The Fried Foods and Bunny Menu

• Smothered rabbit
• Banana corn fritters
• Sourdough bread with dried fruit
• Corn on the cob
• Mango chimichangas with raspberry lime sauce

We’ve wanted to get a rotofryer for a long time, and we finally gave in. They have several very nice features. They use less oil than other electric fryers. They have lids so you don’t get splattered by hot oil. They precisely control the oil temperature, so things come out better. And they provide a means to filter and re-use oil a couple of times (don’t re-use oil too many times! ick!).

In order to play with our new toy we had to fry something. We of course went overboard and picked several frying recipes, even though we only used one of them with the rotofryer.

The main dish was “smothered rabbit,” from one of our favorite cookbooks, Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen. We substituted sweet bell pepper for the onion, and carrot for the celery. It was by far the most flavorful and wonderful bunny recipe I’ve ever had (bunny is, after all, white meat). We spiced and pan-fried the bunny, then cooked it in stock that had been thickened with a roux. By the time we were done we had a marvelous gravy to go with the bunny over rice.

The side dish was banana corn fritters, from Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Tastes. Again we substituted sweet bell pepper for onion (I’m not so fond of onion), and we served them with maple syrup instead of confectioner’s sugar. Note: after removing these from the oil, put them on a rack overtop of a baking sheet, rather than on paper towels. This cuts down on a lot of oiliness.

Also, make sure to take them out while they’re still bubbling a bit. The steam helps to keep the oil out of the fritters.

We served corn on the cob, just because it’s summer and we love corn. We also made sourdough bread and threw in a lot of dried fruits (cranberries, cherries, blueberries).

Dessert consisted of mango chimichangas with raspberry lime sauce, from Fried and True. We couldn’t get 10″ tortillas this weekend, so we used eggroll wrappers instead, which worked just fine. The lime in the raspberry lime sauce made it taste fantastic! This is what we put through the rotofryer, and it worked wonderfully.

For hints on how to make yummy fried food without all the fat content, try to catch a rerun of the fried foods episode of “Good Eats,” a Food Network show that blends cooking and film noir to disturbing and marvelous effect.