Rabbit with chocolate and tomato - 6/10

When we were back in NZ Dad served up his homegrown rabbit for dinner, and it was delicious.

I haven't cooked rabbit before, and as we returned to the UK with our trusty casserole I thought this would be worth a crack. I found a recipe for chocolate and tomato rabbit - apparently the original recipe was an Incan delicacy, with chihuahuas bred especially for eating. Probably tastier than the dog I had in Vietnam, but back to the rabbit recipe:

Brown rabbit and an onion
Cook for half an hour with a tin of tomatoes, a glass of white wine, some stock, and a stale bread roll broken into chunks. It was in the recipe, honest...
Add some garlic, 25g bitter chocolate, some almonds, a bit of parsley, and cook for another couple of hours.

Overall mark for the recipe: 6/10. Good, but no wow factor and it could be better. I couldn't really taste the chocolate, and also, after 3 hours (I cooked it a bit longer, and the rabbit was still very firm) the ingredients which weren't rabbit kind of lost their definition.
I think next time I will cook the rabbit for an hour and a half with just the liquids, remove meat from the bones, and cook the removed meat with the other ingredients for an hour. Wild rabbit really does need a long time at a low heat - at least the one I bought did - but it is quite tasty if you go to that effort. And relatively inexpensive - one rabbit was 4.50, and it easily yielded enough meat for three servings.
Maybe next time I will try rabbit pie. Mmm pie, everything is better in a pie.

Merry Christmas, now get off my lawn

A couple of blasts from the past, specifically the start of my gig going years. TISM were absolutely mad, and the HLAH cover of I'm on Fire rocks.
The Cash version is also worthy, but I can't find a video of that one.

One of these is mindblowingly fantastic

And one of these is fantastically mindblowing. Take your pick which is which.

Tom Jones

We went to Tom Jones on Monday. The man has a new gospel album out, and he is even better live than on the album. The venue was Union Chapel, which happens to be both intimate (seating about 700) and down the road from our house. Bonus.


He still has all his top notes, and he is 70. I had no idea that he can go low as well - he can sing about as deep as I can, which means he has at least three octaves of pure power. Truly phenomenal. The video above doesn't quite capture his presence, he owns the stage.

If you were to be extremely vocally retentive you could observe that his tone is a touch huskier than in his younger years. But the counter argument is that he is enough of a legend that the change in tone makes him even better - Johnny Cash's American Recordings series is something similar.

As an example of how enduring he is: he introduced one song by talking about performing it with Elvis after hours in Elvis's hotel room, when they were both doing Vegas back in the 60s and 70s. Elvis!

An additional bonus of the evening was Lauren Pritchard, one of the introductory acts.


She also does a nice cover of Waterfalls by TLC.

Remi Galliard, part two

Following up his 2009 video compilation, check out the latest Remi Galliard vid below:

B Movie of the week

The Hitcher, 2007 remake. Usually remakes are not as good as the originals, and in this case the original has Rutger Hauer so major kudos there, but this version still has some genuine jump / horror moments.

I just watched Sean Bean - the title villain - take out a rural police force complete with helicopter, to a soundtrack of Nine Inch Nails' Closer. O for Awesome. And thanks to the magic of youtube** , you can too.

Sean Bean has a wonderfully varied filmography. For all of his appearances in masterpieces - the Lord of the Rings, he also features in a hell of a lot of guilty pleasures - Death Race 2, Equilibrium, Silent Hill, and Ronin. The Hitcher definitely falls into the latter category, and it is awesome.

**Warning - the link contains strong language.