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:

PMS dinner

Sometimes a girl gets a little grumpy, life seems a little difficult to navigate, and strange back pains start cramping her style. Sometimes she just really, really wants some bacon. Which is what sent me out of the house at 7pm to the little local/sustainable/organic/healthy/green grocery store to get some of their marvelously smoky bacon, prepped by a local chef (from Cafe Estelle, the same bacon I used for ice cream). I went straight past the girl giving out nut butter samples to the meat freezer, which was full of steaks and shanks and other large meat packages, but devoid of bacon. The clouds covered the sun, the flowers began to wilt, the boxes of fresh fruit started to bruise, suddenly the world seemed gray and dark. I gave the grocer a mournful look. Upon hearing what I was looking for, he suddenly morphed into a porky knight in armor shined with bacon grease riding a hairy, frothing boar. Extolling the virtues of the bacon, he bounced over to a cooler, and pulled out a huge pack of bacon that had just been delivered. And, like the bacon, I was suddenly delivered from my misery. Praise the Lord of the Flies.

So this is less of a recipe and more of a vice. I really like bacon, and I really like cooking with the leftover bacon fat. I don't have any tricks for it, and there's probably oodles of amazing things that I could do instead, but usually I just throw a bunch of potatoes into the fat until they smell and taste like bacon. Potato-y bacon.

These are Rose Gold potatoes, from Savoie Organic Farm that have a little bit of sage and marjoram thrown in, courtesy of my housemate's garden. I let them fry in the bacon fat for awhile, and then threw a little water in, covered the pan, and let them steam for a bit.

The cucumber and tomato, my concessions to non-bacon food groups, are also from Savoie. The tomato is an heirloom beefsteak tomato, definitely the best beefsteak I've ever had. The cucumbers are also heirloom, also fantastic, and have a beautiful yellow skin to boot. I've been eating them all week, raw and unadorned, because they're just that delicious. And also because the weather is still hot, muggy, and terrible.

On another note, I went fruit picking up at Weaver's Orchard on Tuesday, with a whole host of lovely people, and we picked a whole lot of fruit. There's pie dough and vanilla ice cream mix in my fridge, so there's some more legit blog posts and photos in the works, but for now I'll just leave you with a little preview of things to come.

Potato Salad with lots of stuff in it.

It's been terribly hot lately, an oppressive, heavy, wet, humid heat that makes going outside unbearable. So today, when the humidity dropped and the temperature averaged a lovely, cool 87 degrees, I decided that I should take advantage of the opportunity and do some cooking that would last through the next heat wave. Which could only mean potato salad.


Potatoes are easy to come by for everyone, and during these summer and fall months when plant life is sustainable on this coast, I buy my potatoes from one of my favorite growers at my weekly farmers' market - Savoie Organic Farm. Barry Savoie is awesome, knows everything about potatoes, and has introduced me to some fabulous varieties that I'd never eaten before (Rosegold potatoes are really beautiful, crunchy, and delicious). For potato salad, or when I'm feeling vague about my potato plans, I usually get Onaways, which are pretty standard new potatoes.

I'm a big fan of simplicity, and I often make potato salad with whatever leftover ingredients turn up in the fridge, so my usual recipe tends to focus on texture rather than specific ingredients, and goes something like this:

A 4-ingredient vinaigrette-based salad.

a pot full of boiled potatoes
some sort of onion-thing (red, green, shallot, garlic scave)
some sort of crunchy thing (pickles, celery, cucumber, capers)
some sort of green leafy-ish thing (dill, parsley, more green onion, chives)
mayonnaise or vinaigrette
mix together everything, realize you've once again failed to calculate how much potato is really necessary (my math usually goes something like 1 person = 4-6 potatoes, which is way too much potato/person), try to foist leftover potato salad on everyone you know.

But for this potato salad, I wanted to make sure I got some significant vegetable matter in with all the egg and starch. This wasn't going to be some half-assed barbecue side dish, it was going to be a summer staple. It had to have some semblance of balance.

So I went to the grocery store (a rare occurrence lately) and scanned the aisle for impulse potato salad buys. And then I went out to the backyard and picked some chives and parsley. And then I raided the fridge.I ended up with pickles, cucumbers, red onion, fennel, chives, green onion, capers, and parsley. 

Fennel is fine raw, but I decided to sauté mine with olive oil, then add the chopped, boiled potatoes to get a little crispy brown texture into the mess. The fennel caramelized nicely and gave off a subtle

flavor which was, on the whole, a little overwhelmed by all the everything else. I've never used fennel much in cooking, but I'd like to start - it would be fantastic in a more simple, less mayonnaise- based dish.

Probably if one hadn't started getting really hungry and had planned out her day to provide plenty of time for cooking experiments, one would let the potatoes and fennel cool down before throwing in everything else. This would ensure that the cucumbers wouldn't get warm and flimsy, that the greenery wouldn't wilt, and that everything would be chilled a bit before the mayonnaise hit it.

I got hungry, threw everything in together, peeled some hard-boiled eggs, whipped up some mayo (an egg yolk, a lot of olive oil, and a bit of vinegar), and ate it still warm, completely undermining the entire concept of a cold dinner. It was pretty delicious. Tomorrow, once it's had some quality time with the refrigerator, I imagine it will be even better.