How Not to Cook Your Hare

The 1954 debut of 'Taz' (the Tazmanian Devil) in "The Devil May Hare," we find a new Looney Tune character who eats anything and everything, including, he hopes anyway, this boney rabbit.  At this point in the cartoon Bugs tries to cooly persuade the crazed and hungry Taz that he wouldn't find much to eat on his bunny body by lifting up the fur on his leg revealing no meat.  I got a little taste of this trying to cook farm raised rabbit on saturday.  We received a gift certificate from a specialty meat store in Hudson and chose pheasant pot pies, wild boar, and some rabbit.  When ordering, I asked out loud if anybody might like to sample the rattle snake selection, but no takers. No Yak either, kangaroo, or llama.  I wanted to find the simplest possible recipe, so decided on a slow cooker option, which asked for the rabbit, onions, one smashed garlic clove, bay leaves, a variety (pick your own) of herbs, beef broth, tomato paste, carrots and potatoes, all to be simmered for 6-8 hours in the slow cooker.  From what I've read, wild rabbit is tough and needs long cooking to soften, but this was a farm raised rabbit and by the time those hours were over Bugs was soft, tender, and had obviously absorbed the liquids very well

There was one problem: the meat was so fall-off-the-bone tender that the bones themselves from the carcass had begun to break down also and became part of the meat, so that when you bit down on what looked like a long slab of dark meat, you might just as likely find a chip of bone crunching in your teeth.  They say that rabbit is the most nutritious meat available to eat – low calorie, low fat – but that it's a tricky little animal to get the proper cooking time and texture figured out.  The next time I try rabbit I might shorten the cooking time and simply braise in a pan with a carrot.  Taz probably thought the same thing.