One of the benefits of working in a hotel is when banquets has a site visit. They usually end up with leftover product and since we are the only restaurant on property that can actually alter our menu and utilize these products we get all the goodies. Last night we had 15 rabbits with only the hind legs removed handed to us. So we started breaking them down to loins, kidneys, frenched racks, fore legs, and scrap for stock. It's a tedious project but well worth it. Tonight we did a black pepper pasta, carrot sheet(agar and gellan), sous vide the legs overnight with duck fat and made a rillette, soaked the kidneys in milk and then basted them with brown butter, sous vide the racks ahead of time then pan seared to mr on pick up, and again sous vide the loins a la minute and gently finished in the pan as well(in my opinion the hardest part of the rabbit to execute correctly).
We agar clarified the stock and ran it through a coffee filter, the servers frenched it tableside, we added a little lemon juice and basil oil to the consomme to help with the overall flavor of the dish. Some radish greens and turnips as well.
In the end you have
1 loin
2 rack
3 kidney
4 rillette
5 consomme
The saute station loves the four pan pick up. A lite fall dish, no all we have to do is get the servers to really push it. Rabbit in Orlando is not an easy sell so it is up to them to really sell the customer on it. I'll usually give them the go ahead in pre-shift to spiel the guests on an item like this, "Try it, if you don't like it I'll buy it for you", a risk you sometimes have to take to get things moving and get people to try new things but so far we haven't bought anyone dinner on that recommendation.
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