Rabbit Beer Stew | You've Got Meal!

Happy New Year, Internet! Enjoy 2014 and try to clean yourself up after that New Year’s party. The winter holidays tend to be a period of culinary excess for a lot of people, so we thought we try and take things light for our 1^st post this year and rabbit does the trick.

The beer stew is still a hearty, full of flavor dish that can comfort you in the cold January, but the meat is light enough not to remind you that you ate all that meat at that Christmas table. Yeah, Internet, we know, we know….

Leaving shameful secrets aside, let’s crack down the ingredients: 

• 1 rabbit carcass cut into 7 parts (the lower legs, the front legs, and the body cut into 3 parts), 
• 1 large onion, 
• 2 carrots, 
• 3-4 cloves of garlic,
• 2 tsp chili jam, 
• bay leaves, 
• thyme, rosemary, 
• 2 cups beer (we used some light Belgian), 
• 2 cups chicken stock, 
• salt, pepper, olive oil, 
• white flour.

1. Start of by covering the meat with flour. Dust off any excess and fry the meat in a good splash of olive oil, o high heat, until the meat gets a golden color on all sides (it takes about 2 minutes on each side, depending on the size of your Bugs Bunny- yeah, you’re eating Bugs, get over it). 
2. Remove the meat from the pan and place it in a warm plate, cover it with some tin foil. 
3. Next, sauté the diced onion, diced carrots, chili jam and finely sliced garlic for 3-4 minutes on medium heat, scraping the bottom of the pan to let loose those delicious tiny brown bites. 
4. Add the herbs, either finely cut or whole so you can remove them later (we used 2 bay leaves, 2 fresh thyme twigs and 1 small rosemary twig). 
5. Next, add the beer and bring to a simmer on medium heat. 
6. Add the stock and bring to another boil. Pop in the meat, reduce the heat to a medium low and cover the pan. 
7. Cook for around 50 -60 minutes or until the meat is tender enough. 
8. Remove the rabbit from the stew and increase the heat to high in order to reduce the liquid to half. Meanwhile what we did was to remove the meat from the body parts and flaked it. The reason we did this was because those parts had some tiny bones that could get pretty nasty and because it adds richness to the stew. Add the flaked meat and the 4 legs in the reduced stew.

As a side dish we served some oven roasted carrots with cumin and orange juice. You can find the recipe in a previous post, you can check it out here. 

I mean, eating rabbit meat with carrot side dish sounds a bit ironic (insert light giggle here), but the stew needs some starch so feel free to use some wild rice or oven roasted spuds or some crusty dark bread. Serve with your choice of beer and enjoy this light, yet very comforting, dinner to celebrate 2014. 

Enjoy,