Rabbits make delicious meals for winter dinners
For most of us, February is the last month we’ll have a chance to hunt till the early seasons roll around again next fall. This is also rabbit time. The season for hunting cottontails and swamp rabbits remains open statewide through Feb. 28, and many Arkansas hunters are enjoying a last taste of the winter outdoors while gathering fresh game for the dinner table. We’ ll be among these late-season nimrods, hoping to bag a few rabbits to eat. A few will make it to the freezer to tide us over until the next small-game season. Most, however, will be cooked fresh from the field. We love a hot game meal when it’s still cold outside, and as far as we’re concerned, no game is more delicious than rabbit. Few wild game meats are as delectable and versatile. Rabbit is delicate, white and lean, with just a hint of gaminess. It can be cooked in every conceivable way, from simply fried, baked or roasted to stews, casseroles and pies. The taste is comparable to that of chicken, and recipes for the two are interchangeable. Rabbits were the first game animals I pursued and the first I learned to cook. Perhaps that’s why they’re still my favorite, on the table and in the field. When I was younger, I hunted cottontails every week of the season, and whenever I camped with friends, we would kill several rabbits for dinner and spit-roast them over a campfire with nothing more than a sprinkling of salt and pepper to season them. Those rabbits were especially good because we ate them right there where we killed them, fresh from nature’s larder. They were good because we had killed them. They were good because they were cooked over a campfire built in the fresh air of a cold winter night with the barred owls calling around us and the stars twinkling overhead. That’s when all game is best, we think — when you’re out there and you can feel that primitive, deep-down-inyour-soul connection with the animal you’re eating. It’s a feeling you never forget, a feeling that tells you this is right; this is the way it was meant to be. One animal dies and is eaten by another, and in the eating, a circle is completed. Later in life, when I discovered an interest in cooking wild-game dishes, rabbit became the basis for many of my experiments. It proved itself delicious in scores of different ways — basted in a rich barbecue sauce, smothered in fiery sauce piquant, slow-cooked in a thick brown gravy, fried in a crunchy coating of corn flakes and butter, diced in a quickmade hash. I have never found a bad recipe in which rabbit was the main ingredient. Here are some of the ways I’ll be serving up rabbits this year. Perhaps you’ll enjoy these recipes, too.