Duvel

Sure. When on offer, rabbit is around 10 €/kg (last week 10.49 €/kg) for the whole animal, including head, lungs, heart, kidneys & liver. Regular price is about 15 €/kg for the whole bunny, and 25 €/kg and up for selected parts (e.g. front or hind legs, saddle). The rabbits offered in the two major supermarkets here is imported from nearby France (Alsace).

And now ... let’s cook them 😉

I remember having that combination once. A quick check through my collection gave at least one more instance of using mustard in a Beijing style dish (from a series of regional cookbooks, published by Wei-Chuan, Taiwan) ...

Tonight another attempt to use up the rabbit dishes of this week: Banh Mi, featuring the rabbit terrine from Sunday, with Kewpie, fried egg, quick pickled carrot and cucumber, plenty of cilantro, fried onions and Vietnamese hoisin sauce. Accompanied by a fruity Hop House lager ...

The conill amb xocolata described above suffered from a lingering bitterness of the sauce. Today I used the leftovers to prepare rabbit tacos. The basic flavor profile of the dish lend itself already to be used in a Mexican dish, and I used additional soaked ancho peppers and cumin/cinnamon/coriander to smoothen out the sauce ... So, refried pulled rabbit served on wheat tortillas with goat cheese cream, the chocolate-ancho salsa, quick-pickled red cabbage, some fried bread/almond/pine nut crunch and cilantro ... no complaints 🤗

Meatballs, mushroom cream sauce and “clean out the fridge mash” (potatoes, sweet potatoes, spinach, Savoy cabbage, onions, garlic, butter) ...

Umeboshi Onigiri (enjoyed with Suntory Toki) ... Follow by an Onigiri with freeze-dried Mentaiko.

If he is equally apt in deboning them, please bring him around when you move in with me ... 😉

In Germany (and other European countries) you’d marinate in slightly acidic marinades (think red wine : white wine / diluted vinegar) and braise until tender ...

Not in Japan.

I was lazy and got a McRib, just before the Corona curfew kicked in at 20.00h. And I will not apologize for it ...

I used to have monthly layovers at Urumqi airport in Xinjiang province, China. I always bought some bagged red-cooked Bactrian camel meat. Originally, to freak out my colleagues and friends, but soon because it was actually quite tasty ...

Why ?

I’d like that - let’s get this stupid pandemy over with, and you come over and start your living in trial period 😉

Tonight, after 4 days of rabbit (thanks to the rabbit cook-off) the family requested another protein ... the little wanted the movie moved from Sunday to tonight, so ... bacon cheeseburgers. I recently switched from frying to broiling for my indoor burgers. Far juicier results and proper cheese melting (plus higher capacity up to 6 patties simultaneously). Served “Arnau” style: Kewpie, salad, patty & cheese, bacon, tomato, pickles, bbq sauce & roasted onions ... complaints successfully silenced 😉 Enjoyed together with Howl’s Moving Castle - a great movie !

That looks great ! Would you be so kind to share your source or your recipe ?

Today I prepared the „sealing“ of the terrine(s), if you will. The rabbit bones (with ample residual meat) was cooked overnight in the rice cooker, congee setting (sorry, no pictures). The resulting stock was cooked & reduced with some dry wine, onion, garlic, carrot, pepper, salt, bay leaf, cloves and juniper berries. Upon testing, it gelled pretty well. The terrines were covered with the stock and left to cool in the fridge ... The terrine was served as light lunch on toasted brioche, alongside salad with a mustard vinaigrette (Machê would be my preference, but our supermarket had none), some pickles, hot mustard and of course topped with jellied stock. Enjoyed with a Jever, because I felt like a little reward 😉 Little one was sceptical at first, but upon trying decided it was „delicious“ and could be featured again as lunch ... After the beer I knew it would be time for a nap - might as well go full throttle ... Carajillo for „dessert“ 🤗

I have not heard of that substitution before ... is it „a thing“ ?

This is red pepper from Cambodia, Kampot province. It has a very intense peppery aroma, with a moderate heat level. I purchased my first glass several years ago while visiting there, and am seeking out this variety ever since.

Corrected the ... autocorrect 😉

3rd rabbit’s the charm ... After two stews there was a bit of family pressure for a different dish. As I wanted to do a cold preparation, I looked into some rabbit terrines and patés ... I narrowed it down to a rabbit and prune terrine from this recommendable book ... And the straightforward rabbit terrine with Armagnac from this excellent book. Family voted for the latter, so it was decided. I do cook a lot, but never had any formal training. That is usually not an issue, but with certain tasks it is a disadvantage. My way to debone the rabbit (despite reading/watching some instructables and freshly honing the knives) put a new meaning to the verb „butchering“. I will spare you the progress picture and will just proudly present you with about 700g of rabbit meat from a 1300g rabbit, chopped into small pieces ... This was mixed with ground fatty pork, some cubed ham, garlic, onion, pepper, fresh thyme, parsley and pink salt, then a glass of Armagnac (whisky, as @liuzhou suggested, would be good, too) was added. The mixture was tightly wrapped and marinated overnight. The next day freshly ground crustless white bread was soaked in milk, squeezed and mixed with egg and some quattre epice. The mixture was combined with the marinated meat, some extra pepper & thyme added and filled into my grandma‘s round terrine form. It was closed tightly with two layers of tin foil (too lazy to make the traditional water/flour dough to seal it) and popped in a bain marie into the hot oven for 2h. The leftover masse was put into ramekins, covered and baked for 30 min, both to a core temperature of 72 oC. Before ... After ... They‘ll all cool overnight and tomorrow I will add some gelatinized stock with wine as a cover and the we‘ll have a tasting ... looking very forward !

And I was thinking Germany had cheap pork meat ... is this from a regular butcher/supermarket ? It definitely looks good, but(t) for that price I‘d probably only get roadkill here 😉

Fried leftover Trinxat (think thick potato cabbage pancake) with fried egg and blood sausage ... not exactly the sustenance one requires if merely working from the homeoffice, but oh so yummy 🤗

With pleasure. This potato dumpling, or „Knödel halb und halb“, is a common side dish in Thuringia and Lower Saxony (where I hail from). It is made from 50% boiled and 50% raw potatoes, as the name „half and half“ implies. You divide your potatoes, grate finely half of them and let them drain. Typically the water is collected, the starch settles after a while and is put back into the mass to bind it. I forgo this and just potato starch. The other half of the potatoes is cooked and mashed. Both parts are combined with egg(s) and starch plus some flour and a bit of nutmeg and then formed into dumplings and cooking in barely simmering water for about 30 min. They are tricky and sometimes disintegrate for no reason. A good recipe is found here (sorry, only in German).

Tonight we move from Catalonia to Germany to a true classic: Hasenpfeffer! I hope that @chromedome will forgive to make this first - I am looking very much forward to your version! This is again a triangulation between this version (which is in the tradition of the Rhineland) and a more simple „housewife“ version from Thuringia ... Hasenpfeffer is a robust dish that works well with hare (hence the name), but is equally good with rabbit. The stew is usally thickened with rabbit blood, which poses a difficulty if you buy the rabbit already butchered. See below for a decent workaround. I chopped up the rabbit yesterday night into 9 pieces, that were marinated overnight with salt, pepper, thyme, garlic, onions, cognac and red wine. Tonight, some bacon cubes were fried and subsequently the marinated rabbit parts were fried in the bacon fat. The rabbit was removed and onions plus carrot were fried, dusted with flour and fried some more. In parallel, in a enameled cast iron pan icing sugar was caramelized, some tomato paste was added and fried briefly before being deglazed with the rabbit marinate. More wine was added, together some garlic, juniper berries, peppercorn, bay leaves and all the prefried items from before. In the oven it went, and 45 min later the meat was ready. The braising liquid was filtered, given onto chopped up Flönz (a soft pure pork blood sausage) and the resulting sauce pureed - done ! The Hasenpfeffer was served with potato dumplings (the Thuringia addition) and apple sauce (the Rhineland addition) and enjoyed worh a cold Kölsch ... Manöverkritik: This stew was unanimously deemed more tasty the yesterdays conill amb xocolata. The sauce was more intense and rounded, the meat itself was complementing the sauce. The usage of blood sausage worked well tastewise, but didn’t thickened the sauce. Thank you, potato starch. Overall quite good ... this I will make definitively again - and I think it should be nice with duck legs, too. Next time !