Rabbit Burgers

My hunter has been carrying out a bit of pest control for a local organic farmer friend of ours lately, and each time he goes out he brings home a few of the good 'eaters'. Rabbit has to be one of the most versatile meats, anything you could do with chicken you can do even better with rabbit. It's juicer and tastier. This is one of my favourite rabbit recipes, SUPER fast, no mess, huge success.

One man's pest is another man's dinner...

Ingredients

2 whole rabbits (meat removed from the bone - about 500gm meat)

1 Egg

1/2 onion (white or red)

1 clove of garlic

The leaves from a sprig of rosemary about 10cm long

Salt & Pepper

Thai Style (omit rosemary)

Handful of fresh coriander

1 teaspoon of minced ginger

1 teaspoon of lemon-grass

A good 'glug' of sweet chilli

Juice of one lime

Truly the easiest burger patty recipe!

Put all the ingredients into the blender and pulse till combined.

Bingo  - rabbit mince!

The mince can be used for burger patties, or meatballs served as a nibble with a dipping sauce, try putting meatballs on kebab sticks and barbecuing for something different. Or even bake it as a meatloaf.

When my hunter brings home a bag of bunnies, I make a couple of batches of rabbit mince and put it in the freezer. It's a great thing to get out for BBQs. Guests are always surprised how much it tastes like chicken, but is so much more juicy! 

A wee tip, we always soak our rabbits overnight in salt water, it gets the gaminess out a bit.

Duck Shooter's Bacon & Egg Pie

Every May, kiwi hunter's wives are assigned the task of creating the ultimate Bacon & Egg pie, for a 'Duck Shooter's Pie-off'. There is much prestige bestowed upon the hunter who's wife makes the best pie. It should be crisp on top, not have a soggy bottom (heaven forbid!), be juicy but not messy to devour, and nourishing, as it may be the only thing he gets to eat till they get to the pub for dinner later that evening. Also, it must have a happy balance of two vital ingredients - bacon and eggs!

Here's my fool proof recipe (totally adaptable & dependent on the size of your dish…)

Ingredients:

500 gms streaky bacon, cut into 3cm pieces (preferably free farmed)

6-8 eggs (depending on size, but always free range!)

2-3 sheets of pre-rolled savoury pastry, (not puff, tends to go soggy. Make your own if you're really going for brownie points)

1 cup frozen Peas

Onion (or shallots or spring onion)

Grated Cheese

Mushrooms

Salt & Pepper

Method

Preheat the oven to 180 deg Celsius.

Line a greased baking dish with pastry.

Sprinkle grated cheese on the bottom of the pie (this helps to prevent the soggy bottom!)

Meanwhile, fry the bacon, onion & mushrooms till the onions are softened. Turn the heat off and stir through the peas, not trying to cook them, just combining.

Half fill the pastry lined dish with the bacon/onion/mushroom/pea mix.

Crack in 3-4 eggs. My hunter prefers the yolks left unbroken, but break them if you'd rather.

Pour in the rest of the filling mix, and crack in the remaining eggs, salt and pepper the top (easy on the salt, the bacon should take care of that for you).

Top with more grated cheese, and/or a pastry lid. For extra brownie points do a lattice, but avoid getting too fancy, love hearts and messages will only embarrass him in front of his fellow hunters.
Place on a rack in the middle of the oven, and cook till golden brown!

Bacon & Egg pie is made to be shared among men and as much as I'd love to tell you how many it will serve, it's entirely dependant on the size of your dish and the hunger of your man/men!

Rugged Duck Casserole

This opening weekend was a boomer! We were left with so many ducks we ended up just 'breasting' the majority of them. And after vacuum packing what seemed like the entire bird population of Central Otago, somehow I still wanted more. So I decided to cook a duck casserole for dinner! I was in a bit of a hurry so this was prepped in under 20 minutes, and left in the slow cooker for 4 hours, but you could easily give it a bit more love and do it in a casserole in the oven. This recipe is about as adaptable as they come, see final notes for options!

Ingredients:
6x Duck Breasts, leave them whole (skin on or off)
4x Bacon slices (roughly chopped)
2x Carrots (roughly chopped)
2x Parsnip (roughly chopped)
6x Shallots (1/2'd or 1/4'd (or 2 med onions chopped)
1x Celery (roughly chopped)
2x Handful of chunky chopped mushrooms (flat or button)
2x cloves of garlic, crushed or roughly chopped
Rind of 1 orange (or spoon of marmalade!)
1-2 cups of Red Wine (plus 1-2 for you!)
Juice of 1 orange or 1 cup of Orange Juice
Couple of sprigs of rosemary (or a teaspoon of dried)
1x Bay leaf
Flour
Salt and Pepper

I always start by giving my duck breasts a thorough looking over, checking for any shot that you can easily pick out (saves your teeth later!) and any damaged bits that you'd want to cut off.

Then, chop all your veges (carrot, parsnip, shallots, celery, mushys, garlic) and the bacon,  throw them in a frying pan and sautee for a few minutes. Remove to the slow cooker or your casserole dish.

Our duck breasts were 'naked' (skin off) so I coated ours in flour, S&P, but if you've got skin on I wouldn't bother. Quickly brown the breasts in the same frying pan, just a minute each side, then add to the veges in the pot.

De-glaze the pan with a cup of red wine, the oj and the orange rind. Pour over the veges and duck. Place your rosemary and bay leaf on top, lid on, set to low, and see you in 4 hours!

You shouldn't need to add any salt, the bacon should take care of that, but have a taste of the sauce after a few hours, you might like to add some pepper.
You can add a handful of frozen or fresh beans, or some spinach in the last few minutes for a complete meal!

I served ours with mashed potato & kumara (sweet potato for you lot on the other side of the world), and some chunky crispy bread.

Adaptations:
No oranges? Use marmalade
Works with whole duck too! Or quartered.
Add whichever veges you like, try to stick to ones that can stand long, slow cooking - potato, kumara, pumpkin, yams etc
No celery? Spring onion is good too.
Don't want to use red wine? Use a bit of balsamic vinegar (about 1/4 cup max), some vege stock to make up the liquid and maybe a spoon of berry jam/jelly or quince paste if you want to be super fancy!

The Day The Hunter Did Himself A Mischief!

Ruby

I remember it well because it was the weekend of my birthday, early August, a beautiful bluebird day, and I was spending the Saturday with a good friend of mine skiing at a local resort. We’d had the most incredible run of good weather, almost spring like. The snow was crisp on top and heavy underfoot.

From casually walking along the ridge, to slide city!

The hunter decided to take our wee Ruby (English Springer, 2 years old at the time) for a hunt up in the valley for goat or deer, whichever crossed his path first. Up the right hand side of the valley, which gets little sun, they walked and walked and walked, for what seemed like miles probably, with no sign of anything. Nice day for a walk luckily. As he was making his way quietly across the ridge line glassing over the other side for any animals having a lazy winter lunch in the sun, boots on snow, he felt his foot start to slip out, the crusty snow top had become ice... He quickly had his legs whipped out from underneath him, and had no chance of regaining his footing. He tried repeatedly to use his rifle as an ice pick, but the ice was too hard, and the slide too fast. Poor Ruby (ever loyal) had obediently followed along, despite the Hunter telling her to stay, she proceeded to slide down the hill at a million miles an hour just meters above him! It must have been quite a sight! They slid for a hundred meters or so, luckily (??) he saw a rose hip bush in his path and was able to bring his slide to an abrupt halt by throwing himself into it, ouch. Meanwhile, Ruby went flying over the top of him and slid a further 50 meters or so, her claws like little ice skates, providing her no grip whatsoever! She too, eventually came to a stop with the help of a thorny bush, although more by luck than choice! It took some serious coaxing to get her to come out of the bush, she was so shaken by her big slide!

Hunter and dog reunited after quite a scare, the hunter checked Ruby over for any injuries, and she got the all clear. He wasn’t quite so lucky… on inspection of his upper thigh he discovered he’d left a few layers of skin on the ice! His trusty stubbies had failed him. And although the bush had saved him from sliding further, it wasn't an entirely friendly shrub, the scratches across both legs were evidence of that. Queue graphic photo... I guess at the time it was numbed with the cold, the real extent of the injury wouldn’t make itself clear until later in the day… the post-hunt shower…

I called the hunter on my way home from my day in the snow to see if he wanted to catch up for a beer to compare stories of our days adventures, blissfully unaware of what he’d been up to, and was greeted with the words a hunter’s wife dreads; “Ruby and I did ourselves a wee mischief today out hunting…” 

Of course I fear the worst! Do we still have a wee Ruby? Vet Bills? Broken bones? Rolled the truck? What kind of mischief!? He filled me in on the basics, and I was somewhat relieved that it seemed no permanent damage was done to either dog or hunter.

When I got home, poor Ruby was still shaking on her beanbag (3 hours later!), eyes wide like her life had flashed before her! The hunter was only slightly better, whiskey and adrenaline are an amazing cocktail for pain relief and story telling it would seem. The wound was raw, but clean, right down to the meat. He was icing it, as much as he could handle, but it was incredibly painful.

In the days following, we tried a number of different dressings for the wound, unfortunately it was a bit of a trial and error. One error we made was to put a fabric dressing on it… which had to be removed in the shower because of course it stuck to the raw meat. I’ve never seen a man drop to his knees in such pain, I thought he was going to pass out… I was gently trying to remove it, slowly, slowly. But he insisted I rip it off like a band-aid… I ripped and ran! After that (and a fair bit of googling and consulting the pharmacist), we discovered the magic of ‘moist wound healing’. Although pretty gross, it definitely worked! Basically, when you have an raw open wound like that (like a burn), you cover it in a plastic shield (like a second skin bandage), allow the shield to fill with the wound’s healing fluids (yes pus and blood…) and VERY carefully change the shield daily, giving the wound a bit of time in between to get some air. It’s smelly and revolting (you can thank me later for not providing any photos of the dressing changes), but works and is much less painful than the alternative. It's also is less likely to leave a scar. It took about a week of the expensive second skins, but once over the worst of it, it healed extremely quickly.

You’re probably asking yourself, “why didn’t he just go to the doctor!?”, and yes I suggested that to him.  But we really didn’t think there was anything a doctor could do that we couldn’t. It didn't need stitches, we had antiseptic powder and the appropriate bandaging. We kept it clean, changed the dressing regularly, watched for any signs of infection, and a week later, happy days, it was well and truly looking a whole lot better. Lucky escape for both man and dog. And no, he didn’t shoot anything that day, but what an experience! And that my friends, is what we call, doing yourself a mischief!