Saturday 17 December 2011

Cassoulet history

Found this entry in a blog, which provides some interesting background to cassoulet. It also contains a recipe which I might well try out at some point in the future...
Cassoulet

Does anyone want recipes?

I should probably provide recipes for cassoulets on this blog. Might do seperate metric/Imperial/US versions, or try and combine (although this gets rather messy sometimes imho). Any thoughts anyone?

Trying out "Feed shark" to see if I can increase traffic...
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Wednesday 14 December 2011

Christmas dinner leftover cassoulet

Everyone goes on at this time of year about making Christmas dinner preparations easier, or using up the leftovers in the days following the big day itself.

Not to be left out, I've tinkered with the standard recipe for cassoulet so it can use pre-cooked meats by reducing the cooking time. To allow for this, I've replaced the haricot beans with black-eyed beans which have a much quicker cooking time. I've also replaced the bouquet garni with chopped parsley and celery, since there won't be as much time for the flavours to infuse into the stock.

So, here's the video of this experiment...

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The main changes I would suggest would be to use a little less parsley and a bit more ham or gammon. It would probably also benefit from a little longer in the oven at a slightly lower temperature (say an extra 15 minutes and 10 degrees cooler).

It has already been suggested that it could have a dash of white wine added... I suspect this might be a worthwhile addition.

All comments gratefully received.

Saturday 3 December 2011

Christmas sort of comes early

I had a good idea the other day. Well, I thought it was good.

One of my cassoulet experiments for this blog should be one which uses up Christmas dinner leftovers. Cooked turkey, sausage, ham... That sort of thing.

The obvious problem with this is that posting it on the blog after Christmas is a bit of a waste of time: who's going to read something that might have been useful a week earlier?

In order to have a chance of posting in a timely fashion, I need to have Christmas dinner leftovers available sooner. So today I bought a small gammon joint, turkey and some sausagemeat. Yep. What more can I say? Three weeks before Christmas. Yep.