26 September 2009

The Manicou Trap


I am not a vegetarian but I rarely eat meat. Times being what they are though, the term 'needs must' is especially apt. We spent the day bickering, which is very unusual for us. T keeps rabbits in a coop in the yard, of which, there are nine...to date,... and we had resolved that one would be on the menu this weekend. T would cull, (a much better word than kill) and I would clean, season and cook it. Many years ago, I had watched someone skin a rabbit and felt confident that I could remember how it was done. I was a little unsure about the cleaning part but Google provided the answers I was looking for and I took solace in one particular website that also gave detailed descriptions regarding bear and moose .I was lucky, it was just a 'leettle' ( banish all thoughts of Peter) rabbit. I strengthened my resolve and searched for recipes and settled on a combination of fricassee and saute, courtesy of SusieQ, and tried to ignore the accompanying cute bunny shots. It was, I admit, a mistake to mention tularemia or "rabbit fever" to T, who dismissed it as being "something I read on the computer" but Wiki alarmed me and I realised I would then have to examine the entrails, search for the liver and check it for any white or yellow bits.. Oh...... Breathing deeply I requested all knives to be sharpened, every available herb to be picked, the head to be removed and the carcass hung above a bowl, for the blood to drain. My mind then decided to explore Buddhism versus earth mother, "lucky" rabbits" feet and how to cure them, how to remove the skin and keep the fur from spoiling... whilst catching sight of leetle ears bobbing behind the chicken wire coop window. T, meanwhile, was engrossed in hand washing and muttering, 'too coward" and steupsing in a vexation. It was some agonising hours later that we both admitted that rabbit would not be on the menu, T confessing that he would have had some difficulty dispatching one of his 'babies' and me knowing full well that, even if I had managed to clean and cook, I doubted very much whether I would have been able to swallow. Tonight we are having rice and wings, which are cheap, come conveniently frozen, in a plastic bag, and bare no resemblance to anything that we have reared or fed.Which brings me to our next venture...The Manicou Trap. Beautifully built by T, (please zoom in and take special note of the Adidas hinges) the trap is due to be set in Corn Buck this weekend.

11 comments:

  1. And, that is the difficulty of raising cute little animals for the intention of food. I can steal eggs from the hens, squirt milk from the goats, but look at them in the eye and think - food? What meat I eat needs to come from somewhere other than my own yard.
    Good to see a post, again.

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  2. ty cottagesweet...yes....thanks to supermarkets and packaging we have been relieved of all reality...:)

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  3. lol... wow... this is too funny...

    loving the manicou trap... although i sure as hell wouldn't be eating manicou... is like eating a rat really...

    i'd stick to wings and rice, or back and neck if i were you...

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  4. Hey Will,
    Yes. please note the location of lovely trap in the hope that someone else finds any captured creatures before we do. I do actually like the taste of manicou, having been tricked into eating it, thinking it was stewed chicken, kind of gamey,...and tatou..even better..
    ..back o' neck...? sorry, that I cannot do....makes me heave just thinking about it.

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  5. Haha, the thing that cracked me up was T muttering about coward yet he ain't volunteering to kill, haha.

    How about fish? Catch fish...or is that not so easy there?

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  6. How about fishing? I love the thought of fishing in a cool shady spot, minus mosquitoes!

    Tell T I'm cracking up at his mutterings about 'too coward' while not volunteering to do the deed.

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  7. yes GG, fishing sounds perfect....and the 'too coward' mutterings should have given me a clue as to what he was really feeling... poor T...

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  8. Made me smile - Glad you couldn't eat 'Peter Rabbit' after all. xxxx

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  9. Hi zooms.....

    Aah! Very topical subject for me at the moment. We just had our last year's lambs put in the freezer. It's a hard one, but I try not to look them in the eye, and see only legs of lamb and chops when handling them at the end. They had a great 12 months here, with no stress apart from shearing and their 'last' ride.

    The next year's babies are all now safely on the ground and we are really enjoying them.

    It seems honest to me,if we are meat eaters, rather than the impersonality of the supermarket.

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  10. I was waiting for the part where you marched out to the coop at which time I was going to jump off the blog, But, Thank God you changed your mind. It seems to me that these rabbits are pets.
    The meat dilemma is very real and I am not a vegetarian, but I can't look dinner in the eye :(
    However, the above post says something about humane treatment of food animals.
    A dilemma indeed.

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