Bunny in his hole? No, fire in the hole.

Last night I had an absolute kitchen disaster. It had to happen eventually.


Pappardelle with Wild Rabbit, Olives and Marjoram


I was super organised and remembered to go to the butcher on Saturday and then decided to continue my organisation and marinate the rabbit on Saturday afternoon so that it would be soaking up the flavours for 24 hours before cooking. All going well so far. So on Sunday night I set about my slow cooking.


Please keep in mind here that the temperature outside, even by 8pm when I started cooking (madness I realise!), was still in the high 30’s, so having the oven on for a few hours was not exactly the greatest decision of my life, but I couldn’t leave the bunny marinating forever. So into my favourite French casserole pot Thumper went, browned a little in butter, accompanied by some garlic cloves, fresh thyme and rosemary and ¾ of a bottle of wine. Into the oven for supposedly 2 hours or until the meat falls easily of the bones.


While the temperature in my apartment continued to rise, I sat like a beached whale on my couch, huffing and puffing in the heat and waiting for the hours to tick by. The smells from the kitchen were good, so I thought I hadn’t a worry in the world. After a while (1.5 hours) I thought I’d check out how things were looking in the oven and didn’t I just get the surprise of my life.


Now readers, because I love you and appreciate that you follow my progress day in and day out, I will below post the picture of the disaster that greeted me in my oven. Please laugh quickly and get it out of your system, then move on. Nothing to see here.




Yep, devastated. If I wasn’t sweating buckets, I would’ve cried.


So instead of having rabbit that fell easily off the bone, I hacked at the bones and tried to salvage some of the meat that wasn’t charcoal black. It was slim pickings. I tossed what I could into a fry pan with some water, a dash of white wine, some orange juice and rind, a bit of pasta water (oh yeah, like I was going to make pappardelle from scratch in the heat – sorry team, but I bought it from Woollies this time!), grated parmesan and the green olives. Let it be known that the only actual ingredients that Jamie listed for this part were the olives, orange zest and the cheese, but I had to get liquid from somewhere seeing as there wasn’t any in the baron landscape that was my blackened French casserole pot…


At the end of it all, I popped it into plastic containers and into the fridge for my lunch. Yep, I couldn’t even bring myself to taste it last night, so it was a risk when I reheated it for lunch at work today, but apart from being unsurprisingly dry and crispy, it was actually rather tasty.


The response from friends was not a positive one when I said I was cooking rabbit, but I have rules to follow and a goal to reach. I will say though, that I felt damn sorry for the little bunny that met a fiery end in my oven last night.


Xx