Rabbit with yoghurt and mustard



Yikes, sorry - this is surely a competitor for all-time worst photo on Recipe Rifle


What with me being the size of a small South American country and liable to fall asleep at any second, my husband has been doing quite a lot of cooking.

You always get something a bit bonkers when he cooks. He'll set off for the shops with a cheery wave, planning to get a few simple ingredients for supper and, after returning two or three times because he's forgotten his keys, or his wallet, or his shoes, he'll make it to the shops and come back brandishing a pig's head, or a side of venison. Or, like the other day, some rabbit and pheasant.

More about the pheasant later, but with the rabbit he turned to Nigel Slater. That's what he does, my husband, he comes home with something weird and flicks through recipe books until he finds a thing to do with it. I, on the other hand, flick through recipe books and then go shopping for whatever it is I need. I'm not sure whose method is better. We're probably both idiots.

Anyway, I was a bit wary of the rabbit. I'm a bit wary of game in general. I don't like the occasionally pooey, ferrous tang much. But this was great. And not at all rubbery as rabbit can sometimes be. My husband claims this is from the resting.

So here we go - Nigel Slater uses cream, but we didn't have any so we used yoghurt (a danger of reading recipes post-shopping), but it was delicious anyway. Using cream would have resulted in a "longer" sauce, but I thought the yoghurt added an interesting tartness to everything. Either is good. You can also do this with chicken. I mean, not instead of the yoghurt, instead of the rabbit.

4 rabbit joints (we ended up using boned rabbit chunks from Waitrose that were reduced)
3 cloves garlic
2 tbsp French mustard - one of Dijon and one of grainy if you can
olive oil
about 150ml of yoghurt or cream

1 Mash together the garlic and mustard with some salt and pepper. Stir in olive oil to make a thin paste (about 2/3 glugs). Rub the mixture over your rabbit.

2 Place in a shallow baking dish, drizzle over some more oil and bake at 190C for about 25mins.

3 Take the dish out of the oven and pour off most of the oil. Tip the yoghurt/cream over the rabbit and shift it all around so it's evenly coated. Bake for another 20 mins.

We ate this with buttered noodles. Then my husband went to play Fives and I watched 3 episodes of House back to back and painted my nails.