Life's been a little weird lately.

The hare that lost.

Have you ever had an ex-boyfriend who, it turns out, was sort of an embarrassment, a less-informed decision than you thought at the time, perhaps missing some crucial traits that would be deal breakers now? And you're glad the relationship is over without much heartbreak on either side, and while it was a learning experience, you're not in a hurry to repeat it. Or even think much about it. But there's all these photographs lying around, and you don't want to get rid of them, because they show part of your life, and parts of it were really fun despite being sort of awkward, and some of them are really pretty, and you just don't know what exactly to do with them?

That's how I feel about the time I made rabbit.

I bought a beautiful, fresh, organic rabbit from one of my favorite butchers in the Italian Market to celebrate the year of the rabbit, and also to experiment a little bit. I was able to watch as he skinned and chopped the hare for me. To prepare, I looked up a lot of rabbit recipes in cookbooks and internets, and found that, while they differed a lot, most of them agreed that browning the rabbit and then slow-cooking it in liquid was the way to go. So I got together some wine and a small group of people that are particularly good-natured about my cooking experiments, and went to town on my rabbit pieces.

Using another purchase from the butcher's - a container of duck fat - I browned the rabbit nicely. It already smelled good (and the duck fat smelled excellent) and looked pretty.

 

I added shallots, fennel, herbs, wine, and rabbit broth, and slowly simmered the rabbit for forty minutes or so. It still smelled good. 

While it cooked, everyone relearned bridge.

We made roasted vegetables, mushroom gravy, and Barbara's fresh bread to accompany the rabbit.

And then we ate it. And it was way too dry. I'm not sure whether it should have been browned more, cooked less, or both, but something terrible had happened in the hour it took to cook. The gravy was the only redeeming factor at all.

It was sort of devastating. A disappointing end to a relationship I'd been a little wary about, but had had such high hopes for.

At least in the end, unlike ex-boyfriends, dry rabbit can be put to another use:

...and sometimes monsters from another dimension try to crawl out of your sponge cake.

Here's a lesson no one needs to learn: sometimes life fails at being awesome. And it's bad when it's happening to you, but watching someone else go through it is no picnic either. When stupid things happen, often the only real solution is time. Wait. Eventually life will feel less worse. Although that doesn't mean it's not still a little bitch.

In the meantime, there's not much you can do to help someone who's dealing with their shit. But if they call you from bart and need a not-stupid person to hang out with, you can invite them over to take it out on the sponge cake you're making for a trifle.

There may be casualties.

Actually, I'm going to take full credit for the sponge cake disaster, and offer some more advice: don't overbeat your eggs. If they get bigger and bigger and bigger and then get smaller, it's too late.

Monsters from another dimension will warp your poor, innocent sponge cake, trying to get into this world by way of your kitchen. There is nothing you can do. You will have to buy store-made cake for your trifle.


On the other hand, the sponge cake will be so desperately hilarious that life will seem a little less ridiculous.

And the trifle will have enough fresh fruit and Grand Marnier that no one will notice the absence of homemade sponge cake, and will start eating it before you can take a nice photograph.

And then your friend, who is a very talented, intelligent, beautiful lady, will give you a lovely blog award, and while you won't understand exactly what that is and have to call her during her work hours to figure it out, it's still quite lovely and much appreciated.

To recap:

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And apparently this One Lovely Blog Award requires me to tell you seven things about me that you may not know and, ideally, aren't entirely uninteresting. And then I'm supposed to pass it to the next lovely blogger, who will look like an asshole if they don't do the same.

One. I was a very picky eater when I was a kid, which was mostly about texture, but I also really hated peanut butter. Once I took a nap with gum in my mouth, and it got in my hair, and my daycare teacher had to use peanut butter to remove it, and my hair smelled like peanut butter, and it was the worst thing ever. Way worse than gummy hair. I grew out of my pickiness, and now I think peanut butter is a-okay, although I don't have the same attachment to it that others do.

Two. The only thing I still refuse to eat is kimchi, which it cabbage that has been left out, rotted, and then is stuffed into small jars with large amounts of spicy. I witnessed an explosive kimchi incident as a young girl and it left deep scars.

Three. My mom always made my birthday cakes and I was never jealous of other kids and their fancy store-bought ones.

Four. The most amazing thing I've ever eaten is an olallieberry (or a loganberry or a boysenberry - some sort of blackberry relative. I can't find the menu.) from Alice Water's Chez Panisse.

Five. My grandpa used to count the peanuts in the little packets they give you on airplanes. I believe the average was 21.5 per packet. Now I count peanuts. Delta's average on my last trip was 16.5. Peanut packets these days, they just aren't the same value as they used to be.

Six. I really enjoy reading cookbooks from the 1950s. The recipes are so funny! My favorite is "Frozen Salad." I don't have it in front of me, but as I recall, it has the cook combine crushed pineapple, cream cheese, marshmallow mix, and whipping cream, freezing the mixture, and then spreading mayonnaise over everything. White and frigid, just like a good fifties housewife.

Seven. I used to live in a house with a lot of potheads (UCSC like what!) which was fantastic, because whenever I messed up a cooking project (like bread that didn't rise enough and was dense and almost soggy on the inside) I could just leave it out on the counter and it would disappear overnight. And the next morning everyone would be raving about the delicious thing they ate when they got the munchies at 3am.

There! Seven things! And the next sucker is Robyn, who is an amazing cook, baker, writer, tweeter, friend, and all-around bad-ass lady, and who needs to update her blog more because I like to read it.