Rabbit Fettuccine with Alfredo and Pancetta

The dinner prep starts off with a fat rabbit cooked in an InstantPot for 35 minutes on high pressure, then a 15 minute natural release of the pressure. After cooling off a bit, the meat gets deboned, and the bones are set aside to make a bone broth. Going into the pot he’s about 4 or 5 pounds.

If you like chicken Alfredo, you’ll love this recipe for Rabbit Alfredo.

The spices I used in the initial pot are shown here. Tarragon, smoked paprika, black pepper, sage, turmeric, oregano, and rosemary.

The next step is to cook pancetta. Now this stuff is cubed, but it’s almost like bacon. In fact if you don’t have pancetta you could probably just use bacon and it’ll still taste alright.

I make sure to save the grease from cooking the pancetta. I start it off in the pan with a tablespoon or two of olive oil so it doesn’t burn and stick to the pan, until the grease renders out of the pancetta.

I cook the pancetta until it’s golden brown.

The pancetta grease is used to make a roux. This is a simple gravy base made with meat drippings and a couple spoonfuls of all purpose flour. Stir this in well.

Now comes the fun part. You have to get all the other ingredients open and ready to go in the pan…. Because you have to turn the heat on the stove to it’s lowest setting. I start off breaking and scrambling 3 eggs in a bowl. Then I have a small container of heavy cream, and some grated cheddar cheese. The “dance” starts now. In this pan of roux, I pour in the eggs and stir them. I start adding heavy cream and stirring it too. Next comes a handful of cheese. Then some garlic, black pepper, and keep the container of cream nearby. You slowly stir this mixture in the pan and cook it on very low heat. If you DON’T keep stirring it as you cook, it will become soupy scrambled eggs. Nope. You want this to cook into a thick sauce. As it cooks down the sauce will start to get too thick. Just add a tiny amount of heavy cream and keep stirring until it’s the consistency of gravy. Because that’s what it basically is — a thick creamy cheese gravy. You can do one of two things at this point. Remember that pancetta ? You can save it as a garnish on top of the plate, or you can do like I did….. just add all the crumbles in the cheese sauce and stir them in.

While the sauce is cooking, I already have my fettuccine noodles going in the InstantPot. I decided to try some new brown rice noodles cooked in some of the leftover juices from the rabbit. I get the noodles going for 4 minutes with a 10 minute slow release of pressure and I don’t even have to bother with them while I’m making the Alfredo. I chose to try the brown rice fettuccine for a reason. I figure that with all the grease, meat, and cheese…. I’d like to cut down on some of the carbs. This is a dish that will danged sure fill you up. You can use regular pasta if you want — doesn’t matter really because it all tastes pretty good.

The noodles are plated up once they’re done and drained well.

I have the deboned rabbit ready to go next.

The way I like to spoon this out is chunks of rabbit directly on top of the noodles. Sauce is next. Then I sprinkle some panko bread crumbs as a topper on everything. You can skip the panko if you don’t like it. I don’t bother cooking the panko…. It’s just bread crumbs to help soak up any left over grease from cooking the rabbit….. or maybe help soak up some of the cheese sauce. It’s just more carbs, but since I used brown rice noodles I guess I could get away with using panko.

After dinner…. You don’t throw away any of the rabbit bones or cartilage or skin.

What you do instead is put all of it back into your InstantPot with some more spices and you fill it to the line with water.

You cook the bones and such for another 35 minutes again, and you make bone broth out of it. Sometimes I continue to refill the water once I’ve strained it out and I run it again maybe two more times. Then I take all the liquids and mix them together and put it in jars in my fridge for cooking rice or more pasta over the next few days.

Some of this rabbit bone broth with a spoonful of bacon grease or butter added in makes some of the best rice water to cook with. By the time I’m done with good old Bugs Bunny, there’s very little useable left of him but a few toothpick shards of bone. I try to break up the bones in order to get the marrow boiled out into the broth. People underestimate how much the marrow contributes to the flavor of the bone broth.