Through the rabbit hole

I had a terrible day.

I had to confront 5 - yes, five - students in my classes with plagiarism. They'd cut and pasted each other's homework assignment. Now it's bad enough that they did this, but they'd chosen to cheat wrong answers written with bad grammar and punctuation! The human brain is one of the greatest pattern-detection devices ever (even mine), so of course I was going to notice this. Anyway, I was very upset. I know this had nothing to do with me, but I felt like I'd been completey taken advantage of. Believe it or not, I'm not great with confrontation, and so I felt terrible the whole day, dealing with the students. At least I wasn't angry anymore.

And yes, I'm going to report them.

Then I came to home to my spotless house (Wednesday again, thank God for Fawzeya) and I had a whole rabbit waiting for me. With a head. And eyes in that head.

Incidentally, the faint of heart and/or stomach might consider stopping here.

I'd bought the rabbit - along with some onions and spices - yesterday at the organic kiosk run by AUC's desert development center. I figured, hey, why not - fresh organic rabbit, at about $3 a kilo. When the man handed me the package, all I could really see was pink flesh, so I thought, great, it's even butchered!

And to an extent, it was. The fur was gone, and they'd helpfully gutted most of it and removed the ears. (Incidentally, knock the ears off a rabbit and you've got a cat. Apparently the butchers here usually leave the ears on to prove that what you're buying is really a rabbit. But I digress.) When I opened the package this morning, my meat delight was looking back at me.

I got home this afternoon, feeling wretched, and realized I needed to take this rabbit apart. Fortunately, I'm a biologist, and I've got plenty of experience dismantling animals. Just not in my own kitchen. So I put on my apron, got out my biggest knife, and, well, got to.

I started by taking off the head, and let me tell you, once your food isn't looking at you anymore, it's much easier to deal with. I wasn't going to eat the head, so I figured, while I was at it, I'd make stock too. Into the stock pot went the head.

Next, I bent the spine back and broke the ribs to flay it open. The butcher had very thoughtfully left the liver and kidneys in. Now, I'm not a purist - I don't eat organs. So, I got my sharp, little knife out (pining for my scalpel), and into the stock pot went the organs. A few bay leaves, some garlic, and pepper, and it was off to the races for the stock. About half an hour later I noticed that one of the eyeballs had popped out, probably from the heat, and was floating around, but hey, I guess it's just more rabbity goodness.

I quartered what was left of the little beast. India was unduly interested by this whole process, even after I pointed out to her the similarities between her and the little fuzzy I was dismantling. I snapped off as many of the ribs as I could get to easily, and dumped those in the stock pot too.

Then it was on to the marinade. I'd originally wanted to cook the rabbit with white wine and mustard, but I don't actually have any white wine. Egyptian wine is ... um, perhaps best used for cooking, but liquor stores are full and far between, and Egypt doesn't seem to produce dries. I finally settled on beer as my best option. Egyptian beer isn't the finest, so I don't feel bad about using it to cook (it's basically Heineken).

I used white vinegar, cider vinegar, olive oil, beer, salt, pepper, bay leaves, rosemary, roasted garlic, and onions. And now my kitchen smells fantastic - the pot o'bunny smells great, and the marinade for the rabbit smells very good too. I'm going to continue on with a recipe for beef braised with beer and onions that I've gotten out of my mom's old Time-Life international cooking series (the Provincial France one). Unfortunately, I'm short on cookbooks here, as well as ingredients, so I didn't bother looking something more elaborate up online.

Now I've got half a bottle of beer in me, I've successfully dealt with a whole animal, and I still have a class to plan for tomorrow. All in all, this day has turned around nicely.