Paddock to Plate - Rabbit Risotto

When I come downstairs from tucking the children into bed, there’s usually a rifle on the dining room table - ready for the hunt under cover of darkness. My Other Half lurks at the back door twitching the curtains and surveying the paddocks.

He gets me to flick on the floodlights and takes his shot. Finally he made the announcement he’d been itching to make: that I’d better find some rabbit recipes for the following night’s dinner.

I was one step ahead of him as usual.

All my favourites have ample ways of dealing with rabbit – Jamie and Hugh. But it was Mark Gilchrist, head chef of ‘Game for Anything’ who provided the know-how for our first rabbit repast, courtesy of You Tube.

First off the mark was rabbit risotto.

The rabbit had hung overnight from the pergola – not an ideal start. You really should gut a rabbit as soon as possible after you’ve caught it, as the innards can taint the meat, apparently.

After suffering a frosty dawn, it was stiff as a board when we brought it into the kitchen. My Other Half used to shoot rabbits in the wild as a boy so he was able to skin it efficiently. He makes a fairly good great white hunter.

Then we jointed it. I use the term ‘we’ loosely. The nearest I’ve come to butchering anything is spatchcocking a chicken. Once you’ve cut the breastbone out of a bird and leaned on it to flatten it out, you probably forfeit the right to get squeamish in the kitchen. But I wasn’t ready to do the first rabbit.

Like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, I believe you owe it to the creature to be able to make the best use of it. If I’m going to eat rabbits we’ve shot, I should be able to skin, gut and butcher them. So i intend on working up to it. Oliver did the first, so I could see how it’s done.

There were some less than lovely moments, like taking the head off. Once it was jointed, it went into a pot of salty water to soak overnight. If you want to see a dead, nude rabbit, you can go to You-Tube. But here’s what a jointed one in salty water looks like:

Then it was rinsed, and boiled for two and a half hours. That doesn’t sound particularly enticing, right? But Mark Gilchrist over at ‘Game for Anything’, assured us it was the best and simplest way to tenderise the meat and get it to fall off the bone. And the aromas certainly gave the dog something to think about.

It’s official, I’m a bunny boiler. Here’s what a jointed rabbit looks like after two and a half hours in a pot:

And fall off the bone it did; here’s how the meat looked - there was plenty of it, as you can see:

We did a taste test at this stage – a great time to do so as it hadn’t absorbed any other flavours. It was full of taste, like gamey chicken; very much like one imagines meat tasted before it got rubbery and tasteless from industrialised production.

I made the risotto that I usually make with chicken, roasted some pumpkin and added it towards the end. I took out a couple of small meat-free portions for the children before the meat went in. They had demurred on rabbit. Then I added the meat and cooked on gently for a couple more minutes. Then we were done.

All that remained was to open a bottle and enjoy our first food-for-free dinner-from-the-wild. Hugh Fearnely-Whittingstall would be proud of us.

Clearing up after dinner, I asked my OH what he’d done with the rabbit skin and fur. In his boyhood on the farm, he covered an old valve radio with fur. ‘It looked amazing,’ he’s fond of telling me. I’m happy to take his word for it. Sadly, no picture is available of it.
He has the fur from tonight’s bunny in his workshop. ‘Do you think covering another radio would make me feel young again?’ he asked me tonight. I’m keeping a close eye on my i-Pod, although I have to say, part of me thinks it would look rather fetching with a furry cover.

Coming soon: A Bunny in the Oven.