Cooking: Rabbit Stifado

A while back Selena had asked me to help her cook up some rabbit stifado. However, due to complications outside of our control, we were unable to make it the right way. I'm not gonna go into the details but let's just say that there were too many cooks in the damn kitchen. After that day I told Selena that I'd help her make the dish the right way.

Last night we finally got the opportunity to do so. Selena had gotten the rabbit from Ranch 99 frozen so she defrosted it prior to coming over. We hacked up the rabbit with a meat cleaver which was scary and fun at the same time.

I left my camera at a friend's house the night before so I was truly thankful that Selena brought hers. Plus, don't the pics look more pro? Anyway, the next step was browning the rabbit. I threw some salt to season with careful direction from Selena not to oversalt. I couldn't use pepper to season because she's allergic to the stuff.

Next we set the browned rabbit aside and put in chopped onion, carrot & minced garlic.

We let that soften up before adding 2 cups of dry red wine to deglaze. After simmering it for "10 minutes", we added chopped tomatoes.

The rabbit went back in the dutch oven and we simmered it for 1 hour. Ideally I would've liked to simmer it for 2-3 hours to make it super tender but people were getting hungry and my artichoke dip was almost gone.

So here it is served on a bed of polenta :) I would've liked to properly season to my taste but other than that the dish was very flavorful. I think the next time I'll add more allspice berries & another cinnamon stick. I am pleased that we were able to do this dish the right way.