Mystery Stew
Warning: contains photos of dead animals. Continue reading at your own risk. Tom Mannion, the Direction of Student Activities (or, as Techers sometimes put it, “paid to give students free food”), hosted an Iron Chef event on Thursday night – four teams of student cooks are given mystery ingredients they must use to cook with, and retired-chef Tom Mannion himself judges the resulting dishes. I was quite excited for this event not because I was going to attend, or to look at the super fancy (and sometimes not so fancy) things the students whip up, but because of the promise of FREE FOOD.
The cooks weren’t going to use everything provided, and Tom Mannion, being super awesome as usual, gives away all the food that he couldn’t keep to hungry cheap college students like us. Including the secret ingredient. There’s my loot from the iron chef event.
Look! It even has teeth and a tongue! Yum.
(I firmly believe that if you can’t look at your food in the eye, you shouldn’t be eating it. Meat is the same thing as dead animals flesh! Deal with it!) The secret ingredient for tonight’s meal is (leftover) rabbit. Being not very pro at cooking, the only rabbit dish we can think off the top of our heads was rabbit stew. So rabbit stew it is! Stew is possibly one of the easiest foods you can make. You just dump all of your ingredients in a pot, turn on the heat, and forget about it for a few hours. Figuring out what ingredients to use might be a bit more trouble, but you can’t really go wrong with having a base of potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, and leeks (or green onions). Dump some black pepper and salt in, and you’re set for a stew.
The hardest part of making rabbit stew was actually taking apart the rabbit. It’s very hard to cut anything when all of your knives are dull… After attempting (and failing) to dissable the rabbit for way too long, I gave up and just dumped the whole thing in the pot, spine and all. Whatever. It’ll add flavor.
Seems legit! And here’s the leftover rabbit:
The rabbit came with liver, which seemed like a waste to throw away. Friend N, who had just came back from the Land of the Far Away, actually knew how to cook and suggested that we make something fancy with it. He decided on Pâté, which had enough accents in its name to at least seem fancy.
Sadly, we are poor college students and therefore not fancy at all. Having none of the correct tools, we ended up crushing the liver-garlic-butter mix by pushing it through a strainer. It won’t be very smooth, but, hey, it has garlic in it. Must be delicious.
After a very long time, the stew was finally done! It was a bit undersalted, but that can be fixed. And the rabbit? It tasted like chicken.
We also had fancy liver paste with saltines. This tasted a lot more legit than the stew. I guess that’s what happens when you actually know how to cook.
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