Recipe: Rabbit pie

Rabbit pie. Photo / Michael Craig

This dish is inspired by the Maori children's song Oma Rapeti, interwoven with flavours of Beatrix Potter's children's book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Here is Scott's version for rabbit pie. At home you can replace the rabbit with chicken.

Serves 4

• 1 whole rabbit
• 3 rashers smoked streaky bacon
• ½ cup each of diced carrots, onions and celery
• 2 cloves grated garlic
• 1 cup red wine
• 3 cups chicken or vegetable stock
• 1 tsp each chopped fresh rosemary and thyme
• 200g pre rolled puff pastry

1 Cut rabbit into 6 pieces, season with salt and fry in a hot oven-safe pan with vegetable oil until caramelised all over. Remove from the pan then fry bacon until crisp, drain on paper towels.

2 Fry vegetables until lightly caramelised then add garlic. Stir, add red wine and boil down to almost dry. Add stock, fresh herbs, rabbit and bacon. Cover and cook in the oven at 150C for 2 hours.

3 Allow rabbit to cool then strain off cooking juices into a saucepan and reduce by boiling until a rich sauce is formed. Carefully remove all the rabbit meat from the bones, taking care to remove all bones. Chop the rabbit, bacon and vegetables then mix with half the reduced rabbit sauce.

4 Divide rabbit into 4 portions and press into small coffee or plastic cups. Cut 4 discs of puff pastry slightly larger than the cups, tip rabbit out on to pastry, cut 4 much larger pastry discs and cover rabbit, press pastry down and crimp edges to seal rabbit in. Brush with egg wash.

5 Allow pies to rest in the fridge for 30 minutes before baking at 200C for 15 minutes. Serve with rabbit sauce, buttered Savoy cabbage and baby carrots cooked in chamomile tea.