WORDS | SB Rawz Illustration | Susanna Byrd
As is so often the case with food I love, I am both sad and delighted that there are a rapidly-dwindling number of jars in our freezer marked frijoles y conejo. The recipe came about in late summer when, still unfamiliar with cooking times for my new Instant Pot, I turned what I meant to be a pot of firm pintos seasoned with smoked rabbit back into pinto mush. Theresa, my wife, suggested taking it the extra mile into refried beans. A tray of roasted onion, garlic and green tomatoes from her garden — all seasoned with Taco Night by local blender Spice Titan — and we had a dish we couldn’t get enough of.
The second batch, which came in the wake of Theresa’s second rabbit harvest, had roasted peppers instead of green tomatoes because that’s what was then lingering in the garden.
I know I buried the lede there; I snuck it in between tomatoes and peppers, garden fare that, though living, doesn’t tend to stir our empathy the way mammals can — mammals that, say, have thick black fur speckled with silver guard hairs; mammals with big doe eyes who bow their heads to gratefully receive scratches behind the ears when Theresa does her twice-daily visits to check water and top off timothy hay and alfalfa-heavy pellets.
Since long before our paths happily crossed, Theresa had been living what she could of her homesteading dreams in the form of various food gardens, inviting seeds saved from the previous year to grow into juicy Cherokee Purple tomatoes, tangles of beans, fluffy tufts of chives and so on, all the while imagining the day when she could add laying hens to the mix.
Farther afield, she thought, would be livestock for meat. Rabbits were on her radar — her parents had raised meat rabbits for a time — but she imagined first raising a Buff Orpington rooster by hand as a kind patriarch for meat chickens. Then fate twisted and there it was, an ad online from a local fella selling a whole meat rabbit, kit ‘n’ caboodle. It was too perfect — too affordable and, even more so, too in alignment with our ethic — to pass up.
Within the week, the seller was standing in our driveway, hands on his hips, surveying our sweet little piece of land just barely across the border from Roanoke City into Roanoke County, saying, “I’m glad they’ll be here.”
The they he referenced were Thunder and Cloud, a Silver Fox rabbit buck and doe named by his 10-year-old granddaughter. He, Theresa and I then unloaded the rabbits, hutches, feed and other supplies he had amassed. By the end of day, the lean-to stretching off our one outbuilding had become a rabbit habitat.
Like that, Theresa went from a vegetable gardener to a homesteader with livestock. After reading through the handful of books that came with the deal, after Theresa draped the metaphorical red scarf over Thunder’s hutch and took Cloud for a visit, after an anticipation-filled month of waiting, after the first indication of pregnancy came with Cloud plucking tufts of hair from her own side to pad the nesting box Theresa gave her, there, beneath the blanket of her black-and-silver fur was the hairless, wriggling, adorable first litter of eight. Cloud was, as Theresa described to me time and again in the weeks that followed, a fantastic mom, feeding and wrangling her babes tirelessly until they were old enough to wean, when she then started batting them away, encouraging their independence.
I feel like I can hear you thinking: adorable? A fantastic mom? Of the rabbits you’re going to eat?!
Let me tell you something about Theresa Rawz: almost daily, I’ve watched her stop cold in her tracks to admire the beauty of deer crossing our road only to top the moment of awe with a winking comment about how good they’d look in her freezer, too. More than anyone I’ve known before, Theresa can actively and equally embody her love of the living animal and her appreciation of the harvested meat.
She cares that deer have healthy, happy deer lives. She cares that these rabbits feel loved and appreciated, that they eat well and live well, and that their transition from animal to meat happens instantaneously and painlessly.
Her love of animals and the lifestyle of self-sufficiency would have gotten her to this moment. That I came along and introduced her to Barbara Kingsolver and Michael Pollan, to Slow Foods and local foods, were what tied together these loves and her desire to be a good steward of the Earth.
The breed itself is a symbol of this: Not too long ago, Silver Fox rabbits were listed on Slow Food USA’s Arc of Taste, indicating being at risk of extinction1. So close we were to losing these animals prized for their thick, beautiful pelts and the ability to grow up to 65% of their body weight in meat with amazingly little water and feed.2 It is the great paradox of our domesticated plants and animals that when we stop eating them, we stop raising them and when we stop raising them, the breed dies off. With industrial meat production, spreadsheets determine the most cost-effective breeds to raise and all the diversity within a species falls to the wayside.
With homesteaders and small farmers, flavor and beauty can take the place on the spreadsheet where industrial agriculture businesses have metrics describing ability to withstand the stress of crowded confinement or durability in transport.
You can see the difference between these priorities easily if you compare the tomato offerings at a grocery store (would you like a slicer, a plum, a cherry or a grape tomato?) to those at a farmers market in late July to early August, when the varieties will include passed-down names like Oxheart, Mr. Stripey, Kellogg’s Breakfast, and Grandma’s Throwing Tomato — each with their own unique flavor profile and best use, whether dried, sauced, or eaten on bread slathered in mayo while standing over a sink or grass or anywhere else juicy tomato drips are welcome.
A benefit that doesn’t get picked up by the palate is how diversity in our food breeds — plant and animal — is food security, particularly pertinent as we navigate the realities of climate change.
Yes, in living this ethic, especially with meat, we are giving up the comfort of all of the carefully-erected barriers we humans have placed between ourselves and the “natural world,” the very phrasing of which is a part of that effort, as though we have somehow overcome or transcended our place in nature. I will admit that I found myself flinching on harvest days each time I heard the distinct woosh of the air rifle Theresa uses to ensure instant and painless deaths. I only watched one such dispatch, needing to have the experience, and noted that our neighbor, Keith, who is always eager to lend a hand, tenderly turned his head away as Theresa’s finger extended toward the trigger.
In this, each of the three of us were acknowledging and, in our own ways, honoring our inevitable and inextricable interdependence with all of it — that we are fully a part of the cycle of life and death, of living things feeding living things and, in that way, perpetuating life itself.
Okay, stepping off my soapbox and back into our kitchen the Sunday after the first harvest where Theresa was slicing pieces of rabbit belly she had smoked along with some legs, ribs, and backs, one of which eventually made its way into the aforementioned frijoles y conejo. The smoked belly was reminiscent of pork belly but with a greater ratio of meat to fat, making for a smoky, savory, juicy, umami bite.
I, too, was sharing my first rabbit creation, having brined, seared and, finally, braised in a spicy broth the rabbit entrusted to me.
Earlier in the year, our first peonies blossomed and I realized, as I deeply inhaled the scent for the first time ever, that peonies smell like what roses want to be when they grow up.
The first bite of the braised rabbit was like tasting a chicken thigh but somehow more complex and interesting. I tried, for the duration of that afternoon of nibbling from both the braising pan and the smoker trays, to come up with a comparison that might get a reader to the nuances of flavor that we experienced but all I’ve got is this: rabbits are to chicken what peonies are to roses.
This article first appeared in our 2024 Spring Issue, HOME.
SB Rawz is the wife of a budding homesteader, a passionate cook/preserver of the foods Theresa raises; her lifelong commitment to her small part in positive world change tends to be expressed through supporting sources of local and ethical foods, her life and business coaching practice, and her well-honed skills of complimenting strangers in passing. Learn more at rawzcoaching.com.
