Lapin en gibelotte pour Pâques

For tomorrow's Easter dinner, I'll be cooking rabbit. It's a standard item here in the supermarkets and on the open-air markets. This year, I just bought a couple of rabbit thighs. The hind legs of the rabbit are very meaty and very lean. I'll cook it in a way that's called en gibelotte, which means in a stew made with a white wine sauce,mushrooms, onions, and smoked pork bacon (lardons fumés). I'll be adding some turnips, leeks, carrots and chicken gizzards (gésiers) to the stew, because I like them. I'll take pictures.

If you want to see various versions of rabbit stew on my blog, click this link and then scroll down to see some old blog posts.

We'll also be enjoying some fromage de chèvre as the cheese course with our rabbit lunch. I bought an A.O.C. Sainte-Maure de Touraine log of goat cheese. As you can see I did my shopping at Super U. More tomorrow...

Lapin aux carottes et aux champignons

For our Easter Sunday dinner, I decided to make a stewed rabbit with carrots and button mushrooms. As far as I can tell, it's about the same thing as an old recipe for lapin en gibelotte, which I've made in past years. The other ingredients are onion, celery, herbs, and white wine. I didn't put in any lardons (bacon) this time, but I might add some today before we have the lapin aux carottes again.

Why are we having it again today? It's because Walt didn't eat any yesterday. Or anything. He was not feeling well at all.
I won't go into details; if he wants to tell about it, he will do so on his blog.

These photos are fairly self-explanatory. It's how you make a standard stew with meat and vegetables. In France
you can buy a whole rabbit or you can buy rabbit parts. This recipe would be good made with chicken or turkey.

I thickened the stewing liquid with a flour roux, and I put in my favorite spices, including black pepper and allspice.
The recipe I found on the internet had ingredients and instructions, but no quantities except for the amount of flour
for the roux and the number of onions. My translation (or adaptation, really) of it is below.

Rabbit with carrots and mushrooms

a rabbit cut into serving pieces
carrots
fresh button mushrooms
celery (optional)
smoked pork lardons (optional)
chopped onion to taste
thyme, oregano, or both
bay leaves
flour

salt
pepper
allspice (optional)
white wine
chicken or rabbit broth (or water)
potatoes (optional)

In a non-stick pan, sauté the rabbit pieces in olive oil until they start to take on a golden brown color.

Take the rabbit pieces out of the pan and set them aside. (I browned them in two batches — I was cooking a big rabbit, 1.7 kilos =3¾ lbs.) — in a non-stick frying pan and put them in a big wok in which I was going to cook the stew.)

Cook the (optional) lardons in the same pan. Put them in the wok with the rabbit pieces, along with the carrots, onions, celery, and mushrooms. Set the wok on a moderately hot burner and stir everything around to lightly brown the vegetables. Cover the wok as necessary and turn the heat down so that the vegetables and meat will start to cook through without burning.

Take the cover off the wok or pot. When the liquid in the wok has basically evaporated, sprinkle a tablespoon or two of flour over the stew ingredients. Stir. Season with salt, pepper, and (optional) allspice. Gradually pour in a mixture of white wine and broth, stirring everything to let the flour thicken the liquid. You should end up with just enough liquid to barely cover the meat and vegetables. (I had made rabbit broth using the trimmings and the head (!) of the rabbit after I cut it up. I had also marinated the rabbit pieces overnight in white wine and herbs, which also went into the stew.)
 
Stir everything around gently. If the gravy is too thin, cook the stew uncovered to let it reduce. Adjust the amount of liquid to get the consistency you want. At this point, I put in four smallish potatoes, whole, to cook in the gravy. Let the stew simmer for 30 to 60 minutes, until the meat and vegetables are done to your taste. I like the rabbit well cooked, almost falling off the bone.

This kind of stew is almost better re-heated the next day, people always say. I'll let you know tomorrow if it was.

The Tuesday market in Valençay

The weekly open-air market in Valençay is set up on Tuesday mornings.

There are a lot of vendors there selling local goat cheeses, of course.

And there are also many others selling fresh local produce and meats.

Valençay has a small but spacious market hall on the main town square so that even in bad weather
the market is a pleasant place to shop. I wish Saint-Aignan had a market hall like this.

Bavette is a lean cut of beefsteak that is cooked rare to medium-rare so that it's tender.
Many sources say it would be called flank steak in U.S. terms but I think it's more like skirt or hanger steak.
However, skirt and hanger are used to describe different cuts of beef in the U.S. compared to the U.K.,
so it's hard to figure out what's what.

Tomates ! They remind me that yesterday was like a fine summer day here in the Loire Valley region.

Walt has planted tomato seeds in little pots and we'll set the seedlings out in the garden plot in May.

Celery root, a.k.a. céleri-rave in French and celeriac in English, is good peeled and grated, raw, as a cole-slaw type salad,
or cut into chunks and cooked like carrots or turnips. You can also roast the whole celery root in the oven.

These are whole rabbits that have been skinned and prepared for cooking. The brown stuff is the liver,
which is like chicken liver and is delicious. I've seen such rabbits cooked whole in a pan in the oven,
but most often you see them cut up into serving pieces and cooked in a braise or a stew.
We'll be cooking rabbit (lapin en gibelotte — three old posts) this coming weekend...

Du lapin au petit déj...

...mais pas pour moi. Bertie the black cat had rabbit for breakfast this morning. He seems to find rabbit particularly delicious. Tasha the sheltie pup tried to nose in and get some of Bertie's food, but I chased her away. I really like rabbit too — but mine doesn't come out of a foil cat food packet. It's sold fresh in French supermarkets or open-air markets and is considered to be a member of the poultry family. Out here in the country, some people raise them for food in outdoor cages.

Walt and I have cooked rabbit (du lapin in French) for lunch or dinner at Easter every year since 1984. We were living in a flat on Capitol Hill in Washington DC back then. Easter rolled around, and we talked about what we would have as a special meal. Thoughts of the Easter Bunny made rabbit jump (get it?) into my mind. We hadn't been back to France in about two years at that point, and I missed having rabbit as a regular choice on restaurant menus, the way you do in Paris and all of France.

I don't know where I found a rabbit in DC, but I did. Maybe it was at Eastern Market, a market hall located close to where we lived. I'm talking about farm-raised, domestic rabbit, not the wild beast. I probably cooked it « en gibelotte », which is a stew made with a cut-up rabbit, some onions, garlic, herbs, mushrooms, bacon lardons, and white wine. As I've said, that was the first of some 35 Easter rabbits we've enjoyed feasting on over the years, prepared in many different ways. One classic is rabbit in a Dijon mustard sauce.

This year, instead of a whole rabbit, I decided to buy just the choicest cut in all rabbitdom, the "saddle" or râble. I ordered six pieces, not knowing how much each would weigh, and figuring we could put extras in the freezer for later. The râble is the piece that runs from the shoulder to the back legs (which are the second-best pieces to eat), and includes the two plump strips of white meat that run along each side of the animal's spine. It also includes two thin "wings" of meat that are the abdominal muscles, as you can see in the photos above. You might decide to cut those off and dice them up to add to the stew.

The râble also comes with the rabbit's liver and kidneys, and all those morsels are very good to eat too. They can be cooked in a stew or braise with the rest of the rabbit pieces, or they can be made into a separate dish. And using those flaps of abdominal muscle folded and pinned around it, one option is to fill the râble with stuffing and roast it. The liver and kidneys can go into the stuffing, along with sausage meat, onions, herbs, and bread crumbs. But that's not what I did...

Cooking rabbit in springtime

If you don't live in France, you probably don't cook or eat rabbit very often — if at all. It's a standard item in France, the way duck is. Over here, people don't just eat chicken and turkey, but also guinea fowl and pheasant and quail. And rabbit.

We cooked our lapin de Pâques yesterday. Walt and I have been cooking rabbit at Easter for more than 30 years now. It all started two or three years after we met back in 1981 in Paris. In 1982 we went back to live in the U.S., in Washington DC.

Here you can see the two "saddle" or filet sections on the left, and the liver and thigh sections toward the top.

Then in 1984 or 1985, Easter rolled around and there were pictures and stories about Easter bunnies all around us. That reminded us that we had really enjoyed having rabbit for dinner in restaurants when we lived in Paris. I went on a search and actually found rabbit in a market (maybe Eastern Market?) or supermarket in the DC area. I don't remember where exactly.

So we started our own "tradition" of cooking rabbit every year for our Easter dinner. Yesterday was no exception. On Saturday I went to the open-air market in Saint-Aignan and bought a nice locally raised rabbit, all prepared for cooking. All I had to do was cut it up. Basically, you get two big fat back leg-thigh sections, two pieces of "breast" (the saddle or filets), and two smaller front legs when you finish carving. Rabbit meat is very lean and not gamey. We are talking about rabbits that are raised for food, not wild animals. I did a couple of detailed posts about lapin en gibelotte a few years ago.

Cooked with the rabbit are onions, shallots, garlic, mushrooms, smoked bacon, and white wine, with bay leaves, salt, and pepper.

One of the simplest and most delicious ways to cook rabbit is to make what is called a gibelotte (a kind of fricassée). You brown some onions, garlic, and mushrooms in a pan along with some lardons fumés (chunks of smoked bacon or ham). Take all that out of the pan, set it aside, and brown the rabbit pieces in the same pan.

Then put the onions and all back in the pan and add in some wine and some chicken or rabbit broth — just enough to not quite cover the rabbit pieces. You want them braised and browned, not boiled. Put the pan on to simmer either on top of the stove or in the oven for an hour or so. Serve with rice, millet, quinoa, or boiled potatoes and either a salad or a vegetable like haricots verts, broccoli, kale, or collard greens.

Kitchen news, retro-style

Yesterday I ordered a piece of kitchen equipment of a kind that I have never before owned and never before used. Decades ago these devices became popular in America. Back then, I viewed them as a ridiculous fad of little utility or interest. Times and tastes do change. In fact, whole countries and cultures change noticeably over just a few decades. I've seen it happen.

A new kitchen appliance

The thing I'm talking about is called a cuiseur or mijoteuse électrique in French. When I tell you that my favorite kind of French cooking is preparing what are called plats mijotés, you'll wonder why it took me four decades to decide to acquire a mijoteuse. Some of the most famous plats mijotés are coq au vin, blanquette de veau, and bœuf bourguignon — not to mention la poule au pot and le pot-au-feu.

So if you know what the verb mijoter means, you've figured out what appliance I'm talking about. The next time I decide to make a daube de bœuf, lapin en gibelotte, or choucroute garnie, it will be just the the kitchen appliance to have at the ready.

Here's an American slow-cooker that resembles the one I've ordered.

Mijoter means « faire cuire ou bouillir lentement, à petit feu » and, more figuratively, « préparer un plat avec soin, avec amour ». It means "to simmer", in other words. The device is a "simmerer" or, as it's known nowadays, a slow-cooker. A crock pot. I'm jumping feet-first into the '70s!

The one I've ordered from amazon.fr has a removable oval-shaped stoneware cooking dish that you can put on the table to serve the meal from. And then you can run it through the dishwasher. It holds 6.5 liters if filled to the brim, for about 5 liters of usable volume.

 The removable stoneware cooking vessel

With that shape and size, it can accommodate a small poulet, canard, or pintade, not to mention a small rôti de bœuf, de veau, or de porc that you want to braise slowly for several hours. I can see some good NC-style pulled pork or a batch of chili con carne coming out of it... not to mention all my favorite French plats mijotés listed above.

Not the first time

So at least three of you have said you've been caught up in the same kind of bomb scare that I was caught up in Sunday morning at Roissy/CDG airport. It must happen a lot.

It happened to me once before. Years ago. Walt and I were checking in for a flight over in Terminal 2. The woman examining our passports and registering our luggage was just finishing up when an announcement was made over the intercom. I couldn't quite hear what it was all about.

But the Air France clerk suddenly tossed us our boarding passes and yelled: "We have to run! Follow me!" And we literally went running out of the terminal. We fully expected to hear and feel an explosion behind us. We didn't. It was pretty exciting, all the same.

Yesterday was a beautiful day here in Saint-Aignan. I went out and walked around the vineyard with the dog in the morning. The rest of the day, I was sort of in a daze. My body wanted to sleep, but I did my best to stay awake. I dozed off in front of the TV several times in the afternoon. It was probably a mistake to try to watch the latest recorded episodes of The Good Wife at that particular time.

Today is gray and rain threatens. I slept for the second night in a row. I'm optimistic about my jet-lag ending quickly, but I also know that just when you think it's over it hits you again. By Monday, I should be in good shape. I will probably have a groggy Easter weekend.

We will be cooking a rabbit. That's what we do on Easter. It's a 30+-year-old tradition in this household. This time, I think we might grill the rabbit — if it doesn't rain on Sunday — and baste it with a mustard sauce as it cooks. In the past, we've made rabbit French-style (en gibelotte), Thai-style (in a coconut-milk curry), and other ways. Grilling it will be a first.

Meanwhile, here are some pictures of purple flowers of various kinds that I've taken recently around the yard and vineyard.

The rabbit recipe

Here's the promised recipe for the Lapin en gibelotte, or rabbit fricassée. It was really delicious — rabbit meat is very white and lean, and of course there's no skin and almost no fat on it. It's not really gamy, but doesn't "taste like chicken" either. My translation is partly translation, partly adaptation, as you'll see if you compare the English to the French (at the bottom of this post.

Lapin cooked in Vouvray wine

1 rabbit

2 carrots

1 onion

1 garlic clove

1 shallot

2 stalks celery

½ lb. smoked bacon

½ bottle dry white (Vouvray) wine

½ lb. mushrooms

2 Tbsp. butter

herbs (thyme, bay leaf, tarragon, etc.)

In the morning (or the night before), put the rabbit pieces into a bowl with the sliced onion, shallot, garlic clove, and carrots, as well as the herbs, and the wine. Let marinate for 8 to 16 hours.

Later in the day (the the next morning), take out the rabbit pieces and sponge them off with a paper towel. Fry the bacon (lardons) in some butter (if needed), and then add the rabbit pieces to the pan and brown them lightly. Strain the marinade (nor not) and add it to the pan. Let it cook, covered, for about 40 minutes. Fifteen minutes before you plan to serve it, add the mushrooms, sliced, to the pan.

Put the rabbit pieces on a warmed serving dish while you reduce the sauce (if necessary).

A leg and the saddle of the rabbit, browned, along with the liver and the kidneys, also delicious

The rabbit pieces in the pot with some browned smoked pork lardons

These kinds of French recipes often specify that you should marinate the rabbit, chicken, beef or whatever in wine with herbs and aromatic vegetables, and then strain the marinade and cook the meat just in the liquid. I almost never do that. Why discard all those good onions, carrots, celery stalks, etc.? Just serve it "home-style." The presentation is less elegant, but the result is a more balanced meal.

Rabbit stew, ready to serve

Walt bought some nice little spring turnips, so we put those, peeled and cut into chunks, into the cooking liquid too. The liquid is the white wine from the marinade, as well as an equal amount of stock that I made by boiling down the rib cage and the head (!) from the rabbit carcass.

Here's the French recipe I based mine on:

The Easter rabbit

At this time in my life, everything seems to have happened, or started, very long ago. I started learning French 50 years ago this year, when I was fourteen and a freshman in high school. Fifty years! I came to France for the first time more than 40 years ago, and 40 years ago on this date I was living and working in Rouen, in Normandy. Then I lived in Paris for a couple of years, in mid-'70s, plus three more years from '79 to '82.

Thirty years ago Walt and I started living together in Washington DC. We had met a couple of years earlier in Paris. That same year, I started working with my friend CHM. Then Walt and I moved to California more than 25 years ago. And, finally, we moved to France ten years ago. See what I mean. Everything happened... started... so long ago...

 Our Easter rabbit in its marinade of white wine, herbs, and vegetables

That's the way it is with the Easter rabbit. I won't call it a bunny. We started cooking a rabbit for Easter back around 1984, when we were living and working in DC, because seeing the Easter Bunny everywhere on TV and in stores that spring made us think about eating rabbit the way we had enjoyed eating rabbit in Paris. I think we've had rabbit on Easter every year since then.

So today we are cooking a rabbit, as usual. I'm cooking it in almost the most basic, simple way: « en gibelotte », it's called. That means stewed in white wine with lardons, carrots, onions, herbs, and mushrooms. It's a kind of fricassée, like Coq au vin is a fricassée, but the gibelotte is made with white wine instead of red wine — at least in my version. (The Larousse Gastronomque says a gibelotte is a « fricassée de lapin au vin blanc ou rouge » — but to me the red wine version is more often called a « civet ».)

The recipe I'm basing my Lapin en gibelotte on is Monique Maine's, in Cuisine pour toute l'année (1969). She calls it « Lapin au vouvray ». That's appropriate, since we live near Vouvray, which is on the Loire River less than an hour from here by car, and the first time that we came tp stay fpr twp weeks in the Loire Valley was 12 years ago in Vouvray, in a gîte rural we'd rented for a vacation. That turned out to be a pivotal moment, because we ended up living here not long after the good experience we enjoyed here.

I'll translate and post the recipe tomorrow. The first step is to marinate the rabbit for 6 hours or more in white wine (preferably vouvray, but any dry white wine will do) with the aromatic vegetables. Then you take the rabbit pieces out of the marinade liquid, dry them off with a (paper) towel, and sautée them in butter or olive oil before stewing them in the marinade. You can cook chicken the same way.

The rabbit cut up — two front legs, two hind legs, and the "saddle" (or « râble » in French)

I cut the rabbit up yesterday — Walt went to the Saturday market in Saint-Aignan and bought one from our favorite vendor — and put it in to marinate. I'll be doing the cooking part after I come back from my walk with the dog this morning.

Lapin à la moutarde

This mustardy braised rabbit was the best rabbit that I'd cooked in a long time. I wanted to make a lapin à la moutarde — rabbit in a mustard-cream sauce — this time, and I looked around on the web and in my favorite cookbooks to see what the options were.

I have a memory of a whole rabbit roasted in the oven that was served by a Frenchwoman who rented out rooms to students in Grenoble back in 1974. I was the assistant to the professor who was running the University of Illinois Year Abroad program that year, and the woman had invited us to dinner. I'm not sure I had ever eaten rabbit before — but maybe I had, because I had already spent a year and half in France on earlier trips.

Rabbit braised and served in a creamy mustard sauce

Whatever... the rabbit was delicious. It looked a little strange laid out whole in a baking pan. I remember the woman opened the oven and basted it while we watched. She chattered away in French, and I could understand what she said but probably couldn't add an awful lot to the conversation. She was used to having American students living in her house, so she didn't mind.

The rabbit browned, with sliced onion added for flavor

Yesterday, I was tempted to cook the rabbit whole, because that would have avoided the whole problem of cutting it up. The recipe I found, however, called for rabbit cut into serving pieces, and it was otherwise a simple preparation that sounded very good. Walt and I have been eating rabbit once or twice a year for nearly 30 years now, so I've had a certain amount of experience when it comes to carving up a raw rabbit. Mainly you need a sharp knife, some kitchen scissors, and a lot of patience.

The rabbit cut into serving pieces before cooking

If you want to know how to go about it, have a look at this web page. It's not for the faint of heart. I won't show you the process here — just the result.

Mustard is a classic ingredient in sauces for braised or roasted rabbit in France. Sometimes the rabbit pieces — or the meatiest pieces, like the rable (the "saddle") or the back legs — are basted with Dijon mustard and then wrapped in strips of fat or bacon and roasted in the oven for 60 to 90 minutes. It's basted frequently with the mustard-flavored pan juices and fat.

Take the rabbit, onions, and carrots out of the pan and
serve the sauce separately if you want.

Or, as in the recipe I chose, the rabbit pieces are browned in butter and/or oil and then braised in a mixture of stock (chicken or vegetable) and white wine (half a liter in all), with sliced onions and carrots, bay leaves, thyme or rosemary, and salt and pepper. After the rabbit is braised and completely cooked to your taste — some like it a little firm, others prefer it falling off the bone, so cook it anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes — you just add about half a cup of cream and 4 or 5 tablespoons of Dijon mustard to the sauce and let the dish simmer for another 10 minutes before serving it.

Steamed broccoli is a good accompaniment —
broccoli is good with the mustard cream sauce.

It's easy to see why mustard is a classic ingredient in rabbit dishes. It's delicious. This kind of thing would be really good made with chicken thighs and legs too. I'd take the skin off to minimize the amount of fat and to mimic the skinless rabbit pieces.

Domestic rabbits (farm-raised, not wild) give a very lean white meat that is not strongly flavored. Rabbit is a standard item that's always available in French markets and supermarkets (as is duck), alongside chicken, turkey, guinea fowl, beef, pork, veal, lamb, and so on.

We ate the lapin à la moutarde with broccoli
and steamed new potatoes.

Ginette Mathiot's classic home cookbook Je sais cuisiner includes a dozen recipes for rabbit — stews like gibelotte (white wine) or civet, (red wine) roasted rabbit, or fried rabbit — and even gives instructions on how to kill, skin, and dress a live rabbit before you cook it. The edition I have dates from 1970. I wonder how many French people were still buying live rabbits that recently. Probably not many — especially not in the cities.

Moroccan rabbit with lemon and almonds

We always cook rabbit on Easter. We started cooking rabbit on Easter just because Easter made us think of the Easter Bunny, and I said: "Hey, why not cook a rabbit. It's something we don't eat very often, and it can be really good." That was probably in 1983 or 1984.

For years, we would make a Lapin en gibelotte for Easter dinner. That's a classic French stew of rabbit, onions, carrots, potatoes, and herbs with a thickened, creamy sauce. We probably also made Lapin à la moutarde a few times — rabbit cooked in a sauce made with Dijon mustard is another French classic.

Tajine de lapin au citron et aux amandes — Morroccan-style rabbit

In 2008, we saw a cooking show on French cuisine TV where the chef made a Thai curry with rabbit. So we made that. It involved boning the rabbit and cutting the meat into small pieces. It was really good, but it was a lot of trouble. Walt blogged about it, with pictures. The recipe is there too.

The rabbit came cut up into 6 pieces with the liver in
a little plastic cup inside the supermarket package.

This past winter, we saw a Swiss cooking show on French CuisineTV on which the cook, Annick Jeanmairet, prepared a Tajine de lapin au citron et aux amandes. That's a rabbit cooked with lemon and almonds, not to mention onions, garlic, and typical Moroccan spices: cumin, coriander, turmeric, saffron, cayenne pepper, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and so on. It looked really good so we got the recipe off the CuisineTV web site and saved it for our Easter dinner.

When you buy a rabbit, you get two each of these pieces:
front leg, saddle (the back), kidney, and back leg.
You also get the liver, which is good like chicken liver.

One good thing about recipes for rabbit dishes is that you can always substitute chicken if you can't find or don't like the idea of eating rabbit. You should try rabbit, though, if you haven't. Domesticated rabbits don't have a gamy taste at all, and the meat is even leaner than chicken.

Here's a step-by-step description of putting the Moroccan rabbit dish together.

You can cook potatoes — no need to peel them — in the pot with the rabbit. Or you can omit them and serve the rabbit with rice, pasta, or couscous.
Peel and slice up two medium onions (or a medium onion and a large shallot). Peel and de-germ four cloves of garlic. Using a vegetable peeler, remove the zest of two lemons.
Cut each zested lemon into four wedges. Squeeze out the juice and seeds . Then cut each of the eight wedges in half again. You'll put the zest strips and the wedges, pulp and all, in the dish to cook with the rabbit.
Here's the lemon zest. It's in strips, but I think it could just as well be grated if you want. After they cook, the strips are tender and tasty.
Put olive oil in a heavy-bottomed pot and cook the onions & garlic in it on low heat. You'll brown the rabbit with them and spices before adding liquid.
Add 2 tsp. of curry powder to the pot. Let the spices cook for 2 minutes, and then put the rabbit pieces in. Stir them around and turn them so that they get covered with spice.
The saddle (râble) pieces have long flaps of meat on each side. Pin them down using wooden skewers to make them cook neatly.
Pull the fat off the rabbit kidneys, and trim up the liver to remove any veins or fat. Cut the liver into 2 or 3 pieces if you want. Add all and then 2 cups of water. Cook on low heat for 45 minutes.
Five minutes before before serving, add peeled almonds and fresh herbs to the post. Parsley and cilantro are good, but I bet fresh oregano and basil would be good too.

So you cook the rabbit pieces in a big pot with the onions, garlic, spices, and potatoes. I say use curry powder or make up you own spice blend. The original recipe called for just cumin and saffron. The Moroccan ras-el-hanout spice blend I used contains cumin, turmeric, ginger, nutmeg, coriander, and cardamom.

The cooking liquid is water. Let the rabbit pieces brown a little in the pot before adding liquid. Add salt and pepper liberally. When the potatoes are done, the rabbit pieces will be done too. Like chicken, rabbit doesn't really take long to cook.

The potatoes and rabbit pieces are cooked.
Add peeled almonds and some herbs for the last five minutes.

The rabbit we bought at SuperU seemed especially good and meaty. It weighed about 3 lbs. I'm sure this would be very good with chicken or even turkey. I think chicken thighs and drumsticks might be the best.

On the plate — a little messy, but delicious

Annick Jeanmairet's recipe (in French) says you can substitute black olives for the almonds in this tajine. I think green olives would be just as good. In fact, here's what I'm going to do next week: I bought some turkey wings at SuperU on Saturday — they sell them as a substitute for veal and call them blanquette de dinde — turkey for stew. It's actually just the first wing section with a big piece of turkey breast meat attached. I'm going to cook the turkey Moroccan style with lemon and olives.