Recipe: Rabbit in milk

I got adventurous last night and tried modifying a recipe to use with rabbit. Jamie Oliver has a Chicken in milk recipe that looked interesting to me, so I figured I'd give it a shot with rabbit. Of course I had to modify it a bit because of a few things. One, I forgot to thaw the rabbit meaning it had to be cooked from a frozen rabbit, and two, I'm unable to do a recipe as written for cooking from what I can tell.

Ingredients:
1 large or 2 small rabbits
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
1 stick butter
1 stick cinnamon
A hand-full of dried sage
2 lemons
1 full bulb of garlic, cloves separated but not peeled
1 quart milk

Method:
Due to not having thawed rabbits I couldn't brown the chicken in the oil before mixing everything else together. With a thawed rabbit, brown the outside of the rabbit in oil while pre-heating the the oven to 375F (190C).

Mix all of the ingredients together in the pot so it fits fairly closely together, and cook with the lid closed for ~1.5 hours basting with the juices in the pan when you remember to. I did it a couple times and actually turned the rabbits when I did so. Remove from the oven, and serve on or off the bone with mixed greens. I think this would be good specifically with rice and broccoli, but we had it with some lightly spiced Brussels sprouts.

This is the recipe that has tasted the most like roast chicken of any recipe I've managed with rabbit. The milk leads to the flesh being very tender, and the lemon with cinnamon gives it an interesting core flavor in addition to the taste of the meat itself. Served with some of the curds from the milk separating due to the lemon it is really delicious. I under salted and peppered it which is easy enough to fix post cooking, and I'd probably do it that way again.

I am incredibly frustrated with myself right now though, because after eating last night I was so tired I remembered to bring in the water bottles from the rabbits, and an extra load of wood for the wood stove, but I forgot to put the rabbit away. We got 2 servings out of a probably 16 serving dish of really delicious rabbit. The rest of it is now feeding the chickens because I was careless.

I'm looking forward to trying this recipe again, and I'd probably add some ground cloves to it for a really New England fall flavor.