Well, Tonight was a First

For Christmas my sister gave MacTroll a book called Good Meat: The Complete Guide to Sourcing and Cooking Sustainable Meat. She also gave us 3 lbs. of frozen rabbit, which is really just one rabbit.

It's been sitting in my freezer while I worked on what to make with it. So tonight, I made Rabbit a la Moutard. I took my bunny out of the freezer and defrosted it, and then I started to cut it into the required number of pieces.

Here's the thing about rabbit (and yes, you can thank me for not taking photos), its muscles are mainly leg and back. There's no meaty breast like a chicken. Now, I've cut apart bone-in birds before. Mostly turkeys and chickens. I've seen the giant pieces of cow and pigs. But I've never really been to a pig roast before. All of my meat is delivered to me by the butchers, store keepers or giant conglomerate producers in a post butchered state. I even request my trout to come headless and tail-less as much as possible.

But I had a problem cutting apart the bunny. When I told MacTroll why, he nodded and then he suddenly left the room for a phone call for work. Leaving me with my problem.

This was my problem -- the little bunny body looked an awful lot like a cat body. We used to call Looseyfur the cat, Bunny soft. We say the same thing to our cat Clawdio. Pulling the legs that were tucked into the chest cavity out almost made me vomit. Seeing the little heart and the liver didn't do me any favors either.

I shut my eyes and told myself to stop making the bunny into my pets. Then I cut it apart and spent two hours on that recipe.

MacTroll ate it and said he had a hard time telling it wasn't chicken. I couldn't eat it for many reasons, so I had my prepared meal from the cupboard. But if I couldn't eat it, I didn't feel right giving it to X-man. So, he got a turkey hot dog, which I have no problem with because it doesn't look like a fuzzy bunny cat thing, Dr. Praeger's sweet potato shapes and some applesauce. He gave the thumbs down to Dr. Praeger's.

After dinner, I thought about my reaction to meat looking like the actual animal it came from and like an animal it merely resembled. I have cooked lots of meat -- a lot, but I've never gotten the urge to vomit before when cooking. So I have to ask myself, why it registers with the bunny, but I could give a shit about birds, cows and pigs? If I had a connection to any of those animals, would I immediately jump into a vegetarian lifestyle?

Is this when a person starts to realize she might perpetually have been living in a state of denial? Or does she just write off that particular kind of meat?

That said, there was a much cuter bunny-related news. X-man's class had their egg hunt today. :-)