Although I'm not particularly religious and certainly don't follow Christian holidays I do enjoy using them as an excuse to cook an awesome meal. With Easter earlier this month I did just that. Jessica and I decided to make a feast of sorts from the Kokkari, which is a pretty amazing Greek restaurant in San Francisco. Feeling adventurous and wanting to cook a themed meal with something we never had cooked with before we settled upon rabbit. Of course we didn't realize the irony behind cooking a rabbit on Easter until we planned the whole. This wasn't really thought through before we bought it since it inevitably was put upon me to break it down. Into individual pieces. And then take off the meat. Did I mention that it was a cute little rabbit? But, always wanting to master special techniques in the kitchen, such as butchering, I took one for the team. It proved a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. I've broken down a couple of chickens before, which are fairly easy especially with the number of helpful guides online (thank you YouTube for telling me how to de-bone a lamb leg for Thanksgiving!). However, a rabbit is a lot smaller making things more difficult (maybe I shouldn't go into pediatric surgery...) and has a thin layer of "silver skin" surrounding its meat that needs to be removed before cooking. But, after about an hour it was all done and I was quickly looking forward to trying out another Greek rabbit recipe that involved braising, which does not involve taking the meat off the bone...that I did here on accident. I also need to try it out before Jessica gets two dwarf lionhead rabbits that I will feel too guilty cooking their cousin in front of them.
I also got the chance to try out some new pickles that had some Mediterranean flavors. I chose some vegetables that were available at the farmers market: Persian cucumber, cauliflower, and carrots. The brine was simply 2 cups: 1 cup: 1 tbls: 1 tbls white wine vinegar, water, salt, and sugar. Then the spices were your basic dill, garlic, peppercorns, bay leaves, mustard seeds, fennel seeds, and the new to me Greek oregano. These were heated up to dissolve and poured over the vegetables. I think these pickles turned out really well after sitting in the fridge for 3 days and I'll definitely be making them again! I haven't played around with oregano (let alone Greek oregano) or white wine vinegar in a pickle yet so these were a nice change.
The rest of the meal was roasted/fried potatoes with lemon, spicy feta dip, flat bread, brown butter orzo, watermelon feta salad, and grilled rabbit.
Tesa update: I think this turned out really well considering it was my first time curing a piece of meat! I'm not entirely confident the cure penetrated all the way to the center of the meat, which it is supposed to do. Having a class or instructor would be handy since I could be told first hand what to look for. We've mostly been using it to fry and then through some vegetables in the pan with it. I think it would be really great in carbonara or a base for bolognese! After making this at home I definitely want to try to cure some more things since it was so fun and nice to make something at home that you usually have to buy in a specialty store - I just need an environment (i.e. wine fridge) that is nurturing and safe for curing, which a LA apartment definitely is not.
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