What do you call this love??    RABBIT.

How to make Rabbit Fricassee.     Or….getting your own back when Peter Rabbit eats all your carrot tops off . 

This is an example of a GAPS meal suitable for stage one of Intro and all the way to full GAPS.

All ingredients must be organic…. this is a healing protocol after all.

You will need one or 2 wild rabbits from an organic farm. Take a pigs trotter, chicken feet and/ or some other meaty bones (or boney meats) and pack into the bottom of a stainless steel or corning ware pot ( please no Teflon or aluminium!) Just  cover the bones with water, then add a dessert spoon full of real salt. Chuck in branches of rosemary and bay, and maybe a half a teaspoon of whole  peppercorns crushed ( optional) . We are going to simmer that for an hour or 2 and draw out all the goodness from the bones ….the gelatine, the proline and glutathione etc….. into the stock.

. Put on the lid, and  turn on the heat to LOW.  Simmer while you go and water the garden for half an hour. With pot simmering away, grab your rabbits out of the fridge.  You can leave the rabbits whole if they will fit into your pot. You may need to  bend them with force , and if that doesn’t work,  cut them with a knife or poultry shears into 2 or 3 pieces, because we do need to fit them into your pot. Place the pieces of rabbit on top of the simmering bones, top up with water to the original level as some will have evaporated. Put lid on and let rabbit steam for an hour. Turn off the heat.

Go and plant seeds or put some washing on, or something while rabbit cools down. Now strip the meat from the bones, placing the rabbit bones back into the pot with the original bones. Turn the heat back on and simmer away again. Meanwhile, cut the rabbit meat into bite size pieces. I enjoy eating the rabbit kidneys as I work, with the rosemary flavour they remind me of the stuffing in a super market cooked chook, a distant memory now of course…. now that we refuse to buy abused birds from factory farms.

Look at all that delicious meat… from 2 feral animals that eat more veges from my struggling garden in a night than vegan Dr Michael Greger would eat in a week.

We roasted some egg plants which the rabbits missed ( but the goslings defoliated)  on the gas flame until charred on all sides, peeled off the char and roughly chopped the lovely flesh, scraping away as many seeds as reasonably possible. Why? Well the  skin and seeds of nightshades contain plant toxin  lectin, so we try to minimize  them.

Just a little side bar of a personal nature: For years I have noticed  tomatoes give me  diarrhea, (definitely) and joint pain, ( maybe? ) Well since being on GAPS for a couple of years it seems now  I can eat quite a few fresh tomatoes without  repercussions, so that’s nice. The trick is to eat seasonally, so that your body gets a rest from dealing with lectins or oxalate rich veges for a large part of the year.  If it wouldn’t be found in vege gardens in your town, leave it on the super market shelf. Out of season glass house tomatoes in winter are not a good idea.

A great trick for enjoying GAPS is to make simple meals with only a few ingredients. As long as the ingredients are very good quality organic, it will be delicious.  Have a different kind of meat or fish  every few days and change the 2 veges you use. The permutations are endless  and you will never got bored.

I went a bit crazy here and put too many veges into this dish.

Carrots, the charred eggplant , onion and peeled zucchini were fried in a LIBERAL amount of lard and butter. Really it is the animal fats that are full of essential vitamin A, E D and K2. These are what heal you and the veges do not offer that much nutritionally….carrots for example, do not contain vitamin A, they contain beta carotene that our body needs to convert into true Vitamin A . Veges are really  an just an excuse to add more fat.  I used about 150 grams of fat to fry the veges, then sweated them by putting the lid on…. cooking on low for 10 more minutes. Do stir  now and then to prevent burning of those precious organic vegetables.

Now I did pick some silver beet but it is high summer and February is the hottest month of the year. The silver beet is not like it is in lush winter and spring, so it is packed with another plant defense toxin: oxylate. The plant is probaly trying to ward off the bunnies with oxylate. Plants cannot run away but they certainly have powerful defensive weapons. I have learnt from GAPS practitioner Mary Ruddick just how harmful oxylate crystals can be, Ive seen them under the microscope….they are like triangular knife points. Shards of oxylate crystal like glass have even been found in the brain of a deceased Alzheimers patient! The crystals are insoluable and tend to accumulate in our joints. The can also form kidney stones which are terribly painful to pass. The Ancient Greeks had trouble with kidney stones and it is most likely because in Greece they have a long growing season and eat greens like Horta and Spinach and silver beet for many months. But they learnt how to minimize the dangers of oxylate: by boiling their greens in lots of water and disgarding the water, they reduced the oxylate content by half . If you then eat the greens with lots of calcium rich cream, milk and cheese , the oxylate in the greens will bind to the calcium and form stones of calcium oxylate in the gut, which will pass straight through you and out safely. That is way better than bare oxylate crystals piercing through the gut wall and travelling in the blood to be deposited in the liver ( gall stones) , kidney ( kidney stones) , knee and hip joints . Traditional recipes have often evolved out of a need to destroy or reduce the harm from plant toxins. Dried beans contain a lot of lectins, so steps are taken to reduce this anti nutrient : they are soaked and drained several times in Greece , cooked for 24 hours or more and then only consumed as a side dish (and not very often.) The old people know that beans improperly prepared make you sick …..not immediately but in the long term. So think again if you think “green smoothies ” with raw high- oxalate green leafy vegetables are healthy. I will make a creamy cheesey sauce to eat this stuff with tomorrow.

But back to the rabbit stew. Return the boney -herby- stock through a sieve to the sizzling pot, and stir for another few minutes. Tip  in the rabbit meat and turn off the heat.  At this point the dish can be served to those on stages 1 to 5   of intro.  For those on stage 5 , 6 and  full GAPS, Heritage  tomatoes and the basil can be  chopped and added as a garnish.  

Serve Rabbit Fricassee warm with a spoon full or more  of GAPS yogurt, some crushed fresh garlic and /or fermented vegetables like sauerkraut. These are your probiotics which are going to restore the all-important balance to your microbiome.

Ok so I am no food stylist or photographer but it tastes great . The rabbit is so tender and quite similar to chicken.

We make a big pot full and will happily eat this whenever hungry for the next few days. It  should stored in the fridge,  and when anyone is hungry they simply take out some from the cold pot and heat up in a small saucepan. Nourishing meal in no time!