Rabbit stew

As a child, I ate a lot of rabbit stew. The meat was free, and properly cooked, it's delicious. Rabbit meat is virtually fat-free, and therefore a healthy source of protein.
Any chicken casserole recipe can be adapted to use rabbit instead, if you're lucky enough to find a source.
Before cooking your rabbit, there's a couple of things you need to understand.
Rabits are muscular little creatures, and the meat needs long slow cooking to tenderise it. And it can be a bit gamey, so soaking it first is a good idea.
This is how Mum prepared rabbit stew.

Cut the rabbit into portions, and soak in cold, salted water, for at least an hour.
Dry the meat, and brown it in a frying pan. Remove and place in a heavy pot.

Then fry a roughly chopped onion and several rashers of bacon in the frypan. Add these to the pot with the rabbit. Pour some hot water into the frypan, and scrape up all the brown bits. Pour this water over the rabbit in the pot, and add a pinch of mixed herbs and two or three thickly sliced carrots.
Cover and simmer gently for about 1 + 1/2 hours, or until the meat is tender - will depend on the age of the bunny.
Remove the meat to a plate, and thicken the gravy with flour, and a dash of Parisian essence if liked.
Serve with mashed potatoes and peas or beans.

Parisian essence was a browning agent, made, I think, from caramelized sugar. You probably can't buy it now. Today I would use Gravox as a thickener. Sliced celery would be a good addition, and a  slurp of red wine would also go well.


A bit of history (from Wikipedia)
Everyone blames Thomas Austin for the rabbit problem in Australia. He released 12 wild rabbits, specially imported from England, on his property, Barwon Park, near Winchelsea, Victoria, in October 1859 for hunting purposes. Many other farms released their rabbits into the wild after Austin. At the time he had stated, "The introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition to a spot of hunting."^[5] 

Aussies have been hunting them ever since!

But rabbits were first introduced to Australia by the First Fleet in 1788. They were bred as food animals, probably in cages. In the first decades they do not appear to have been numerous, judging from their absence from archaeological collections of early colonial food remains.

However, by 1827 in Tasmania a newspaper article noted ‘…the common rabbit is becoming so numerous throughout the colony, that they are running about on some large estates by thousands. We understand, that there are no rabbits whatever in the elder colony' [i.e. New South Wales]^[2]. This clearly shows that a localised rabbit population explosion was underway in Tasmania in the early 19th century. At the same time in NSW Cunningham noted that '... rabbits are bred around houses, but we have yet no wild ones in enclosures...’ He noted that the scrubby, sandy soil between Sydney and Botany Bay would be ideal for farming rabbits^[3]. Enclosures appears to mean more extensive rabbit-farming warrens, rather than cages. The first of these, in Sydney at least, was one built by Alexander Macleay at Elizabeth Bay House,'a preserve or rabbit-warren, surrounded by a substantial stone wall, and well stocked with that choice game'^[4]. In the 1840s rabbit-keeping became even more common, with examples of the theft of rabbits from ordinary peoples' houses appearing in court records, and rabbits entering the diet of ordinary people.

So rabbit has been an integral part of Australian cuisine since the first white settlement. Many a farmer has cursed them, and they have caused untold damage to the environment and the economy. Still, they're damn good eating!