Rabbit in Red Wine Sauce
Chop and fry three or four onions in three ozs butter. When soft and golden add two desert spoons of plain flour stir well then slowly stir in a large glass of red wine. Add seasoning, (salt, pepper, a little hot chile and whatever else you fancy) and a couple of stock cubes. Stir in some cream.
Fry the rabbit sections (4 back legs, 4 front legs and two backs) to seal them. Put in a slow cooker, cover with the sauce and leave to cook for a couple of hours.
Beautiful.
Mostly, this week, I have been butchering road kill.
Muntjack deer are small - and very tasty. If you find one freshly killed on the roadside you are lucky. If a friend finds one and drops it off at your house because you are know to enjoy road kill you are even luckier.
The following is best done outside.
Cut off the head and last joint of the front legs (a saw is easier than a knife). Hang the deer by the back legs. Slit the belly open and remove the guts. Tear, cur and pull at the pelt from the slit up the hind legs to just below the rope. Pull down hard peeling the pelt down to the shoulders. Pull the front legs out one at a time and remove the pelt completely. Leave the carcass to hand for a few hours then take it down and cut off the last joints of the leg. Joint the carcass, bag and freeze.
Venison for the table. Recipe may follow.
A message to those who consider butchering and killing road kill or shot game to be disgusting.
If your philosophical position on meat eating means that your diet is totally vegan or sensibly vegetarian then you have my admiration - though you will probably not want it. If you are a meat eater and consider that instructions on how to prepare road kill for the pot are disgusting then you do not have a philosophical position at all.
I am a meat eater but do not really approve of the way most meat is farmed. Raising beef cattle or chickens is a very inefficient way of producing food - itn helps to ensure that starvation continues in third world countries.for the grains etc that are used to feed the cattle and chickens are sourced world wide. Poor countries are forced to sell their food to rich countries in order to be able to pay for the goods that the well off in those countries can afford. The rich countries feed good food to animals so that their people can eat more meat than is good for them - all praise to McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken for they make our children obese. The quality of life for our farmed animals also leaves a lot to be desired and avoidable cruelty to living things should not be tolerated.
However, a deer that has lived a free and happy life that then wanders into the road in front of a car should not be wasted. The rabbits that eat the crops grown to feed people have to be kept in sustainable numbers or we will starve. They live a happy life, are shot, snared or neetted and their bodies should not be wasted.
And happy wild meat tastes so much better.
