Spring foods and herbs

Walt went to the Saturday-morning market in Saint-Aignan yesterday to look for locally grown asparagus. He found some. It was a man we often buy asparagus and strawberries from who had asparagus at a reasonable price — 6.00€/kg, or just over $3.50/lb. in U.S. terms, at current exchange rates.

Asperges blanches

The dollar is worth about 75 eurocents right now; that's the euro being worth $1.31 U.S. The euro went up to almost $1.60 last summer, so we were getting only about 63 eurocents for a U.S. dollar. It's better now, but when you live here with a limited income in $$, you have to pay attention to costs.

Anyway, you can see the difference between the asparagus we buy and the ones that grow untended out in the vineyard. The vineyard asparagus are the green ones. The cultivated ones, grown here along the Cher River Valley and over in neighboring Sologne, where the soil is sandy, are grown buried in sand so that sunlight doesn't turn them green.

Radishes, asparagus, and mint rooting in a glass of water

It's hard to say which is better, green or white asparagus. They are the same plant — only the growing methods are different. With the white ones, you have to peel each asparagus. Green ones don't need peeling. And the white ones take longer to cook. They have a more delicate, less asparagus-y flavor, maybe. We like both.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention our experiment with true wild asparagus. A few days ago, we cooked the slender stalks I had picked out back. Because it was an experiment, we decided not to cook the wild asparagus into an omelet or scrambled eggs, but to cook them separately and try them. To go with them, we made a mushroom risotto. Well, the wild asparagus turned out to be bitter. Almost too bitter to eat. I ate some by cutting them into small pieces and mixing them into the risotto. But I can't say I thought they were very good. Tant pis.

Herbs in planters. Mostly you see oregano.
Also cactus pads and a desert jade plant.

The other spring vegetable Walt picked up at the market was a big bunch of radishes. French people eat a lot of radishes. First you wash them well to get rid of any sand. You take them to the table slightly damp with the clear fresh water you washed them in. Then each person puts a pat of butter and a little pile of salt on a plate. Spread a little sweet butter on a nice piece of French bread. Take a radish and touch it to the salt so a little bit sticks to it. Then eat a bite of the salty radish and the crunchy bread spread with sweet butter. Now I'm hungry.

One of the trees I'm keeping any eye on out in the vineyard
now has fruit on it. Plums, I guess. I'll soon know.

For lunch Walt is going to make an asparagus and ham pie. More on that in a day or two.

Another spring food is herbs. We've been lucky this year. Our parsley came back up and is green and leafy. It's more beautiful than it was last summer. And mint that we planted last summer has come back up too. It was attacked by an insect (we assume) last summer. All the leaves were completely covered underneath with what I assume was insect eggs. We couldn't eat it. Mint is supposed to be invasive, but ours died back while the parsley next to it thrived.

Parsley and mint growing in the well

I've also planted chives and some other mint in planter boxes. We gave up on the herb garden last summer. Weeds took it over when the weather was rainy, and it's hard to go weed it in rainy weather. So we are going to grow herbs in pots and planter boxes this year.

Last June CHM came to visit and he bought us a couple of tarragon plants from a vendor at the farmers' market in Montrichard. We planted them and they did fine. At the end of the growing season, I dug them up and put them in pots for the winter. I left the pots of tarragon outdoors, at the base of the south wall of the house. I didn't know if they would survive.

Tarragon survived the winter

Well, they did we have a couple of tarragon plants now. I've transplanted them into good potting soil. I want to save them, because the plants were very expensive — 6.00€ apiece. Chicken with tarragon is a classic combination.

Oregano

Another herb that reseeded itself, or grew back from the roots, is oregano. I've transplanted a lot of it from the abandoned herb garden plot (where we will plant vegetables next month) into planters. It is thriving too. It has nice flowers in summertime.

I foresee lots of herby salads over the course of the summer.

April afternoons

Yesterday when Sylvie la boulangère drove up to sell us our daily baguette de pain, I was the one who went out to get it and pay her (still 81 cents). She looked at me closely — she hadn't seen me in about a week — and she said: « On dirait que vous êtes bronzé. » — you look like you have a tan.

« Ça n m'étonnerais pas — je passe mes après-midi au soleil depuis quelques jours, » I told her. I've been spending my afternoons outdoors in the sun. The weather has been that nice. My routine is to write a blog post in the morning, walk the dog (if it's my day), and then do some work in the kitchen until lunchtime.

April afternoons at La Renaudière, near Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher

Work in the kitchen might be making lunch, or it might be preparing food I've bought for the freezer. Yesterday, for example, I had about 5 lbs. of bœuf pour bourguignon, stew beef, that I had bought at Intermarché Thursday morning. It was on sale, and I stock up when the price is right (3.50€/kg, or about $2.20/lb. in U.S. currency).

I give prices because I think it's interesting to be able to compare French prices with U.S. prices (or other countries'). If you're thinking of moving to France, this will give you an idea of the cost of living. And if you are retiring, you will find that prices and bargains matter more than ever.

One afternoon a bumblebee landed on the table right next to me

Before I freeze the beef, I trim it up to remove most of the fat and connective tissue. Walt and I eat the meat, either in stew or ground up to make meatballs, and Callie gets the scraps, which I cook to add to cooked rice or her kibbble. I'm retired, so I have time to fiddle with food a lot — that's why I can buy inexpensive meat and vegetables, for example, and do the long cooking required to make a good bœuf bourguignon, bœuf aux carottes, coq au vin, or blanquette de veau.

Storm clouds threatened yesterday afternoon
and we had a hard rain shower overnight

I had also bought four nice chicken leg-thigh sections because they were also on sale — 2.99€/kg, or about $1.85/lb. Those just need to be repackaged for freezing, so that we don't have to thaw them all at once. Then I started getting lunch ready.

Meanwhile, Walt got out the vacuum cleaner and sucked up all the dust and dog hair in the living room while he watched tennis on TV — he watches without needing to listen. The tournament going on TV right now is a clay-court event down in Monte Carlo. Roger Federer lost yesterday to a fellow Swiss player.

This is Callie keeping her eye on an inteloping bird...

Lunch yesterday was leftovers — more of that rabbit I cooked Easter Sunday, which made three meals for the two of us out of that. The rabbit cost about 9.00€, but we got our money's worth out of it. The leftovers were almost better than the dish was on the day I cooked it. Neither one of us minds eating leftovers for a few days after a big cooking project. I know some people who can't stand to eat the same thing two or three times in a row, but that's not us — as long as it's tasty.

...and her reaction when I tell her it's just a bird — "Duh!"

After lunch, I watched a Woody Allen movie on TV. We have a satellite system and a program package from French CanalSat (which is the only game in town since CanalSat bought out it only competitor, TPS). We get 6 or 8 movie channels, and a lot of them show English-language films in the original English version. They also show a lot of French movies, of course, and we watch many of those, along with a scattering of German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese films.

The makings for April showers

The films always have French subtitles if they are in a foreign language, and you usually have the option of watching them dubbed into French if you'd prefer. Only a few films are actually shown in V.O., which means version originale, with subtitles. Most are broadcast in V.M., version multilingue, which means you can choose the language soundtrack you want to hear. It's nice, and we don't see the point of watching American or British movies dubbed into French. The French movies don't have subtitles, but we're both past the point of needing those.

Me and Callie sitting in the back yard on a nice April afternoon
(this is a composite of two photos that I "stitched" together)

After the movie, at about 3:30, for the past week or two I've been relocating myself to the outdoors. There are usually some clouds but the sun pokes through often enough to keep the temperature at pleasant levels. And as a result of sitting outdoors or working in the garden most afternoons, I've gotten a tan. It's probably bad for my skin, but it feels good.

I have a lot of plants in pots that need re-potting this time of year, and that's a perfect activity for a nice afternoon out in the sun. Yesterday, I re-potted my grandmother's Sanseveria plants. My grandmother died in 1974, and I've had the plants since the early 1980s, when a cousin in North Carolina gave me some of them. There's no telling how long Grandmama had had them. Walt and I lived in Washington DC back then. I moved the plants to California with us in 1986 and they thrived out there for many years.

The grapevines are starting to get some leaves on them.

When I moved to France in 2003, I took most of the Sanseveria plants back to North Carolina and gave them back to my cousin. I had a planter-box full of them. She said all hers had died in an unexpected freeze one night. I didn't see how I could move any of the plants to France. But meanwhile, Walt and I stopped off to see CHM in southern California on our way to N.C., and I gave him a couple of cuttings from Grandmama's plants.

In 2004, CHM came to Saint-Aignan for a visit. And guess what he brought me — a cutting from my grandmother's plant. He wanted me to have it. I potted it up and it has done well. In 2005, I brought back another cutting from North Carolina — my mother had one of the plants I had brought back from California. One of the plants produced a baby a couple of years ago, so now I have three.

One of Grandmama's Sansevieria plants

Anyway, sitting outdoors reading and listening to the radio (my favorite radio program, a French talk/game show called Les Grosses Têtes, is on from 4:00 to 6:00 every afternoon), or puttering around with potted plants, is my idea of a rally nice way to spend an April afternoon. Every other day I walk Callie at 6:00, so that gives me some good exercise too, and a chance to take a lot of pictures.

Cockscomb hairdos

Here's a translation of an article that ran in our local newspaper, La Nouvelle République, last week. I enjoyed it and hope you do too.

The principal of Lycée Ronsard,
arbiter of style
Piercings, scarlet-red hair, chains, OK... but the cockscomb, that’s a no! A Vendôme high school student gets sent home.

He’s a nice kid, easy-going, who is well-liked by friends of both genders. Thursday, however, his life was turned upside down: as he walked onto the grounds of Ronsard high school in Vendôme, the student bumped — figuratively speaking — into the principal, Alfred Piélot.

And that’s when all the trouble started: on the one hand, a classic suit-and-tie, impeccable grooming — everything you would expect in a high school principal. On the other, a leather jacket, funky shoes, red and blue hair, and, above all, a cockscomb haircut. A very impressive cockscomb haircut. Either you like it or you don’t. The principal doesn’t. The esthetic conflict runs deep.

The student is firmly invited to return home and get rid of the crazy-looking hair, the ostentatious character of which has shocked Alfred Piélot. Before departing, the banished student alerts his classmates, who immediately go running to the principal’s office. Over the course of an animated and acrid discussion, it becomes obvious that the two sides don’t at all share the same view of what constitutes elegance in fashion.

Chloë, who is especially outspoken, calls it a “unique and original” haircut. Alfred Piélot calls it “ridiculous.” The arbiter of fashion is the principal and the principal alone. Alfred Piélot puts an end to the discussion by sarcastically inviting the dissident students “to lead a solidarity movement in favor of their reprimanded comrade.”

The problem, with young people, is that there is no need to ask them twice when you're asking them to do something they are already tempted to do: yesterday, 30 or more of them came to school with different-colored cockscomb hairstyles.

Alfred Piélot is doing his best to remain philosophical about it all: “I am not sure that accepting the will of these young people would be doing them a favor educationally. Where are the boundaries? It’s true, last Thursday I decided that one student had gone too far. I really didn’t appreciate that modified Roman-helmet haircut. But the student was re-admitted the next day, because he had trimmed the cockscomb down to make it shorter.”

Everything changes, nothing changes. In the 1970s, students were sent home for wearing their hair too long...

You have probably gathered that a “cockscomb haircut” is what we would call a mohawk in the U.S.

Several subjects...

A spiffed-up old Citroën 2CV parked on a street in Saint-Aignan

Nadège says in a recent comment that none of the people she works with can pronounce the French first name Gilles. She's working with Gilles Marini, who played Dante in Sex and the City: The Movie. Nadège is a makeup artist in Hollywood.

The red cowslips were still there a few days ago.

Well, Gilles is hard to pronounce for Americans because we don't have any words in English that begin with that voiced sibilant sound. We have [sh] but not [zh] as an initial consonant — [sheep] for example, but not [zheep]. We do have the [zh] sound, however, in the middle of words like treasure, pleasure, and measure (all pronounced [-'eh-zhoor]). It's the same sound that is the final consonant in Nadège [nah-'dehzh].

French is full of words that have [zh] as the initial sound: je, jeudi, jouer, jurer, jamais, gîte, giboulée, Giverny, and on and on. Maybe telling people that Gilles is pronounced [zheel] will help.

* * * *

A few days ago Callie found a hedgehog in the yard. Well, a hedgehog that was trying to get into the yard. It was stuck in the fence. Callie was doing her daily early-morning inspection tour when she started barking wildly.

I went over to see what the problem was, thinking she might have chased a cat out of the yard and into the hedge. But the barking was too hysterical. And there was the poor hedgehog, wedged in and trapped.

A hedgehog stuck in the fence

I told Walt about it when Callie and I got back from our walk. He put on some very heavy leather fireplace gloves and went out to see if he could extricate the poor animal. He succeeded, only getting stabbed once or twice by the hedgehog's quills. He stretched the wire fence and little and pushed the animal through. It rolled itself up into a tight ball and stayed there under the hedge for the rest of the day. We wondered it it was injured or even dead.

Callie loves being outside on warm afternoons.

The next morning it was gone. Hedgehogs are nocturnal. It was probably just waiting for nightfall before making its move. Hedgehogs are also animals you want to have in your garden, because they eat slugs and bugs. It's too bad they can't fit through the slots in our wire fence. Maybe that one was just overweight.

* * * *

The wisteria is starting to bloom.

The plum and pear tree blossoms are now falling, and the cherry blossoms are not far behind. I'm getting worried that our weather is not yet warm enough for all these trees to actually set fruit. I think chilly damp weather is not ideal at this stage in their development.

Apple blossoms, a wide shot and a close-up

Now the apple trees and the wisteria are blooming. I wish we knew how to keep the apple trees from setting fruit. Thousands of apples — it seems like millions — cover the ground under the five apple trees in our yard for most of the summer. We can't use them all, and we can't even give them away because everybody we know has just as many apple trees and apples as we do.

And I found these little orchids growing in our back yard...

Meanwhile, we're happy because parsley, oregano, mint, and tarragon from last year's garden have all come up again and look really healthy. Our thyme and rosemary plants also survived the cold winter. Now if we can just get some good tomatoes and eggplant going in the veggie garden, we will be sitting pretty.

Edgetarianism

"The house stinks." That's what Walt said yesterday afternoon when he came back from walking the dog out in the vineyard.

"Well, yeah, I'm cooking collard greens," I told him. I had told him I was going to. "That's what they smell like when they first start cooking." It's a smell I don't mind. I grew up with it.

Collard greens

A couple of years ago I was at home in North Carolina and I called the mother of an old high-school friend to see if I could stop by for a visit. "Well, I'm cooking a pot of collards, but if you don't mind the smell, come on over," she said. So I did, and I don't remember even noticing the smell.

The fact is, collard greens, fully cooked, taste a lot better than they smell when you first put them on to cook. Today, I cooked a batch with a big chunk of poitrine fumée, smoked pork belly, that I bought from Mme Doudouille at the outdoor market in Saint-Aignan last Saturday.

A pot of greens cooking on the stove

Where did the collard greens come from? I grew them. And no, you can't find them in France otherwise. These are plants that I planted last October. They survived a cold winter. Then in March, they started bolting — going to seed. I waited a few weeks to see if they would grow more, if the leaves would get bigger, with the coming of warmer weather. But they didn't. Here's a link to a picture of the puny little collard patch I had.

Yesterday morning I decided the time had come. I pulled the dozen or so plants out of the ground and cut off the woody root section with pruning shears. Into the compost pile went the roots. I put the stalks and leaves in a bucket and took them to the laundry sink in our utility room. There I ran a sink full of water and let the plants soak for a few hours. That loosens up any dirt stuck to the leaves.

The hamlet just 1 km NW of ours is Les Bas-Bonneaux.
The grape-growing, wine-making Guerriers live there.

The afternoon was nice, so we sat outside and enjoyed the sun. After having mowed most of the yard (that was Walt) and tilled up another garden plot with the rotary cultivator (that was me), we deserved a relaxing afternoon. We worked hard in the morning.

Yard mowed, garden plot tilled (sunrise view)

We had gone into high gear yesterday because for days and days MétéoFrance kept predicting rain in Saint-Aignan. So we bided our time. It never did rain, except last Saturday. Sunday morning skies looked threatening, so we didn't go out to start any big projects in the garden.

Today's weather — Saint-Aignan is in the band of rain and
storms. The numbers are wind velocities in km.

Then Sunday afternoon the sun came out and it was very pleasant outside. But the village has noise-restriction ordinances — no power tools allowed on Sunday afternoons. That gave us a good excuse to relax some more. On Monday, exactly the same thing happened. Gray morning, partly cloudy afternoon. And because it was Easter Monday, the same noise restrictions were in effect. More relaxing for us.

Yesterday just light scattered showers were predicted. We decided we'd better take our chances. I harvested the greens and tilled up a plot. Walt picked up sticks all around the yard and mowed two-thirds of it. The prediction for today is a decent morning and then "sustained" rains and maybe even thunderstorms in the afternoon. So we needed to get things like mowing and tilling done yesterday, while we could.

Pulling the leaves off collard plants

In the afternoon, while we sat outside, I pulled the leaves off all the collard plants. I was surprised at the amount I got. It must have been about 2 pecks. If you don't know what a peck is, let me tell you. It's one-fourth of a bushel. And that means it's about nine liters, if that means anything to you. Two pecks = 18 liters. Take my word for it, it's more than I thought I would get from my little collard patch. Maybe you can judge from the pictures.

Here's the take

My mother told me on Sunday that she was eating some more of those prison-farm collards that we enjoyed back in February when I was back in N.C. on a visit. I haven't tasted my own collard greens yet. I hope they are as tasty as those "incarceration collards" (here's a link to that topic).

People in Saint-Aignan don't have collard patches, but they grow Swiss chard. We've been served chard by friends and neighbors here. And a lot of people have cabbage patches in their gardens. They grow not only cabbage but also a lot brussels sprouts. Collards, cabbages, and sprouts are plants that survive cold weather, so they give you something fresh and green to eat in winter.

One other good thing happened yesterday morning: I discovered a lot more asparagus growing out back, just outside our yard. First, I noticed wild asparagus growing on a patch of ground that was, last year, a big blackberry bramble, until a crew from Electricité de France came in with some major equipment and cut it all down, along with a lot of small trees. All that vegetation was growing directly under the power lines that feed electricity into our hamlet (9 houses).

Wild asparagus and the garden variety
that I gathered just outside our yard

You'll see from the pictures how much wild asparagus I was able to gather. The stalks are very thin and fine. I haven't eaten any yet so I don't know what the taste is like. Recipes I've found on the web say to cook them and then eat them cold, with vinaigrette, or hot, in an omlet or scrambled eggs.

After finding the wild asparagus, I walked over to the patch of ground that until last year had been covered by a huge compost pile, until the mayor (our neighbor) sent a crew in and haul it all away. She also had a sign put up to warn people that they could be fined for dumping anything on that patch of land.

We've been dumping wildflower seeds on that plot of ground this spring. I hope we don't get arrested. No flowers have come up yet.

Asparagus coming up out back where the big compost pile used to be

And what did I find there yesterday? More asparagus — the garden variety. I picked only two stalks, which were ready, but I noticed another dozen or more that are pushing up out of the ground now and might be ready to harvest in day or two. You can bet I will keep my eye on them and cut them as soon as I think they are just right.

Susan of Days on the Claise calls this kind of wildcat harvesting "vergetarianism" — it means foraging for food on the verge of the road. I might call it "edgetarianism" — gathering wild plants around the edge of our property, including asparagus, plums, and cherries (he says, ever the optimist).

Catching up

I wanted to mention a comment that Michel Pierssens left on my recent topic about our local newspaper here in the Loire Valley. Michel said he had worked for La Nouvelle République years ago.

"Your comments about La NR bring back some memories from my time as « secrétaire de rédaction » while a student in Tours in the 60s. At the time, local « correspondants » were quite illiterate (the pay was extremely low) and the secrétaire de rédaction all but made up the articles about local events from almost undecipherable reports. The main thing for the bosses was to get photos showing as many people as possible so they would buy copies of the paper..."

The prunus tree in our back yard, 13 April 2009

As Michel said in his comment, there's no telling whether the newspaper's staff still has to work under such difficult conditions, but it's possible. As usual, the best intentions and supreme dedication is never enough to ensure quality. It comes down to resources. You need talented and experienced reporters, writers, and editors to put together a high-quality newspaper, and most people need to be paid a living wage if they are going to do that kind of work.

I'm sure a lot of newspapers, especially in the U.S. these days, are struggling with these kinds of issues.

Thanks, Michel, for those memories and comments. (I met Michel last summer when he was in Saint-Aignan.)

This is one of the trees out on the edge of the vineyard
that I plan to keep my eye on as the season progresses.
I hope it produces fruit as beautiful as its flowers.

Walt went out walking in the vineyard a few days ago and came home with a nice bunch of green asparagus spears. We've seen asparagus growing wild out there in a couple of places over the years, but we've never been there at the right time to pick enough to actually make our "found asparagus" part of a meal.

"Found asparagus"— it isn't what you call wild asparagus,
but grows wild out in the vineyard.

This time we did, as you can see. Yesterday we made a stir-fy of asparagus, green onions, mushrooms, and shrimp, which we ate over Chinese wheat noodles from the Paris Store in Blois. It was quite good, flavored with fish sauce, oyster sauce, garlic, and ginger.

That reminds me that Quinn left a comment on my Easter Weekend topic the other day. "Why don't you grow your own asparagus? They require no effort and the patch will yield for up to thirty years...," Quinn said. We tried planting some asparagus a few years ago, actually. But we don't have the right soil for it, I think. It needs well-drained, sandy soil, and ours is heavy clay.

Prepared for stir-frying

I saw a gardening show the other day where there was an explanation about how to best plant asparagus. You buy the roots and you dig a deep trench to plant them in. You fill in the trench with sandy soil. The asparagus themselves grow in the sand without ever seeing the light of day. They stay white. That's how they like their asparagus here. If you don't plant them deep and the spears stick up above ground, they turn green.

If we lived down in the river valley, where the soil is sandy and loose, we could grow asparagus. Up here on the heights, the soil, clay and flintstone, is a lot heavier. Drainage isn't great. We are working every year on amending our vegetable garden plots to lighten up the soil.

The stir-fried asparagus, mustrooms, green onions, and shrimp

Oh, and Quinn, of course you can paint the dandelion. You didn't even need to ask. I would love to see your painting of it when it's done, if that possible. Can you take a photo of it and e-mail it to me?

Today I plan to pull out the rotary cultivator again and till up two more garden plots. It's still too early to plant anything outdoors without protection (cold frames, tunnels). But Walt has been busy transplanting all the tomato and eggplant seedlings that have come up in our trays. We have something like 36 tomato plants and 19 eggplant seedlings in pots at this stage!

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.