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. :-)

Animal House

Last week in the middle of snow central we came home to find Riley in our bare living room with his tail between his legs. I took a closer look and noticed a puncture wound on top of his head. What the hell? I thought, as I inspected it. There was a little blood, but it was pretty recent. I ran around the house looking for whatever he might have bumped into. It looked like the corner of a picture frame or something sharp might have fallen on his head.

But nothing in the house was out of the ordinary. 

Then I noticed he also had a similar mark at the end of his nose. But instead of being a hole. This looked like a cat scratch. Oooohhhhh! Really? Huh. Well, okay then.

I treated the cuts and then applied antiseptic to them. But -- within 24 hours the areas began to swell. Then on Sunday, a bunch of black on my dog's nose literally fell off. It was pretty disgusting. So, on Monday, I took him to see our vet, Dr. Mary Welle. He's on antibiotics now, and we're putting Vaseline on his nose to try and keep the area most, which is hard, because my dog is a licker. 

Anyone who knows us, or read the paper last Saturday, knows that we have five geriatric animals. They're all rescues. Our three black and white cats: Clawdio, Nyssa and Luke were all adopted over a decade ago from Fancy Cats Rescue Team in Fairfax, Va., when MacTroll and I served on their board of directors and volunteered between 5-30 hours a week doing adoptions, the newsletter, the volunteer schedule, etc. Later, after we moved to Champaign in 2003, we adopted Maya from the Champaign County Humane Society.

In 2001, we adopted Riley, our dog, from the Washington Humane Society in Washington, D.C. His prior owners had been arrested and incarcerated on drug charges. Riley was six months old at the time. And his name was Sergeant when we got him. As a puppy, Riley was very curious about our cats. And all of our cats pretty much ignored him, stayed up on the counters and out of his way. Until one day, Riley got too close to Clawdio, and Clawdio didn't like it. He flicked his tail at the dog, meaning, "Get away Blockhead!"

In puppy lingo, flicking your tail is a wag. It means you want to play. He moved forward trying to play with Clawdio. Clawdio puffed out his fur, hissed and opened his paw (but didn't use his claws) and smacked Riley on the nose. Riley got scared and ran. (Keep in mind, the two had been living together for over 4 weeks at this point.) Clawdio, much to everyone's surprise, PURSUED Riley. He chased him around in a circle from the living room to the dining room to the family room of our little condo twice, hissing and smacking Riley on his hind quarters the whole time, before I was able to intervene.

That is the one -- and ONLY -- cat/dog confrontation we have ever had in my house in the last 10 years--before last week.

Riley isn't talking about which cat kicked his ass. As far as I know, since the dog's pretty much always been at the low end of the dominance totem pole in the house, his interactions with the cats haven't changed. He's not going out of his way to avoid anyone in particular. I know it wasn't Nyssa because she's the only cat we have that's declawed. And, of course, the black and white mafia aren't selling each other out.

But this is what my dog looks like today. 

I guess it's a good thing we got that living room furniture yesterday. Here's Riley enjoying the oversized chair. :-) I'm pretty sure he wants to claim it as his own.