Cheesecake and Rabbit

Despite being busy with the block beautification project over the weekend, I did manage to get some cooking in.

Cheesecake

With strawberries coming into season, my thoughts turned to one of my favorite treats: mascarpone cheesecake with balsamic strawberries. Here's the recipe.

Rabbit

The Coop actually had rabbit when I shopped there Friday evening. I've always been a big fan of it. I followed a recipe from Claudia Roden's book The Food of Italy: Region by Region. I like this cookbook because it covers all the regions of Italy and because she captures the essence of simplicity -- often just giving the basic structure of the recipe and letting the cook take over. She fits multiple recipes on one page.

I was grabbed by a Sicilian recipe for rabbit. I thought the agrodolce sauce was delicious, but the rabbit was tough unfortunately. I'm also not sure if I would dredge the rabbit in flour next time. Anyway, here, roughly, is the recipe:

Ingredients:

1 2.5 lb rabbit cut into pieces
1 onion, sliced
1 pint red wine (I used a cote du rhone, which worked fine.)
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons pine nuts
1 table spoon raisins
2 tablespoons chopped black or green olives
2 or 3 tablespoons olive or sunflower oil
flour

Fry the onion until golden. Dredge the rabbit in flour and fry until just browned. Add the wine and simmer for 20 minutes, until rabbit is cooked. Add the vinegar, pine nuts, raisins and olives and cook 1-2 minutes until the vinegar cooks off. There should just be a faint taste of the vinegar.

Enjoy!