what’s cooking wednesday: rosemary rabbit and roasted potatoes
Let me start by saying I know rabbit probably isn’t a common dish for many of you, but we eat it all the time as P’s parents raise the little guys for food. You could easily do this recipe with chicken, though, so please don’t be put off by the bun’.
This week’s What’s Cooking Wednesday will mark a first around here as I decided to post an entire meal–mostly because once I put a plate together last night, it looked so darn good, I couldn’t resist.
So, here we have rabbit with rosemary, roasted potatoes, garlic bread, and salad with red onion. Let’s take it from the top with all the ingredients you’ll need for everything.
1 rabbit cut into pieces
6 medium potatoes (serves 2-3 people)
salad greens
6 cloves garlic
olive oil
rosemary
white wine vinegar
salt
black pepper
peperoncino
1 red onion for salad (optional)
Oven-Roasted Potatoes
First preheat the oven to about 400°F (205°C). Peel and cut the potatoes into wedges, and put them in a baking dish. Drizzle with olive oil and season them with black pepper, peperoncino, a few sprigs of rosemary, and a generous amount of salt. Don’t be afraid of the seasonings here; it takes a lot to overseason potatoes (except with the peperoncino, depending on how hot you like them).
Put them in the oven, and just let them do their thing. Every now and again, give them a shake and turn them around a bit. They should take about an hour and fifteen minutes to roast, and if you want them crispy on the outside but soft in the middle (how I like them but P doesn’t), it’ll take a little longer. The other option to shorten cooking time is to raise the heat from the get-go.
Let the potatoes sit for a few minutes before you eat as they are extremely, extremely hot out of the oven. Bet you knew that.
Rabbit with Rosemary
If the rabbit (or chicken) isn’t cut into pieces, that needs to be done first. P’s in charge of all things bunny around here, so he does this, and I have no tips to offer. Although a lot of people marinate the rabbit, we don’t, and I really like it better this way because you taste more of the rabbit and less of the seasonings, but to each her own.
Put a generous amount of olive oil (5 tablespoons) in a frying pan and sauté 4 garlic cloves on medium heat until lightly golden brown and then remove.* Add rabbit pieces, seasoning with black pepper, peperoncino, salt, and rosemary sprigs. Once one side of the bunny is browning, flip, and let the other side brown as well.
Turn down the heat to low, add about a half cup of white wine vinegar, and let rabbit simmer for another fifteen to twenty minutes or so, or until the inside is no longer pink. If your rabbit is sucking in all the liquid too quickly, add some hot water, but only if absolutely necessary.
*For a special treat, add some pancetta/bacon to the garlic at the beginning; this adds a great smoky taste.
Note that the entire rabbit portion of the meal will probably take about forty-five minutes, so you can try to time it with the potatoes accordingly.
Garlic Bread
About five minutes before you will eat, you should put the bread in the oven. You can use a fancy broiler if you have, but I just used the heat from the potatoes and set the oven on its lowest setting for the bread.
Use thin slices of preferably Italian bread, and smear on a little butter or drizzle a little olive oil, depending on your taste. Peel a couple of garlic cloves and cut in half; use the halves to rub onto the bread.
Put in the oven, and remove when toasted to your liking–a light golden brown is usually good.
Salad with Red Onion
OK, you probably don’t need instructions here, but for the sake of a complete meal, I’ll describe what I did.
Wash the salad greens and tear into bite size chunks. Cut a red onion into chunks and mix with greens. For the dressing, drizzle olive oil and white wine vinegar on top and then add salt and a pinch of sugar. Toss salad and serve.
And there you have an entire meal, ready in about an hour and a half from start to finish.
Buon appetito!
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[tags]rabbit recipes, rosemary, roasted potatoes, potatoes, salad, red onions, garlic bread, cooking, what’s cooking wednesday, recipes[/tags]
17 Beans of Wisdom to “what’s cooking wednesday: rosemary rabbit and roasted potatoes”
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[...] here that I like an awful lot of Calabrian food–I can get with wild boar (cinghiale) and rabbit (c... bleedingespresso.com/2008/05/one-womans-poison-is-anothers-delicacy.html
Michelle Kaminsky is an American attorney-turned-freelance writer who lived in her family's ancestral village in Calabria, Italy for 15 years. This blog is now archived.
Calabria Guidebook
Recipes
We eat rabbit occasionally. It’s sold frozen in the supermarkets here in Germany. I quite like it 🙂
I love rabbit! My Spanish husband knows several different ways to cook it and they are ALL so yummy! It’s rare to see it at a poultry shop here in Ireland though 🙁
This post is mouth-wateringly yummy, which is not doing my diet any good!
Awwwww, poor rabbit… and so close to Easter too! Couldn’t you just wait until after he delivered all of the Easter eggs? :p
I ate rabbit once when I was a little girl. Ahhh, yes, the good ole days when my parents forced me to eat everything. Well, let’s just say that I didn’t have the greatest rabbit eating experience.
I haven’t eaten it since…
I’ll stick with chicken. 🙂
I have to admit. That looks quite good, and I haven’t eaten meat in almost 7 years.
Also! I noticed you’re reading History of Love. Goooood choice. I’d also recommend Jonathan Safran Foer, if you haven’t already heard. He’s Allison Kraus’s husband, and they have very very similar writing styles.
We had rabbit for lunch in the caffeteria at work. I couldn’t believe it. It seemed too exotic to make for hundreds of people. It’s good but it taste like chicken!!! I couldn’t resist. 🙂
Okay, I lied. Now, I am starting to hate Wednesdays.
It is only 9am in Chicago and in reading your blog, I am suddenly ravenous. I have to wait another nine hours until dinner — and I can tell you, my dinner won’t be this good!!!
My dad (Calabrian born and bred, but emigrated to Scotland at 19) has rabbits for this purpose in his back yard – always has. Obviously something he took with him from Calabria. NOBODY will eat the poor wee things over here, but he still has them anyway and refuses to give them up! 🙂
I love reading your blog btw, I discovered it a few months ago… it feels like I’m back in Calabria when I’m reading.
thanks so much for that recipe. I too, grew up eating rabbit but have never attempted to cook it on my own. I guess it was just something only my mama could make. i think i am going to attempt to use your recipe. Thanks!
I like these posts – we have to do a recipe exchange! 🙂
Oh yum. I’ve never had rabbit but it sounds so good! My kids love oven-roasted potatoes like you make, and it’s certainly healthier than french fries!
For those of you who haven’t had rabbit, it really is quite good…and as Jeff said, it really does mostly taste like chicken, but here’s some info on why you should consider cooking up the bunny.
Concetta, you share a name with my great-grandmother! Feel free to email me with any ideas/memories you have for future posts.
Enza, making rabbit is so easy; there are tons of recipes if you do a Google search, including ones for ragù…perhaps someday I’ll post one of those too because I love me some rabbit ragù!
Wow that looks really good. Quite the cook you are.
I’ve only had rabbit once in a Spanish restaurant in Boston. It was very good.
I used to love rabbit (“alla cacciatore” or any way really) until we got our own little drawf rabbit named Lenny (now I will test your literary skills — think back to middle school). I must say that now I have a hard time thinking about eating rabbit, although I do occasionally….Anyway Lenny hangs out between a landing and the terrace and is so soft and cuddly, a great, quiet pet.
Sorry, have a good rabbit meal. I’ll pass for today.
Oh, and two other things: I made your carbonara again and it was as fabulous as ever. Can’t thank you enough for that! And I’m on my 100th post and I hope you don’t mind, I had to borrow your idea of the 100 things about me meme to celebrate!
That looked so good. when I was a child my dad would go hunting for rabbits but I’d never eat them cause they were cute fury animals. Now I pay a small fortune for them, when I find them in the shops.
Kyle, thanks for visiting! Rabbits are big in European cuisine generally, but I’ve never had Spanish Bunny. I’ll have to check out a recipe….
Elizabeth, nothing Lenny is coming to mind…help! One of my best friends back in the States has a rabbit for a pet; it’s so cute how he just patters around the house on his own. So yes, I can definitely understand the hesitation to chow down on Lenny’s cousin 😉
Bonggamom, the carbonara just keeps giving does it? Good! Don’t worry about the 100 things; I certainly didn’t invent the idea! Can’t wait to read yours!
Madelyne, yes, rabbits are expensive even here at the butcher because they just aren’t easy to find anymore. Unless, of course, your in-laws raise them in the cantina. This is actually why now my OH is kicking around the idea of raising them as a business…we shall see…..