Ever since
Ms. Kiwi showed up, I've had a hankering for trying my hand at big-"C" Cassoulet. You know, that daunting (for cook and consumer) French dish of, essentially, layers upon layers of fat 'n beans.
As you may or may not know, I am not one for following recipes, so after prowling around the Internet for a few minutes, I convinced myself that I'd make something up when we went to Tahoe. I'm not a skier or snowboarder, and I had a whole ham hock just waiting to roll in the hay with some beans and then feed a gaggle of hungry riders.
Here's what went down:
- Midnight, Thursday: Soak a lot of Navy beans.
- 11am, Friday: Rinse beans. Put them in Ms. Kiwi with ham hock, onion skins, garlic skins, celery and carrot butts, sprigs of rosemary, thyme, bay leaf. Heat slowly. Cut up into small bits a stale old hunk of baguette you have lying around. Stick it into the oven at a low temperature that sounds right, and peek in on it every now and then. When the bits are crunchy, take them out.
- 2pm: Extract everything from gorgeous stock. Reduce stock and carefully separate beans and delicious ham pieces from the other crap.
- 3pm: Render fat from some bacon. Brown some mild Italian sausage in it. Remove meat. Throw in whole buncha chopped onion, celery, carrot and let it brown around in the fat in the pan.
- 3:30pm: Add some spoonfuls of tomato paste. Add some more if you want. Brown around. Then dump in a can of diced tomatoes. Meanwhile, hack the end off a whole head of garlic, lop a tablespoon or two of butter on it and wrap in foil. Put in oven at a temperature between 250 and 400 for a while, until it starts smelling good and you check it and it is nicely browned and squishy. Then take it out and just let it sit by itself on the side.
- 4pm: Hurry and add beans! Then meat! Then reduced stock! Riders are coming back and want to go drink!
- 5pm: Go drink multiple pitchers of beer while your stewing pot of kind-of-fat and beans and vegetables slowly does its thing for a while.
- 8pm: Return to glorious stewy pot of kind-of-fat-but-not-really and beans and vegetables smelling to-die-for. Let riders ooh and ahh over glorious smell of your day-of-slaving. Squish smooshy bits of garlic out of wrappy bits into a pan with the melted butter sloshing all around its sides. Get this warm, then add your homemade breadcrumbs and a little flourish of a handful of parsley, and toast them up.
- 8:10pm: Bat the hungry riders away from Ms. Kiwi with a spatula. Dump buttery-garlicky breadcrumbs all over top of hot stewy beany mixture, and stick Ms. Kiwi into a hot oven somewhere around 400-450 degrees.
- 8:30pm: Carefully pull Ms. Kiwi out of oven and put on table in front of drooling riders. Serve them a gigantic ladle-full with plenty of breadcrumby bits on top, and let them help themselves to various dark and moody red wines.
- 9:30pm: Scrape Ms. Kiwi clean with spoons or tongues, follow up with ice cream cones if possible and a quick session in the jacuzzi.
