Thanks, Bugs Bunny!

For Valentines's Day, Joe and I bought our own copy of The Princess Bride as part of the ingredients to a romantic dinner. What's the cutest thing we could eat, we wondered? A cute, wide-eyed, furry--

WABBIT!

OK, for those of you who don't eat meat, this is not gonna sound very yummy. But for those of you who do--TRY RABBIT--IT'S FANTASTIC!!

I simply didn't know.

Of course I'm lucky to be married to a talented cook. Joe made "Coneglio in porcetta"--a whole rabbit marinated overnight, Italian style, in white wine, and stuffed (Yeah, Joe did the whole trussing thing with needle and thread) with bread crumbs, organic salami, Black Forest ham, sauteed fennel and fresh fennel sprigs, and four cloves of garlic, served with a cream fennel sauce and bits of crisp fried bacon on top. The combination was perfect. The fennel was a mild, sweet compliment to the delicate white meat and the savory stuffing.

Rabbit is low in fat but not dry, and tastes like young turkey or duck without the heavy notes that a fattier type of meat can give. We got ours frozen at our local supermarket (Joe had contemplated shooting a snowshoe hare, but I'm really glad we settled on the domestic kind--it was absolutely not gamey tasting).

Served with a bottle of pinot grigio chilled outside on a 10 degree Fairbanks evening, had this been a first date, I would have fallen madly in love all over again with my intense and quirky but decidedly hot little cyclemaniac with his odd sense of humor and many talents.