Make Hollandaise Sauce or Debone a Rabbit. Choose One, Sinner!

I started the daube de lapin today, which meant I had to run to the store and buy a few ingredients. Considering I'm also going to be making beuf bourguignon this Monday, I also bought all the ingredients for that.

But first, I had to debone a rabbit. Yeah, get a knife and cut all the major muscle groups from his little frame. I watched a few people on YouTube do it, and of course they did it in less than 6 minutes. I was hacking away for a good half an hour. The thing that sucks about rabbit compared to beef is you really need the entire rabbit if you're hoping to get enough meat for four to eat, while with beef, an entire roast might come from a single muscle of the steer.

I did my best to get as much meat as I could off the little guy, but I had a really bad, cheap knife, and I was grossly inexperienced. And for what I could recover, I also had to cut away the outer sinewy parts, so that just resulted in a waste of more meat. All in all, I ended up hacking away probably 1.5 pounds of meat, while I fear I needed three. I would have tried to get more meat off his little arms, or try to harvest more from the scraps of sinew and fat laying around my counter, but it would have been far more work for maybe another mouthful of meat, and whatever meat was still laying around my counter had basically been reduced to bunny burger anyway.

So I went to Harmon's, hoping to find more bunny meat there. They told me it was illegal for them to keep wild meat (like rabbit and other things a person would hunt) with traditional things like burger and chicken. They were kind enough to direct me to the stewing beef, though, for the beuf bourguinon.

And then in the produce, I found I have a moral objection to buying an entire bunch of parsely so that I could use two sprigs of it for my rabbit marinade. So I just pulled two sprigs from a bunch, wrapped them in a produce plastic bag, and stuffed the bundle in my pocket. A five finger discount for a couple pennies' worth of parsley never hurt anyone, and I'm sure Harmon's will recover from their loss.

In light of the low amount of rabbit meat, we're going to have to add baby red potatos and carrots to the stew to make it a good meal. Considering the marinade that will also become the broth, I think these additions will suit everything rather nicely.

Oh yeah, and another thing unrelated to this happened to me yesterday, and possibly again today. I found out the reason why I'm suddenly dropping weight rather rapidly is because I'm not eating as many calories as I should. The bare minimum for someone like me is 2000 calories per day, and yesterday I ate about 1200 to 1400 calories. This means it's very possible that I'm losing something more than fat. At least I know tomorrow won't be a problem with hitting the calorie threshold.