The organ meats were best. Rabbit meat is a little tough, but tasty enough. I guess a little salt wouldn't have hurt either; all I did was panfry it in olive oil with an onion, and it's quite edible. I still have plenty left for breakfast tomorrow; it took me so long to cook it, making sure I killed all the parasites, that I lost my appetite. Washing it down with my last Tecate, and happy that I finally, finally, finally, achieved some success hunting. It might have been dumb luck, but once I got the sights adjusted on the crossbow, my practice shots were all coming within inches of where I aimed. And cottontails, at least, sit pretty still for you most of the time. I had missed this one with my first shot, and it ran a few feet, but then sat down and waited to die. My second shot, as I said before, went clean through his head. I pushed a second bolt up through his chin into his brain to finish him off.
I'm going to try eating fresh rabbit at least once a week, which means I'll have to go hunting every day unless today wasn't just a lucky shot -- maybe I'm really getting good at it! Of course I have to watch out for rabbit starvation, but there's plenty of cactus fruit to alleviate that, being high in both carbs and, in the case of barrel cactus, oils (in the seeds, at least by the looks of them). There is also oil in the seeds of coyote melon, which is the only part of that plant edible to humans. I'll have to try mashing the fruit for the saponins which are supposed to be there. I've had really lousy luck making lye for saponifying oils, so if I want soap I'm going to have to find another source. Yucca? What a joke. I've tried every which-way to make soap from yucca -- roots, leaves, whatever, nothing works for me. Maybe these are the wrong subspecies or maybe I just don't know the secret yet.
last updated 2013-01-10 20:57:37. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com