October #FastfortheClimate

1 October, 2014.  Rabbit, Rabbit.

Today is National Kale Day… and it’s World Vegetarian Day…  and it’s the first of the month so it’s a day on which I and Many choose to fast as part of #FastfortheClimate.  We do this each for our own reasons, but coming together in an international community of climate change awareness, solidarity, and focus. Fasting is an invitation to bring contemplation into the space of hunger in one’s body — that’s the idea anyway.

Yesterday I tweeted it just as I felt it:

“Tomorrow I just want to feel connected to other people connected (not disconnected) to enormity of our historical moment @FastForClimate“

It was all going to be about that.

But this is kind of how the day unfolded:

Rabbit: Vegans, Locavores, and Recipes Galore

.…in which Kitchencounterculture explores local food, locavorism, veganism, climate impacts of diet, and A MASSIVE LIST OF RABBIT RECIPES from a really great collection of cookbooks…

In my freezer are two rabbits, which a local man, H,  the getting-elderly but still a-hunting brother of a friend, had in his freezer.  For £3 each it was hardly a sale but rather an exchange.  “Cook it like a chicken,” he advised, and told me he’d cut it in seven pieces: two back legs, 2 front legs, two middle bits and a “bonnet” (the ribs).  He recommended I “casserole” it: fry the pieces in a pan with carrots and onions, then tip it in a roasting tin with gravy, or wine, or beer.

My friend, H’s brother P, said H would have hung it for a few hours after bringing it  home (probably this time with a ferret not a rifle — I didn’t think to ask but will, and will update here), then gutted it, then hung it again for a few days before skinning and putting it into parts.  These are men who’s childhoods would have been 70 years ago.  H remembers his mother Sybyl roasting rabbit very plainly, but she would never eat anything wild herself, though duck was also on the menu for these country children of mid-Wales back then.