Under my thumb: fried rabbit stew (Τηγανιτό κουνέλι)

First she had me making kalitsounia...

... and now I'm in the kitchen...

... frying rabbit.

All the rabbit is used in this dish, including the head - it's in the plate.

Better write down the recipe if this happens again, knock on wood.

And he thought I spent all my time on the computer. Everything else got done as I waved my magic wand and screeched "Abraca-frigging-dabra" at the top of my voice.

Welcome to the real world, honey.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Fried rabbit (Κουνέλι τηγανιτό)

Tsiknopempti - meaning "burning Thursday" - is the Greek equivalent of Ash Wednesday. In the Greek Orthodox Church, it is traditionally the last day people eat meat (the next ten days being devoted to cheese-fare), before they start the long period of fasting from all meat products and by-products, during "Great Lent". In practical terms, few people do this; who is going to abstain from all meat products for 59 consecutive days, and dairy products, for 49 consecutive days in this day and age? Miss out on Sunday roast? No milk in a cup of coffee? What do you do with eggs - collect them from your hatching chickens and store them for eating in 60 days time? What about milk - throw it away, like the angry farmers on television, protesting about low subsidies and grants that are taken away from them? I really don't know, because in our family, we don't fast in the strictest sense.

What I do know is how cleansing a period of fasting is. Your body feels lighter, your system isn't clogged with animal fat. You don't need to suffer spells of dizziness, as sugar isn't off-limits. There are plenty of cookies and cakes made during this time that don't contain eggs, milk or butter, halva being my absolute favorite. The reason why fasting is still important in our contemporary times does not need any explanation: just look at the rising levels of obesity in Greece and many other nations, specifically ones that are highly developed. In Britain it has even become a national issue discussed in Westminster Palace on the banks of the Thames. The modern way to fast, practiced by many of my friends who also feel the Great Lent is too long a period for complete abstinence from meat products, is to abstain from meat etc on Wednesdays and Fridays, the most solemn days of the week because of their significance during the Holy Week before Easter Day.

Tsiknopempti is celebrated with great frivolity and plenty of meat eating all over Greece. In my first year of living in Greece, I went out on that day for the first (and last) time with some friends, in Plaka at Monastiraki, a suburb overlooking the Parthenon in the Acropolis. We walked around the streets walking alongside the raucous crowds of people wearing scary costumes, with their cans of spray, bags of confetti and spirals of coloured ribbon, carrying plastic batons and clubbing or spraying each other, including strangers. I decided that once was enough of this kind of experience. I know that it's all in good fun, but I don't particularly like to be bothered by other people.

I've never celebrated Tsiknopempti in the traditional Greek manner with my family. It's too much of a bother going out with young children, who get incredibly frightened by the skeleton and ghostly ghoul masks when they are suddenly confronted by them in the middle of the street at night. Maybe when they're older, we might celebrate this occasion altogether, but I doubt it: they'll be going out with their own friends by that time, so we might have to have a little feast on our own, like we usually do.

In any case, Tsiknopempti was never a good day for me. Either I'm very busy at work, or it's very cold, or one (or both) of the children are sick. It always turns out like a Friday the 13th, which doesn't occur every single year, so if you're always out of luck on that day, you might be lucky to have a good year when there is no Friday the 13th, but if you always experience bad luck on Tsiknopempti, you must brace yourself to face up to it every year. This year's Tsiknopempti was no exception for me.

After refusing to get up and exercise her broken leg as the doctor ordered, my aged mother-in-law's neck suddenly stiffened, causing her so much pain, that not even her live-in carer could pacify her. She refused to be moved to the special hospital bed that we had bought for her - it was lying in the middle of the room taking up space and looking quite useless, even though it would later prove to be the answer to her problem - and didn't want to have the bed she was lying on moved to another part of the room, which would have enabled her to watch television without having her head turned sideways all the time, thereby cramping her upper torso; according to the traditions she was raised on, the bed would be in the same position and facing in exactly the same direction as that of a coffin brought into the house of a deceased person, for the next-of-kin to gather round during the wake. She demanded to have a doctor brought in for a house call. The family doctor (ie, the one that will cost the least money) refused to do house calls; "I have 70,000 patients registered under my care through the national health service," he screeched at me through the phone, "the system's not able to cope," and with that last statement he disconnected the line, leaving me with a dead receiver in my hand. If she had simply done what we suggested in the first place, none of this would have been necessary. This mobility problem was more self-created than a true outcome of her condition.

Since I couldn't solve her problem, I called her son to ask him for advice. "Call an ambulance, and see if they'll take her to the hospital," he said. I love the way Greeks treat their own problems as other people's problems. I refused to do this: first of all, how dare anyone use public services wastefully and take up precious doctors' time without reason. Don't get ill on a Friday or Saturday night, because when you turn up at the hospital, the medical staff will all be stitching up drunkards who were involved in a brawl, as if they hadn't anything else to do. I feel that the health system in Greece works perfectly well, as long as you 'know' which system to use. In the end, we called a doctor friend, who was more than happy to come and cheer the old woman up by prescribing some morale-raising drugs, and by the end of the morning, that was my only accomplishment. The dishes were still stacked on the benchtop, I hadn't cooked a meal and the house was a mess.

To top it all off, when I picked up my son from school, I turned up in my usual kitchen-and-garden garb, and to my horror, found the children, teachers and some parents sitting at tables, eating BBQ meat and sausages and listening to traditional Greek songs, while the children were running around in fancy dress costume, all enjoying the revelry. "I don't recall getting a note about this," I said in a meagre attempt to excuse my ignorance of the event to the headmaster. In fact, I do remember seeing a note at one point, but with the health matter consuming our minds the whole of that week, our attention was always being distracted by the hypochondriac and we were missing the point, which is our children's lives. I haven't felt so dejected in a long time.

I finally got round to cooking some fava when I came home, and that was our main meal on Tsiknopempti. No meat, no roasting dish or charcoal grill to celebrate "Ash Thursday", just plain creamy yellow fava, a very soothing dish after a tormenting day. It's not the first time that I have felt that I cannot uphold a tradition as it dictates, but that doesn't stop me from celebrating it at a more appropriate time, in a unique way. It does not have to be Tsiknopempti to celebrate it; I'm going to scorch that frying pan till it's black. We're having stamnagathi salad (spiny chicory, Chicorum spinosa) with fried rabbit, something I'll bet most of you cannot even conceive. Fried chicken comes close, but it's not as sweet or organic - let's face it, I live in a village, and free-range organically fed animals are the norm here. Thanks to Andreas once again for providing us with the delicacy.

It's not a difficult dish to make, but it will create a mess. Oil will spit left, right and centre on your benchtop, and the pan will blacken, but that's what Tsiknopempti is all about: getting your chops stuck into meat in the literal sense. It isn't the healthiest of options to eat fried meat, but everything in measure. Just this once, it won't hurt us.











You need:
some pieces of rabbit meat (chicken makes an excellent substitute), cut into serving-size portions, enough to fit as one layer in a frying pan
some flour, to coat the meat
salt, pepper, oregano to taste
olive oil
wine

Marinate the rabbit meat in some wine. for an hour. This will tenderise the meat, and give it a more pleasant aroma. Place some flour in a bowl, and mix in some salt, freshly ground pepper and oregano. These are the typical Greek spices used for flavoring meat. You can also mix in some cumin, chili, garlic, and any other spices you prefer, but it won't be a Greek dish you're making then. I'm going to keep it Greek here.

Heat up some oil in a shallow frying pan. The oil should coat the pan completely and rise up to at least half a centimetre. Dredge the meat in the flour on both sides, and shake off the excess flour so that it won't clog the oil when it is frying. Cook well on both sides over high heat, which you will need to lower in order to prevent the meat from burning and then raise once again, so that the meat takes on a dark golden colour. This process is called searing, and it involves cooking meat at a high temperature in order to allow it to retain a juicy centre. Turn the pieces over when they are done on each side to your liking; our personal preference is for a very well cooked crusty finger-lickin' good rabbit. When the rabbit is done to your liking, pour a small glass (half a wine glass was ewough for my frying pan) over the meat to seal its flavours. Turn off the heat, and let the rabbit cook in its own juices. Serve hot with a fresh salad and some bread to mop up the juices from the pan.

This post is dedicated to Andreas and his presents of rabbit, eggs, and greens from his garden.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

MORE FESTIVALS:
Christmas
New Year's cake
Clean Monday
25 March
Red eggs for Greek Easter
Fasting and Great Lent

MORE RABBIT RECIPES:
Hare/Rabbit stew
Rabbit on a crockpot

Lagos Stifado (Λαγός στιφάδο - hare stew)

Hare in Crete has always been considered a delicacy, because it isn't in plentiful supply, poachers are always hunting them illegally, and small-fry village folks basically enjoy bragging about how many they caught or ate (or both) in a year. A big deal is also made about how to cook hare. It is said that only a traditional cook can know how to do this, and who, may I ask, cooks traditionally in this day and age when most hunters are young souvlaki-eating peasants, while their mothers have abandoned the upkeep of hearth and home in search of paid employment to pay off the modern tradition of building and furnishing homes for their children before they get married? The idea of a Mediterranean diet holds true only in certain classes of people in Crete; most have moved far away from the regime of very little meat and a lot of fresh green vegetables and pulses (beans). You need only look around Hania and the villages which make up its environs and you will discover that there are as many souvlaki diners and cake shops as there are bakeries and corner stores (selling chocolates and cigarettes, as well as newspapers and magazines) in each village or neighbourhood. And if you take a look at the people, you'll notice that they are stout (stout being the euphemism for 'fat').

Hare (as opposed to rabbit) is considered a luxury, true decadence. It is served only in private homes; especially in Crete, there are more hunters than there are hares. Hare is served as a calebratory meal. I cooked this one as part of a children's birthday party where adults were invited. We only cook hare in the company of close friends. You can tell whether the cook has substituted rabbit for hare by the colour of the meat; rabbit is white, whereas hare is bloody brown when cooked. Even though my husband is a hunting fanatic, I generally cook kouneli stifado rather than lagos, as there just isn't enough lago to go round; my husband usually catches birds no bigger than partridges most of the time, as there isn't really much in the way of game in Crete, apart from wild goat, which is forbidden due to its being an endangered species, and hare, which is permitted only during certain periods of the year, and never at night with large flashlights. He always gave them to his mother to cook, because, as he says, his wife "doesn't know" how to cook hare. "But I cook rabbit all the time," I'd complain. "Ah," spoke the wise man, "it's not the same."

One year, when his 80-year-old mother admitted that she wasn't up to cooking game any longer, he gave the hare to a neighbour - another old lady - to cook, and we ate the hare at her place. Wonderful, I said to my co-vivant, when your mother passes away, and the neighbour has other things to do (or she passes away too), there'll be no one to cook the hare for you, and since your wife was never given a chance to learn to cook hare, then the tradition will die out in your house, and what do I care, as that'll be one less job for us to deal with.











He took the point. The first time he asked me to cook hare, he told me to consult his mother, which I duly did, although I knew that there would be no recipe involved: it would all just be hints (cook the hare in its own juices), and tips (cut the hare into small pieces because its meat is tough and won't cook easily), and secrets (you should never add any water while cooking hare), and advice (cook the hare in plenty of wine). I went back upstairs, and told the mister that his mother told me just what to do, so will he let me get on with it. I consulted my recipe book by a well-known husband-and-wife team of Cretan cooks (Psilakis), and found out that there were just as many ways to cook hare as there are cooks. I picked one, and cooked the hare accordingly. The recipe is very similar to one that I found on the web for stifado rabbit, except that you will need more cooking time in the second phase, due to the nature of meat that has been reared in the wild: rabbit needs less time than hare to cook, and it tastes lighter.

Because the average hare is usually too small to make decent servings for a meal for many people at a dinner party, baby onions are added to make the dish more substantial. In this way, each person attending the dinner party can take one piece of meat, along with 2-3 onions and some sauce onto their plate without feeling coy about eating this rarity. If you want to omit this step, it is perfectly possible to simply add the salt and all the liquids just before the first time you seal the pot. I always add the onions because I love onions (and garlic); I add more than is necessary in any dish. And because this is a rather heavy meal on the stomach, I would never cook it in summer. If you are manage to catch a hare in the summer months, skin it and freeze it for later. Believe me, it'll be worth it.

For the marinade: you need:
1 hare (or rabbit)
1 litre of wine
2 medium onions
6 cloves of garlic cloves
5 bay leaves
a teaspoon of carnation cloves
a tablespoon of peppercorns
Marinate the hare overnight in enough wine to cover it, along with the chopped onions, sliced cloves of garlic, and the spices. This is important because hare tends to be heavy on the nose and the gut, so it needs to be tenderised as much as possible in order to make it more palatable and digestable.

For the stew, you need:
1/2 cup olive oil
2 medium onions, roughly chopped
5 bayleaves
1 teaspoon of carnation cloves
1 tablespoon of peppercorns
1 small glass of wine
1 tablespoon of tomato paste
20-24 small firm onions
ssalt (cumin may be added, but NOT chili - hare is a Mediterannean delicacy, not an Asian takeaway)

The next day, you can choose to discard the marinade OR set aside the spices and onion to re-use them in the stew. I prefer to use a new set. It sounds wasteful, but this is just a matter of psychology; the wine takes on a floury appearance as the meat sits in it, and it puts me off. Suit yourself.

Place the hare, chopped into small pieces in the same way that you would chop chicken or rabbit, in a large pot with the olive oil and roughly chopped onion. Over medium heat, brown all the pieces of hare. When the meat has lost its raw look, pour a small glass of wine over the hare, along with the bay leaves, peppercorns and carnation cloves. Place a lid on the pot, and turn down the heat to its lowest point. Forget about the hare for the next hour. Don't even think of opening the pot.

After the hour is up, open the lid. The kitchen will now take on the most alluring aroma; think open fields, country cottages, autumn weather and fireplaces. Now add two dozen small onions (peeled with a cross cut carved into the pointed - top - part of each onion) into the pot. Pour in the tomato paste melted into a small glass of wine and add the salt. Give the whole thing a stir, and place the lid on the pot once again. Let the hare cook for another hour on low heat. When the cooking time is over, the hare will have turned dark brown in colour.

Hare is served classically with fried potatoes - I can't think of a better way to ruin the wholesome flavour. Try this meal with rice - the sauce from the stew is a perfect dressing for it. I have used exactly the same recipe to cook rabbit, and it worked well for it, too, although it needed much less cooking time - the stage of overnight soaking in wine is optional.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

MORE RABBIT RECIPES:
Rabbit on a crockpot
Fried rabbit

Lemon rabbit in a crockpot (Κουνέλι λεμονάτο στο φούρνο)

Recently our neighbour Andreas, who keeps rabbits and hens, gave my husband a skinned rabbit. I say skinned because if it still had its fur, I wouldn't have wanted it. I can handle cooking meat in my small conventional modern kitchen, but dead animals require a different setup. Some people may not like to see a rabbit - or a chicken or a lamb or any other conventional edible animal - in its whole skinned form, but I don't have any qualms about it. Either you know what you're eating, or you don't want to know it - take it or leave it. I quite like rabbit meat - it tastes a little like chicken meat, only with a more game-like taste. We also used to eat rabbit on a fairly regular basis in New Zealand, because they were considered a pest, and farmers were more than happy for gun-happy hunters to come onto their properties and kill off as many as possible. They were never sold in the butcher's in those years. Pests are like rodents; we don't eat mice, rats and opposums, so who would expect us to eat rabbits? On my last visit to the land of the long white cloud, I was tol dmy aunt that rabbit meat is now available in some luxury food suppliers like Moore Wilson, who used to deal in wholesale imported food products, before opening up to the personal shopper trade. My mother would always turn the rabbits my hunting fanatci cousin brought her into a stew, cooked in a similar way as for hare. I asked Papa Bear when he would like me to cook up a stifado - rabbit stew with baby onions. He was not very enthusiastic; 'maybe next week', he said, again and again. So the rabbit went into the freezer, and this has been been going on for about two months now.

Andreas popped in to see us the other day. He brought us three firm red ripe tomatos from his garden and one sole egg. He explained to us that since there are only two people in his household - he lives with his wife and his children are grown up and have moved away - food doesn't get eaten up very quickly in his house. But farming is his hobby, he can't do away with the chickens and the rabbits and the vegetable garden and the fruit trees. Since he retired, he has also taken up cooking as a hobby, among his other interests like fishing. Take it from me, he's really quite an amazing cook. The first thing I ever tried that he had made was eggplant pickle. He had made a large slit in the eggplant, and boiled it till it was tender. Then he stuffed it with grated carrot, parsley, onion and garlic. He tied up each and every aubergine he had stuffed in this way with some sewing thread, then he put the lot in a pickling liquid consisting of vinegar, oil and salt. It was a brilliant accompaniment to a bean dish. Another day he bought us a shrimp rosotto; he had fished the shrimps himself, and the rice he chose to cook with was the jasmine-scented type from the supermarket. OK, Andreas is not your average Cretan, but aren't we lucky to have someone interesting in Hokeypokeyville? Sometimes, living on an island town in the Mediterranean can drive you bonkers...

Anyway, Andreas, came round last night with - you guessed it - another rabbit. So I guess we're gonna have that rabbit stew after all. But not quite. He said he'd come and cook it up for us the way he likes it. His wife often suffers from depression, and now with the cold weather, I can understand why he needs to get out of the house more often. He obviously wants the company, and we didn't mind either. My daily whadamigonnacooktoday problem has just been solved. But I didn't know how I would react having an older man cooking in my kitchen. I decided I would just snap a few photos.

Andreas brought with him a ceramic oven pot with a lid - we call it a 'gastra'. I don't own one myself, but after today, I'm definitely going to be buying one in the sales. We set the oven to warm up. All Andreas did was cut the rabbit into pieces, place it in the crockpot, pour the juice of two lemons over it, and season it with salt, pepper and oregano. As there was some space left in the pot, he asked us to peel a few potatoes and add them to the pot, which he dotted with butter. No added lipids, and absolutely no water. This went into the oven, which was now set at 180C. and didn't come out for two hours. The times and temperature of course must be taken only as a gauge; rabbit meat comes in different degrees of tenderness, while different ovens cook in different ways.

When the cooking time was over, we opened the oven, which didn't seem to be cooking much, because the crockpot was sealed well enough to keep its content well concealed. We took the crockpot carefully out of the oven; these things get very hot, and they're also extremely fragile - nothing like a metal tin you can bang around wherever! The lid came off, and our noses filled with the aroma of the stewed meat. The rabbit was browned, while the potatoes were tender and puffy. There was plenty of liquid in the pot - more than we needed really. We left the lid off and returned the crockpot into the oven, to allow the potatoes to develop a crunchy skin. Not that they weren't cooked, but it's a matter of taste. What I especially liked about this dish was that it contained no oil, and no added lipids (apart from the potatoes that were just dotted with butter). We had rabbit and roast potatoes with a cabbage salad and some feta cheese. Bread was unnecessary - there were no oily tomato sauces to mop up!

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

MORE RABBIT RECIPES:
Fried rabbit
Hare/rabbit stew