Sloppy Hoppy

 As I have mentioned before, I have canned a lot of rabbit. With the bones, quart jars are more or less needed, and the odd-shaped pieces of meat mean the quart jars won't have as much meat in them as they would if they were packed with boneless chicken breast chunks, but the process overall works well.

Then one has to figure out what to do with the canned rabbit.  It can be used any way you would use canned chicken, and another option is to use it in place of ground beef--they obviously are not the same, but one idea I got from a few podcasts was to make sloppy hoppy--i.e., sloppy Joes using rabbit meat instead of ground beef.  I looked and found some Crock Pot recipes, which I then adapted.

 

1 quart canned rabbit (usually about 1-1.5 lb of meat)

1 can tomato sauce (or tomato paste; see below)

2 Tb dried chopped onion, rehydrated

1 tsp. powdered garlic

2 Tb mustard

1/4 c brown sugar (or Whey Low for low-carb)

2 Tb white vinegar

2 Tb water (if tomato paste used; omit if using tomato sauce)

1 tsp Worchestershire sauce

1/2 tsp salt

My first attempt used tomato paste, because I thought the sauce would be too watery.  I would judge that to be a swing and a miss.  It ended up being edible, but it was obviously dry and it over-cooked and burned a little at the top edge in the Crock Pot (cooking time is about 4 hours on medium, which I have done, or 2-3 on high, which I have not tried).  The second effort with tomato sauce turned out well.

It's worth keeping in mind going forward.

 

 

 

Learning Cast Iron

 A number of years ago I somehow stumbled onto the Kickstarter campaign for Stargazer, which was seeking to make a line of cast iron skillets (10 inchest first).  I chipped in and soon had my pan (it's an original run; no manufacture date is on the assist handle).  Then... I pretty much didn't do anything with it.   I cooked a couple of things in it, but it more or less just sat around, eventually developing a little rust in a few spots.  I hadn't ever really cooked much with cast iron.  It came nominally seasoned, and what I had cooked in it had worked out okay, but it never made it into daily (or even monthly) use.  Finally, I did a little research, got a cast iron eraser from Lodge to remove the rust spots (that worked okay, not great), and did two coats of avocado oil seasoning at 400 degrees for an hour.  That worked well enough that I decided to try fried eggs.

The eggs are working out great; mine don't necessarily slide around the pan on their own, but neither do they stick--exactly.  Usually a nudge from the spatula is needed to make them mobile. In the picture above, an egg is shown with about 3/4 tablespoon of butter.

I have also done cornbread and pancakes; all work well.  For the cornbread, I used the tallow recipe mentioned previously, and it worked very well.  The surface area of the pan is about the same size as that of an eight-inch square glass dish at the cooking surface, but then the walls slope outward and up.  It is probably an insignificant difference.  The cornbread was not noticeably thinner than when baked in glass, but the crust was much better-developed. I put the pan in the oven to preheat, then used some lard to grease the bottom and sides before putting the batter in. This may be my go-to method in the future.

There's a lot cast iron can do and much it cannot do well.  I'm going to be experimenting more with it in the future.