When one of your besties randomly decides to drop off a frozen rabbit, you have no choice but to make an event out of cooking it. That is, if you have never eaten a hare before, and you like to make a big deal out of anything even the least bit novel. That said, I am wont to make a big deal out of Groundhog’s Day because I am easily bored and require a high level of entertainment in life in order to avoid pulling out my eyelashes one by one to find out how many, exactly, I have.

So, we had this rabbit. And Adam said it called for rabbit ravioli, and that called for a lesson in pasta making. We made the pasta and then we had to have something to put in it, so Adam deboned a rabbit. With my very dull santoku knife I bought five years ago at Target and rarely, if ever, sharpen. But we work with what we have. He was polite enough not to complain, at least, much.

So once you have a deboned, raw rabbit, and I’m not even going to pretend to tell you how to do that, because I refused to watch because of the “killing Thumper-ness” of it all, you are ready for the fun part. And by fun, I mean grinding. Adam put his meat grinder attachment atop my KitchenAid mixer, and we shoved the rabbit through it, piece by piece, and that was fun. Grinding meat, turns out, is super fun. Like the Play-Doh Fuzzy Pumper Barber Shop (remember the hair shooting out through their little holey heads?), only more grown-up. And tastier.

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I chopped up a bundle of leeks (the white and light green parts only), two large portabello mushroom caps, and a yellow onion and we sauteed it with the rabbit, some thyme, salt and pepper, and a few cloves of fresh garlic. That’s it! At the end, we added 8 ounces of ricotta cheese, for the creamy factor and to help it all hang together for piping.

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And pipe, we did. People took turns piping piles of rabbit onto sheets of fresh pasta, before folding the pasta over the top and making a perfect little pillow by cutting it into a round with a medium sized pastry cutter.

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All the while, we had a little stock cooking, or as Adam called it, “tea.” We used the carcasses from the ducks (remember them?) I’d been saving in the freezer and the rabbit carcass. First, they roasted for two hours, and then were added to a stock pot of water, carrots, onion, peppercorns, and a few bay leaves for good measure. That simmered for another two hours, and just when the pasta and rabbit were ready and assembled, we poured the stock over the ready raviolis and stuck them in a 250 degree oven to “cook” for 20 minutes or so.

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The result was warm, flavorful, heavenly ravioli, and the ones on the top were toasted brown. They were so fresh, they didn’t require boiling water or anything extreme to cook, and they all stayed perfectly intact because they weren’t subjected to a harsh environment.

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Don’t get me wrong people. This is not the sort of thing I take the time to do on a regular basis. I told Adam during the whole process that my readers were going to be very disappointed when I go back to publishing articles on making bagel pizzas after they have been subjected to such high culinary standards. Still, it’s a fun way to spend a chilly — or really any — afternoon with friends and wine and a big platter of antipasta. I think it’s good, sometimes, to make cooking an event. Not just about the meal, but about the process. The handling, thinking about, and sharing of the act of cooking, and then, of course, the eating. Because eating a meal like this is not your average Saturday night at the Stuke household.

But don’t worry. Never fear, because next week we’ll be back to bagel pizzas, or some facsimile thereof, that you can pull together from the scraps and leftovers in your cabinets, like I do on any given Tuesday.