brand of Thai green chilies is being recalled in AB and SK because of salmonella, and they may have been distributed to other provinces. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/simply-hot-brand-thai-green-peppers-recalled-due-salmonella?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

I don't know. I suppose it happens. Some does are just plain better mothers than others; one of ours consistently lost more kits than the others. I think she just didn't have the patience to wait for them to be done nursing before she hopped out of the nest box. Once the kit is out of the box, mama just plain ignores it. I don't think there's really any practical way for them to get one back into the nest/den once it's out, so they just write 'em off. With the little one I showed in this sequence of photos, I just put it back in the nest box and "normal service was resumed," as they say. That's been the case with any previous successful salvages as well. The unsuccessful ones? Well, I was putting them out in the woods well away from our rabbitry, but eventually realized that there are lots of reptile owners out there. So now I have a bag of failed rescues in my freezer, and we're going to reach out through FB and local pet stores to see who's interested in some to feed their lizards and snakes. It's a way to monetize what would otherwise be a pure loss, so it seems worth exploring. I'll post more later, but right now I have an article to write and my long-awaited load of topsoil will be getting here in an hour as well. For now here's a picture of our little lame bunny, Tina, enjoying some backyard time while I clean out her cage. The lawn chairs in the background prompt the memory of an eye-rolling "dad joke": Q: What's Irish and spends all winter in the garage? A: Paddy O'Furniture

This is probably a more meaningful application of the technology: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/every-grain-of-rice

The last time I looked at them in the supermarket up here (it's been a few years) they ran in the $25-$30 (CDN) range.

Bartered a kitchen-ready bunny yesterday for a used manufactured-stone countertop for our bathroom vanity. Gotta love the rural economy, right? I said off the top that the rabbits are emphatically not pets, but we currently have a couple of exceptions. One is little Coco Bean, featured above, whose status as my granddaughter's daddy's girlfriend's favorite (she'll be abbreviated as "J" henceforward, to save typing) means that he/she will either go to their place as a pet, or be kept out as a breeder when the time comes. My GF also spotted a little lame kit in one of our recent litters, which I brought indoors because runts and physically impaired kits tend to be crowded out by their siblings and starve. The wee one had deformed hind legs and (I believe) hip problems as well, so I dubbed him "Tiny Tim" after the similarly afflicted Dickens character. Except upon later inspection "Tim" turned out to be a doe, so now she's Tina. Now that she's a healthy and growing adolescent we've begun advertising her for rehoming as a pet. She's very cuddly and affectionate (Flemish Giants are known for having a pleasant disposition). Here she is: Although she can't hop around like other bunnies, she still manages to thrash around her cage at high speed, using the same sort of motion as a swimming frog. It's odd-looking, but very effective. She is, of course, spoiled rotten with vegetable trimmings, apple cores and similar delicacies.

Well, she's a ginger and tends to just jump in with both feet. Which complements my style well, because I'm the "overthink and procrastinate" type. So I check her (much of the time) and she prods me into motion (much of the time) and it usually balances out. In this particular instance, the first I heard of the impending rabbit project was when she mentioned to me that we were picking up a buck and two does.

I'm sure they would play favourites if left to their own devices, but when confined to a small space they Hoover up everything. It's a principle that farmers like Joel Salatin replicate on a larger scale by rotating cattle through their pasture with movable electric fences. If everything is cropped to a nubbin, it favors grasses over some of the less-desirable plants.

Not as dressed carcasses, because there's a whole lot of overhead involved in meeting provincial safety regulations. But we do sell them (or trade them) as pets and breeders. The price we get per rabbit squares neatly with the price of a sack of feed pellets, and two of them pays for the 10 bales of hay I can fit into my minivan, so it does definitely help defray our expenses.

When I was a vendor at the farmer's market out here, a decade or so ago, the farmer at the stall next to me would frequently regale us with stories of the silly and funny things his sheep and pigs had done. On one of those occasions he said "TV is for people who don't have pigs to watch," and that line has stuck in my head ever since. And yes, we get a lot of enjoyment out of our bunnies. We handle and cuddle them a lot, because rabbit husbandry is just a lot simpler when they like you and aren't "hand-shy." They need to be moved from smaller to larger cages periodically, the does must be taken to the bucks when it's time for them to be bred, and the grandkids just plain wanna (though the novelty has somewhat worn off, now). Also we sell a lot of them as pets or breeders, to help defray our costs, and the better-socialized they are the better pets they make, and it's just plain fun to watch them scamper around and play. There's a specific "bounce up in the air with a kick of the hindlegs" maneuver that they do when they're happy and high-spirited that always brings a smile to my face. Which brings us to one of the core questions that everybody has to face when raising livestock (however large or small) for consumption: How do you square that enjoyment of the living creature with plunking its mortal remains onto your dinner plate? This is where we overlap somewhat with the Food Ethics thread, as I'd mentioned in my initial post (and I chose to post in this forum because this is where Gardening is, and it seemed an appropriate complement). I'm going to get into some nitty-gritty here, so if you're at all squeamish or would just rather not think of such things, feel free to skip the rest (future posts will have more bunny pictures to make you smile). Also - and I cannot stress this enough - I absolutely understand those who still wish to eat meat and poultry, but prefer not to see the actual deed done, let alone participate in it. None of what ensues should be interpreted as a criticism, slight, or attack of any kind, whatever your position on such things. All of animal husbandry can be thought of as a contract, of sorts, between humans and our livestock. We get the enjoyment of their milk and eggs, their fleece, and ultimately (in most cases) their flesh and/or hides. In return, we offer them a life of security from want and predation (the idiosyncratic pantheon of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels includes a god of "small creatures whose lives end with a snap and a crunch). Ideally they'd see some measure of comfort as well, though factory farming has certainly taken that element out of the equation for commercially-produced meat and eggs. Of course many producers pay close attention to ethics and living conditions, and knowing the growing conditions of the animals we eat for food is one of the perks of growing one's own (or alternatively, of buying from a trusted vendor). Our bunnies live in wire cages: the breeders and young kits are indoors in suspended cages, and the adolescents (as you saw) are outdoors. The droppings simply fall through the floor of the suspended cages, while the outdoor cages are moved daily onto new grass. The bunnies happily do a portion of the mowing for us, and in return fertilize the grass (the droppings from the barn come out in the wheelbarrow, and go to my garden). They have wooden shelters within the cages, and outdoors are sheltered from the sun and rain by tarps (I need to build a few more of the wooden shelters for the outdoor cages, we've expanded the number of cages but had some attrition on the shelters; the bunnies tend to chew them down because that's what rodents do). The outdoor bunnies get fresh greenery supplemented with modest quantities of hay and commercial feed pellets, while that's reversed for the indoor bunnies (the grandkids love bringing them dandelions, a particular favorite, and they also get veggie trimmings from the kitchen). All of which is to say, they have a pretty good life. Which brings us to the end-of-life scenario, which was something we put thought into before we ever started raising rabbits. Our whole reason for going this route is that my GF has rheumatoid arthritis, and eating red meat (especially cured pork, sadly) causes inflammation and in turn can bring about a flare of her RA. Those of you who have RA yourselves, or know someone who does, will understand that anybody who's experienced a full-blown flare will go to considerable effort to avoid one in future. So we eat a lot of fish and poultry, and - as discussed on that corresponding thread - a fair bit of Beyond's faux-beef product as well (we've tried the Impossible, and considered it inferior). But she still craves some form of meat that isn't poultry, and the feedback from her RA support groups was that many people have found they can still eat rabbit. It's theorized that this is because rabbit is so lean, but there isn't really any science to back that up as far as I've found in a few desultory searches. So we began raising them, and she can indeed eat them without any negative impact on her RA (the smart thing would have been to buy one at the supermarket first, but that's just not how we roll around here). So we spent some time looking into, and discussing, the various methods used by homesteaders to humanely harvest their bunnies. We rejected seriously old-school options like the ol' hatchet and chopping block, and the equally traditional method of breaking their little necks by hand. Ultimately we settled on a method endorsed by many modern homesteaders, which uses a dog's choke collar. It's a two-person operation. One holds and cuddles the bunny, and slips the collar around its neck. The other gently grasps the hind legs, and... gives a sudden jerk. It breaks the poor bunny's neck instantly, so it's like flipping a switch. One moment warm and coddled, the next moment "lights out." We typically harvest our bunnies at 16 weeks (a "fryer," if you will). At this age they typically dress out at around 3 pounds, with outliers as low as 2.5 or as high as 3.5 (for those accustomed to metric measurements, that's just over 1 kg to just over 1.5 kg). Do I look forward to this part, or enjoy it? No, of course not (anyone who does is just plain wired wrong, and needs therapy). But from early childhood I've had a very clear understanding that if when we choose to eat meat, we're choosing that something dies (I'll circle around to vegans momentarily). When my father wasn't at sea (he was in the Navy) he usually had snares out for wild rabbits, and I could skin one with my pocketknife by the age of 6 or 7in the brief interval between getting a new pocketknife and losing it. Most kids aren't overly burdened with empathy at that age, and I was mostly just enthused about the forthcoming bowl of rabbit stew. As I grew up we raised our own ducks, chickens and pigs, and I participated to varying degrees in dispatching and butchering them. Currently with the rabbits, because it's a two-person job, my GF does the holding and cuddling while I give the fatal tug on the legs. The cleaning and butchering falls to my lot, as well as the salting of the hides (she has plans for those as well). Then I bag them for the freezer, either whole or in parts. So squaring my enjoyment of the cute, fuzzy living bunny with my enjoyment of the cooked bunny is something I was acculturated to in early life (which is part of the purpose behind organizations like 4-H, I suppose). The grandkids are more ambivalent; the younger ones will eat rabbit occasionally but not always, and the teenager outright refuses. My personal feeling, as mentioned on the Food Ethics thread, is that there's no such thing as a cruelty-free meal. I suppose one could make a case for eating the eggs of humanely-raised poultry, though (to my mind) there's an element of sophistry involved even in that. At the simplest level, if you eat meat in any form then - as said above - you've chosen that something die in order that you may eat. But for me vegans don't get a pass, either, because agriculture exacts a terrible toll in animal life. I don't have the link right to hand, but an Australian university quantified the death toll per acre (or hectare?) of land under cultivation, and it ran into many thousands of rodents, birds, snakes, amphibians and (of course) insects, and this doesn't even take into account the downstream effects of herbicide and pesticide runoff. Then there's the question of whether and what plants perceive, which has been the subject of some fascinating research over the past decade or two. Not in a hippy-dippy Secret Life of Plants kind of way, but sound research that demonstrates at least a limited ability to "remember" stimuli and react to them, as well as some primitive ability to communicate within and between species. So there's at least a question mark hanging over, say, salad greens grown hydroponically in a hermetically sealed environment (which, of course, would not scale well enough to feed the world). That's my personal take. Everyone who undertakes the raising of livestock has their own, and so does everyone who thinks seriously about food. And it's in no way necessary that any of them align with each other. If anybody's interested in the links to the studies I'm mentioning I can dig them up later (I'm supposed to be doing other things right now), but they're easily enough Googled. The remainder of the thread will have less philosophy and more practicality, but I'm probably done for the next several hours.

I've mentioned occasionally on other threads that my GF and I raise rabbits, and I thought perhaps some of you might be interested in seeing them. So I'm starting a new topic for that, because there wasn't a place where they'd be on-topic: they're not garden animals, and they're emphatically not companion animals. I suppose there are a couple of things that might have fit into the "food ethics" thread, but that would have been pretty limiting. So here we are (and for anyone who's not interested in the nuts and bolts, there will be pictures of cute bunnies). Our year-round rabbitry is in a lean-to shed that was built off the side of our barn by a previous owner. They used it for their little tractor (the barn was for horses). We took all of the equipment from the lean-to, put range fencing around it to keep out predators, and an electric fence to deter my stepdaughter's mastiff (truthfully, she mostly keeps other predators at bay). In the autumn as the weather deteriorated we also put up tarps to block the wind and snow. The plan for this year is to tweak the tarps so we can raise and lower them like blinds, giving the bunnies more light and airflow during pleasant weather but still protecting them when it's inclement. During the summer, the young 'uns we're growing out get to live outdoors on the grass. We currently have three cages outdoors, and one more will be moving outside as soon as I can find the time and an extra pair of hands to help. So here's what the wee ones look like in their nest box, when they're just little and their eyes are almost open (the grey fuzz around the edges is mama's fur, the rest of the bedding is straw). It's a few days already since I took these pics, and in that time their eyes have opened and they've begun exploring their cage. These ones come from a pretty silver-grey doe we've dubbed Silverbell. You need to give 'em names or numbers in order to track the bloodlines and which doe/buck combinations give you the best outcomes, and with grandkids in the mix there was never any question that they'd get names. One of the reasons we sometimes lose bunnies at this stage is that Mama bunny will hop out of the nest box when she's done nursing, and occasionally one of the little guys will still be latched on. If you're lucky, you'll find the teeny critter before it dies of exposure. If not, you lose a bunny (we won't be actively breeding them next winter, partly because of this). This little one was lucky. Here's the before: ...and here's the after (the same little one, three weeks later). You'll note the wire cage bottom, which allows most of the droppings to simply fall through to the ground (we do periodically scrape out any accumulation, as well). We were using a gravity-fed watering system last summer, with hoses and Ts and metal nipples that attach to the cages, but that's not usable in winter so we switched to open dishes. The cages have been reconfigured since autumn to accommodate our burgeoning bunny population, so we need more hose and fittings before we can get it re-established. Here we have a couple of does with their litters, a bit older and more developed than the ones in the first photo. The white doe is Sugar, and the black doe is Ebony (and no, we haven't expended a lot of mental energy on the naming process). Sugar's litter were exceptionally lively right from the start. Trying to count them, my GF giggled and said "They're like popcorn!" Note that the coloration is pretty random, even within a given litter. This was Sugar's first all-white litter, but her third litter with the same (white) buck. Go figure. This little guy is one of Ebony's litter, mostly black but shot through with brown. My granddaughter's daddy's girlfriend (as a culture we really need to find shorthand terminology for this kind of relationship), who is a veterinary tech, fell completely in love with this one and dubbed him/her (we haven't checked yet) Coco Bean. Here's a litter of adolescents, from our silver-grey doe. As you see, we only had one in this litter with the coloration we were hoping for. He's a cutie, though (and this one we have checked). This is the cage that will be moved outside within the next few days. Our other adolescent bunnies are already outside: It's easy to tell which spots were under a cage and which ones were between 'em, isn't it? The three white ones in the cage to the left (that's two bunnies, not one deformed mutant) are now of harvesting age, but they've had a brief reprieve because somebody's possibly coming today to buy one. The middle cage are roughly the same age as the ones still indoors, and have a month or so to enjoy the grass. The bunnies in the three individual enclosures in the right-most cage are our next-generation breeders (it's good to refresh your line every year by swapping out the breeders). Here are some closer pics: It's fun watching them react when they realize that "Dude, it's food! Everything we're walking on is food!" It always reminds me of the first time we took our granddaughter to the apple U-pick. Finally, this handsome gent is Parker, one of our two current bucks (the other is Snowball, who's white). They're both Flemish Giants, but Parker is the smaller of the two at probably 13 or 14 pounds. Snowball is a chonk, and probably checks in at 18 or so. Parker was a pet before he came to us, and will become a pet again once he's done his duty by the gene pool. Oh, and little Wembley has appointed himself Deputy Bunny Inspector, and comes with me each morning and afternoon while I attend to them. Can't leave him out. I will fill in some details shortly, but right now I need to go feed and water the critters.

I can attest that they'd gotten as far as Maine a decade ago, because my late (California-bred) wife was thrilled to get them.

Yeah, it is if you want to do it in commercial volumes/timeframes. As it happens, I had randomly tripped across this article yesterday about the heyday of the hand-made bagel: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/bagel-union-strikes-new-york-city

At one of my restaurants, I offered the option of ordering my veggie burger with bacon and cheese. I called that one "The Hypocrite" and it was surprisingly popular.

Not gonna lie, "barbecue spaghetti" is not a phrase I'd ever expected to read. Adding "authentic" to the mix makes it even better, though.

Researchers attempt to identify the flavor compounds at play in fermented coffee (apparently it's trendy?): https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/05/the-chemistry-of-fermented-coffee/

"Golden Mushroom" brand enoki are being recalled for listeria. So far only Ontario is affected, though they "may have been" sold or distributed into other provinces. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/golden-mushroom-brand-enoki-mushroom-recalled-due-listeria-monocytogenes-1?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

The technology that's being used in the cited article won't result in a transgenic food (ie, a so-called "frankenfood"). They're not transferring genetic material from one organism to another, they're identifying and suppressing one aspect of the existing plant; whether that be kale or anything else. It's the equivalent, at the cellular level, of picking the seeds out of your grapes (and of course, we've successfully bred grapes to be seedless without us doing it manually, which arrives at the same end by a different process). If the plant was not carcinogenic to begin with, it won't be carcinogenic afterwards.

I had an immediate mental image of youngsters sinking a long ball and crowing about hitting "nothin' but pork!"

I have a half-dozen of them, purchased for those specific uses.

It usually just means the starch's molecular structure has been altered so it can be frozen and thawed without getting weird (think "frozen pie fillings" for an example). The graphic provides a nice little talking point for the beef industry, though of course it's disingenuous because "beef" doesn't emerge fully formed like Aphrodite. It contains everything the steer (or cow) ate - herbicides, pesticides and all - plus a raft of antibiotics. Not sure where/whether growth hormones are permitted in the US, and too lazy to look it up at this time of the morning. FWIW they'll have eaten a huge quantity of GMO corn as well. None of those things are especially a hot-button issue for me, but they certainly would be for a significant percentage of consumers targeted by that ad.