Foodie Friday: Cute Animals with Mustard

Rabbit is one of my favorite meats, although I find it is one of the hardest to prepare well. When cooked properly, it has a chicken-like texture and a delicate, gamey flavor quite unlike either fowl or larger livestock or game. Cooked a minute too long, and it becomes tough, stringy, and flavorless. Due to their small size, rabbits are also a bit of a challenge to butcher. If you prefer, the recipe below can be prepared using rabbit "loins"--actually the long cylinders of meat on either side of the animal's backbone--which are often available pre-cut and packaged separately. But I prefer the whole animal, and you will find some fairly simple butchering instructions below. Good markets now carry rabbit, but if yours doesn't, you can often find fine, farm-raised rabbits in the frozen section at a Chinese or other East Asian grocery. The following recipe is based on a classic French preparation with fresh favas--a summer dish. For a spring-time variant, I use fresh peas as well as radish and arugula shoots from the garden. The rabbits yield relatively little meat but a lot of bones and left-overs, which I use to make a simple stock for a risotto.

Spring Rabbit with mustard

2 whole rabbits, approx 4 lbs., butchered per instructions below.
1/2 cup pancetta (preferable to French lardons, or substitute good slab bacon)
2 doz. pearl onions, blached and peeled, whole
2 cloves garlic, smashed
1 cup fresh spring peas
1 cup fresh radish shoots
1 cup fresh arugula shoots
1/4 cup fresh thyme leaves
2 tbspns whole grain mustard
1/2 cup dry white wine
clarified butter
sea salt

To butcher the rabbit, I first remove the hind legs. Turn the rabbit on its back and draw your knife swiftly just inside the hip joint. The legs will detach from the socket easily. Set them aside. Cut off the forequarters just behind the forelegs, straight throught the spine. Separate the legs and set aside. Lay the remainder "belly" down. You will see and feel two long cylinders of meat on either side of the spine. First run your knife swiftly down either side of the spine. Then simply work your fingers gently between the spine and the meat and work free. (Do not use the flaps of skin that hang down. Reserve these with the carcass for stock.) Now turn the rabbit onto its back. Two little oysters of meat, smaller versions of what you just removed from the back, are located on the underside of the spine. Remove using a similar method. Finally, bone the legs by cutting quick incisions down to each bone and working the bones out gently with your fingertips. All of the remainder--the bone, connective tissue, skin, etc., can go into a stock. The meat should be cut into bite-sized portions and set aside for cooking.

Heat a heavy sauté pan and melt 2 generous tablespoons of clarified butter. Add the pancetta and fry until the fat renders and begins to crackle. Add the onions and garlic with a pinch of salt (don't overdo it--the pork is very salty already) and cook until they begin to soften. Add the rabbit. Cook the rabbit quickly over medium-high heat. After about a minute, give the thyme a quick, rough chop and add it as well. When you can no longer see any raw parts on the rabbit, deglaze the pan with the wine. Add the peas immediately. Add the mustard, tossing together until everything is evenly coated. Add 1/2 cup each of the microgreens, reserving the rest for a final garnish. Toss together for no more than thirty seconds. Remove from heat and serve immediately, garnished with the remaining greens.

I serve this dish over a simple risotto made with butter, onion, garlic, rabbit stock from the remainders of the rabbits, and a few pinched saffron stems.

Rebels Without a Clause

You know, the last time we had a "secret war," we killed a whole lotta people in Laos and Cambodia for even less than the no fucking reason that we were killing them in Vietnam. I wonder if there is a lesson here.

The Rain in Spain

At their hugely popular website ‘Crooks and Liars,’ John Amato and David Neiwert have helped to expose the fact that there is no conservative party in America any more. They show that the right wingers are not conservatives, they are anarchists.

The only law the right wing believes in is the Law of the Jungle. No schools, no hospitals, no job programs, no nothing. Their idea of nirvana is Mogadishu.

-Rep. Alan Grayson

I have come to regard statists of all self-professed [ed. "soi-disant"] political ideologies as crackpot Hobbesians. "The Law of the Jungle"? Well, it works as a minor Dylan lyric. Look, Hobbes was wrong even on his own terms, but a couple of centuries of subsequent investigation, discovery, and revelation about the natural world lead ineluctably to the conclusion that it is not a war of all against all, but a vastly complex, interdependent, and beautiful mechanism for the proliferation and continuation of life. And that is not to say that there is no violence, no conflict, but that taken holistically, "nature" is not some perpetual cataclysm whose depredations we avoid only via the bulwark of civilization, but that it is instead a magisterially complicated and faceted system of systems of systems against whose billion-year evolution our brief species and briefer societies, for all their apparent (to us) ubiquity, pale and thin.

As for anarchy, I am fond of my friend J.R. Boyd's definition:

Stripped of its arbitrary associations, anarchism just means skepticism toward authority.

This being the nut of it, how are we to conclude anything but that the honorable Mr. Grayson, reading anarchy into his political opponents, objects to their insufficiently graceful acknowledgment of his authority--that is to say, the rightful authority in which he believes himself to partake by grace of his membership in a particular temoporary political majority? Are we to take it that "anarchist" is just an insult to hurl at another faction in the palace intrigues? Why not just call them terrorists? Oh, wait . . . what? You have.

Plainly and obviously, the Republican Party, the "tea party" . . . whomever Grayson is talking about, these people are not actually skeptical about authority, and certainly not about state authority. Their emphases are different, but their belief in the efficacy, use, and necessity of an extremely powerful, intrusive government mechanism is not. If so-called conservatives favor the martial over the judicial, say, or the legislative over the regulatory, well, in neither case is any real skepticism about authority observed. These are matters of mechanics, not of essence. Anyway, Republicans are quick to abandon their anti-Federal stance when "the border" is at stake, and Donks are quick to abandon their questions about the military where "humanitarianism" is concerned, and none of them are hollering that we must throw open the doors of the prisons, open the borders, permit everything, prohibit nothing, let the chips fall where they may. Accusing either one or other of the major political parties in this country, whose entire reason for being is the acquisition of political power and control of the government of the nation-state, of anarchism is like accusing the ocean of being dry.

Factors of Ten

Your average Thomas Friedman column is foolish, incomprehensible, and morally obtuse, but this is truly reprehensible:

That concern for Gaza and Israel’s blockade is so out of balance with these other horrific cases in the region that it is not surprising Israelis dismiss it as motivated by hatred — not the advice of friends.

Israel is holding ONE AND A HALF MILLION HUMAN BEINGS IN CAPTIVITY. It has imprisoned them in a concentration camp. It is one of the surpassing moral outrages of our era, an act of criminal viciousness and vindictive, retributive collective punishment that ought to shock the conscience of any human being.

The acts that Friedman finds so much more worthy of hand-waving denunciation, while regrettable and worthy of condemnation, pale in comparison. I mean, gunmen storming a summer camp are a very bad thing, but this pales beside Israel's offenses. Forget Gaza. Israel killed more people by a whole order of magnitude in its ridiculous 2006 Lebanon war than in all of Friedman's examples combined.

Wild Wild Right

Classy Master

A year or two ago, I made an offhanded reference to Terrence McNally's Maria Callas from his rather lamentable play, Master Class, in which she is portrayed as a sort of post-Tennesse-Williams model monstrous harridan, and Arthur Silber, who is one of the real Callas' great admirers, reminded me that the real Maria Callas was no more McNally's bizarre caricature of her occasional insufferably qualities than was, say, Salieri--in real life an excellent composer and a supporter of Mozart--the same man as Peter Shaffer's ridiculous musical non-entity and sort-of murderer. (Arthur has a number of pieces about Callas' artistry, including this and this.)

Anyway, there is an entirely, totally, fully, wholly, completely amazing set of recordings of actual Callas' master classes at Julliard, in which she is revealed as a kind, generous, funny, and extraordinary teacher. More yet, she expounds on her own ideas about music and artistry and shows herself to be an incisive, original, and even revolutionary musical thinker. Here she is with tenor Marko Lámpas, who sings "Tu che a Dio spiegasti l'ali" from the finale of Lucia.

Will Get Fooled Again

Being a partisan turns your brain to mush. Here is La Digs, explicatin':

This is the story of [Obama's] early days, I'm afraid, from trusting Wall Street to the CIA to the Insurance lobby to big oil --- to the Republicans. It's nice to think that these people are all operating in good faith, but unfortunately, it's just not realistic. Skepticism of all the elite institutions, not trust, is what required for successful leadership in this era.

What is it that she snidely says of conservativism . . . it cannot fail; it can only be failed.

Obviously, Obama didn't get fooled or tricked by nefarious external agents and agencies into making bad policies that run somehow contrary to his core convictions and general principles. The "bad policies" are his convictions and principles. His administration isn't a fucking victim, you goddamn apologist, you toady; it's a perpetrator!

Jewish Military Union

You know, I am not even going to get into the particulars of the Israeli raid in the Mediterranean. Suffice to say: that shit is fucked. I am glad to see that it has raised the hackles of many of the world's less-insane countries, our own mealy-mouthed hegemon excepted, needless to say, although obviously it's very sad that it should cost even a single human life to get anyone's attention. The point that really bears repeating is that the Gaza Strip is a concentration camp. I do not mean that as a metaphor or an analogy. I am not building a comparison. It isn't a figure of speech. Gaza is literally a concentration camp.

I Am Not a Number! I Am a Man!

We killed number three! How, uh . . . how many is that now?