🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the month of December; for the occasion, an assortment of non-holiday-related topics — though I have to point out that Saturnalia will be upon us in a couple of weeks, so get your ass in gear for the occasion — that have come by me recently: a rabbit stew for your pleasure
rabbit stew. From Wikipedia, some bare facts:
Rabbit stew, also referred to as hare stew when hare is used, is a stew prepared using rabbit meat as a main ingredient. Stuffat tal-Fenek, a variation of rabbit stew, is the national dish of Malta. Other traditional regional preparations of the dish exist, such as coniglio all’ischitana on the island of Ischia, German Hasenpfeffer and jugged hare in Great Britain and France. Hare stew dates back to at least the 14th century … Rabbit stew is a traditional dish of the Algonquin people and is also a part of the cuisine of the Greek islands. Hare stew was commercially manufactured and canned circa the early 1900s in western France and eastern Germany.
Rabbit stews are characteristically rich and flavorful. Yes, even the British jugged hare.
Stew 1: Asian soup spoons. I had a sizable stock of Chinese soup spoons that my disabled hands can manage easily, like these (bought with my man Jacques decades ago):
(#1) Chinese soup spoon from Sur la table
But they have a fatal flaw: they are porcelain, so that if I let one slip out of my fingers in the kitchen, or clumsily sweep one off a kitchen counter, it falls onto the tiled floor and smashes into shards, sharp bits of glass that make a minefield of half the kitchen. I have only a few spoons left, and one of the last exploded into daggers yesterday. Misery.
Sending me to the net to find safer substitutes. In what is, I hope, the last chapter in kitchenware replacement — a saga chronicled in my 5/20/23 posting “More new things”:
My previous “New Things” posting (on 5/11) was about replacing household furnishings that were difficult, painful, or actively dangerous for me to use with more suitable items. As it happens, the replacements were well-designed aesthetically as well as functionally.
… In my kitchen cabinets I have a full set of handsome stoneware plates and dishes that Jacques and I bought for everyday use, plus a full set of elegant china for when we had guests, but now it’s all way too heavy for me to handle, and far too breakable. [plates, bowls, glasses, mugs, cups, all had been reduced to shards when I was unable to hold them and they dropped onto the tiled floor of my kitchen]
… Half an hour of searching, and I homed in on … wheat straw [and polypropylene plastic] plates: lightweight, unbreakable, microwave and dishwasher safe, especially recommended for children and the elderly [also available in a variety of pastel colors I found attractive]
Yesterday’s search for comparable soup spoons took me through pages of eminently unsuitable candidates, until I came across a bold surprise, not at all resembling the Chinese soup spoons in #1:
(#2) From Amazon: JapanBargain brand red and black melamine soup spoon with hook
Oh my, creation and destruction, passion and death, blood and earth! But, of course, crucially, the red of the Japanese flag:
(#3)
Meanwhile, the plastic melamine is for all practical purposes unbreakable. I’ve ordered a dozen, to be delivered tomorrow.
Leave a Reply