Author: Ari LeVaux

I was in the front yard when my buddy Thumper drove by slowly. He tossed something out his window at me.

“I’ll see you tonight,” he hollered, speeding away, as I held out my hands to catch the flying package.

It was a dressed and frozen rabbit, which I placed, still wrapped in plastic, in a big bowl of hot water to thaw. I had all day to decide what to do with it.

At a fancy restaurant, I recently saw rabbit on a menu, roasted with tarragon and rosemary. I was struck by how this preparation resembled the way one might prepare chicken. Indeed, the tastes-like-chicken comparison surpasses only the rabbit’s mating capacity in the annals of rabbit cliché.

But why, I wondered, would a rabbit taste like a chicken? A rabbit is a mammal, like a cow. A chicken is a bird. My farmer friend Bob doesn’t ask why. “Rabbit’s a little drier,” he says, “not as fatty. But you can do anything to rabbit that you would to chicken. We always have some rabbit stock simmering on the stove.”

I scoured the Internet in search of interesting ways to cook rabbit. The best site I found was http://diju.tripod.com/Rabbit/recipes.html, where I was tempted to try “Beer-Butt Rabbit,” in which open cans of beer are stuffed with chopped garlic and onions, and the rabbit, rubbed in spices, is draped over the beer cans on a grill. But I had only three cans of Pabst left, and I didn’t want to split the last one with Thumper.

Another recipe read, “Grill for two hours, or until legs and wings wiggle freely.”

Was that an avian slip or are the front limbs of rabbits really called “wings”?

I settled on a recipe for braised rabbit with prunes. If you want the recipe exactly as it appeared, you can find it on that Web page. I modified it in a few key ways, substituting breadcrumbs for flour, adding whole garlic cloves, and most important, I swapped fresh plums for prunes.

Plums! Now is the season, and my little tree is finally producing fruit. How could I go to the store and get dried plums (aka prunes) when plums hang ripe on the tree? Okay, technically, plums and prunes are not exactly the same. Prunes are a type of plum that is usually dried. But I’m not here to split hairs; just rabbits.

I cut off the arms and legs (which really did resemble wings), drumsticks, and thighs. I sliced across the long torso, through the vertebrae, until I had manageable chunks. I treated the liver and heart like everything else. First, I seasoned the meat with salt and pepper and dredged it in breadcrumbs. In a large cast-iron skillet, I melted four tablespoons of butter on medium heat and slowly browned the rabbit parts. Once everything was brown and crispy I placed it all in a big cast-iron pot and added two cups of chicken stock. Then I added two pounds of fresh, split, and pitted plums (more plums would be fine). Finally, I added the whole cloves of a head of garlic and another 1/2 cup of breadcrumbs. I stirred it all together and baked it with the lid on, stirring occasionally, at 375 for about 2 1/2 hours, or until the rabbit was falling-off-the-bone tender.

Thumper came over with a container of fresh feta cheese. We made a salad while the rabbit cooled to an edible temperature.

It was an Atkins evening of rabbit and salad vinaigrette, which complemented each other beautifully. The best part was the liver, drenched in plum sauce.

Thus began my exploration of the plum. The next day I marinated salmon in soy sauce, garlic, and ginger. Meanwhile, I cooked some chopped bacon and fresh plums and a little cider vinegar. When the plums dissolved, I added the salmon and the marinade to the pan and fried it home. Ooo la la.

Yes, the plum and the rabbit have taught me plenty. But there is so much more to know. If anyone ever tries “Beer-Butt Rabbit,” please tell me what it’s like.

My friend Tshewang is from Bhutan. The people of his tiny Buddhist nation in the Himalayas are generally low-key, polite, and soft-spoken; they enjoy praying for universal harmony and the happiness of all beings. Despite such mild manners, there is nothing mild about the Bhutanese diet. They eat hot chili peppers the way many Americans eat French fries — in big piles.

By the time most Bhutanese kids are 5 years old, they are heartily wolfing down flaming platefuls of ema datse, a dish of chilis and cheese. When you eat ema datse, your nose and eyes start to run. You stop eating, but your head only gets hotter. It is painful and a little scary. At the same time, it’s exhilarating. Hot chili peppers trigger an addictive release of endorphins in your brain.

On a recent visit, Tshewang taught me how to make ema datse. We didn’t know which kind of cheese to use (since we couldn’t find any Bhutanese cheese), so we made three batches, identical except for the cheese, and invited my friends over for a trial. We tried feta, mozzarella, and cheddar kurds. Tshewang selected feta as the best. My friends — when they were finally able to speak and think clearly — agreed. Here’s the recipe:

Slice hot peppers — like jalapeno, serrano, artledge, or cayenne — lengthwise and put them in a pan with canola oil. If you want, you can add chopped onions and ginger, though you may not be able to taste them. Turn the heat to medium and cover. After cooking for a few minutes, add a little water and put a lid on it. Stir occasionally until the peppers are almost cooked and then crumble feta cheese into the pan. Stir it up and serve with rice.

(Note: While making this dish, please beware that hands that have handled hot peppers are dangerous.)

This time of year, with so many peppers in season, I make ema datse all the time. Another dish I like to make is phagshapa, which is basically fried bacon with sliced radishes. The other day I was in the pantry and I noticed a few jars of pickled radishes that I had made earlier this summer. As I fondled that pickle jar, I had a series of culinary epiphanies.

Epiphany #1: Make a combination of ema datse and phagshapa, using my pickled radishes instead of fresh ones.

So I’m cooking some chopped bacon in the pan with a bit of canola oil. I add some chopped hot peppers and some chopped pickled radish. I add chopped ginger and onion. It’s cooking, smelling very good, and I’m about to add the feta.

But all of a sudden, for some inexplicable reason, I’m not in the mood for feta. I want coconut milk. This realization comes alongside Epiphany #2, which reveals to me that there’s no reason I can’t switch gears at this point and make a coconut curry. So I leave Bhutan and head south for an evening in Thailand. Once I stir in a tablespoon of turmeric, I’m committed.

Then I add a can of coconut milk and a tablespoon of fish sauce and squeeze in the juice of one lime. At this point, my housemates are gathered at the kitchen doorway, begging with their eyes and drooling on the floor. As a final touch, I harvest some small basil plants from the garden and toss them in whole.

As we eat the curry, I realize that this is the first time I have made a coconut curry that really, truly, totally hits the spot. It’s been good before but always not quite there. This time, nobody can deny that I knocked it out of the park.

Eventually, I did get around to making that phagsha-datse I’d envisioned. I started the same way as above, and when I got to where previously I added the turmeric, I instead added a teaspoon of the Indian spice mixture garam masala (available in many stores or online). After mixing that together I added the feta. And well, I wouldn’t be telling you all of this if it wasn’t spectacular.

Tshewang is back in Bhutan right now, eating ema datse that makes mine seem about as spicy as cold oatmeal. I don’t know what he would think of my adding garam masala to a mixture of phagshapa and ema datse. But seeing as India lies smack between Bhutan and Thailand, I think the geographic precedent is in place. I know the flavor was. •

Growth comes suddenly in the garlic patch this time of year; maybe you don’t even notice until they are 6 inches long. A green shoot emerges from the top of each plant, and over the next few weeks it coils itself in circles, like a snake ready to strike.

The technical name for this beautiful and delectable apparatus is “scape.” Such a harsh name — sounds more like an injury or a disease or misplaced blame — is an injustice to the world of pleasure the name represents. That’s why I refer to them as flowers, despite the fact that botanists advise otherwise.

Whatever you call these garlic thingies, they have a mild, sweet flavor, a mesmerizing neon-green color that’s enhanced by light cooking, and a shape that’s conducive to sauce-dipping. Invite your friends to eat garlic flowers, breaded and deep-fried or roasted in olive oil. Or wrap the scapes around your wrists and traipse about like Greek gods and goddesses.

Or better yet, Asian gods and goddesses, for it was the Asians who first latched onto the pleasures of garlic flowers. The Buddha himself would have been a great fan if they didn’t make him so dang horny. Me, I ate my first garlic flowers in China, riding north on the train toward Mongolia. I made my way to the dining car, where there was no menu and where I was served stir-fried pork and chopped garlic flowers in a mild oyster sauce.

While garlic flowers have long been a seasonal delicacy across Asia, as well as in many parts of Europe, here in the the United States we are catching on slowly. And we may soon lose our chance, as the American garlic market becomes flooded with cheap garlic from China. While California supplies 85 percent of this nation’s garlic, China supplies 66 percent of the world’s garlic, a percentage that’s rapidly growing. Despite a recently imposed 367 percent tariff on Chinese garlic imports, distributors and processors in Gilroy, California — the undisputed garlic capital of America — are still buying garlic from China. Meanwhile, North American garlic production is down.

The type of garlic that’s usually grown for mass-cultivation, including the Chinese imports, is called soft-neck garlic. One of the reasons soft-neck is grown on a large scale is that it’s less labor intensive, because soft-neck garlic doesn’t produce the flowers of which I wax so fervently. And with increasing market pressure, growers will be more likely than ever to favor the soft-necks.

The flowering garlic, called hard-neck, is more labor intensive because the flowers must be picked. Otherwise, energy and resources will go to the growing cluster of miniature garlic cloves that form at the end of the flowering stalk, while the growth of the below-ground bulb — which is what goes to market — is stunted. This is the same principle that’s behind castrating meat animals, like steers and hogs. Without the need to expend bodily resources on reproduction, the animal grows larger.

Thus, whether your garlic comes from Gilroy or China, if it’s grown on a large scale it won’t flower, and that’s why the flowers are a rare sight at traditional markets. But more small-scale, gourmet growers are turning to hard-neck garlic, for a number of reasons: It tastes better, peels like a prom dress, produces beautifully symmetrical bulbs, and sends up those delectable flowers. If you are lucky enough to get your hands on some, there is no better way to usher in the garlic season.

With these curly-stocking-capped morsels, you can do anything you would do with regular garlic. Or capitalize on the shape for presentation points. Steam them like asparagus and serve drizzled in lemon butter aside broiled antelope back strap or add a few to a simmering Thai coconut chicken soup, two minutes before serving, and watch them curl around the bowl.

If you want to find garlic flowers, visit a farmer’s market or try the specialty produce shops. If you still can’t find any, hop online and go to http://www.dakotagarlic.com/garlic_scapes.htm. Dakota Garlic is a family farm in North Dakota specializing in many varieties of hard-neck garlic, which means they have plenty of flowers, and they will be happy to ship you some. They also have a recipe page full of garlic flowers tips.

And if you are lucky enough to have some garlic in the ground, pick the flowers before they start to uncurl. I like to pull straight up, a smooth gentle tug, like pulling a blade of grass. Sometimes the flower stalk breaks deep inside the plant, and what slides out is the most tender bit of garlic flavor you can imagine. In a brown paper bag in the fridge, they will keep for weeks. But as with most produce, fresh is best.

This story originally appeared in the Missoula Independent.