Monday, November 24, 2008

Let the cassoulet adventure begin....

God I love food.

I guess strictly speaking I love to cook more than I love food. For me there's something wonderful about all the little pieces that need to be managed just-so and brought together at the last minute for service.

Several years ago my niece was visiting for the weekend and I was baking cookies. Katey wanted to help and while I'm pretty picky, I have fond memories of "helping" my mother back cookies when I was a kid. I let Katey do the mixing. As we added each ingredient, I asked Katey to taste them. Then once the cookie dough was finished, I let her taste that as well. I wanted her to learn that just because a single ingredient may not taste good, sometimes adding it to some other things can make it heavenly.

Speaking of putting lots of ingredients together, I'm planning to make cassoulet for the family on Wednesday. It's quite an operation. The longest lead time: confit duck legs. Now I know you're saying to yourself... who in their right mind would confit duck legs at home? Me. I've done it once before (in that case I was making spring rolls with duck confit inside). It's not hard, just time consuming. For the cassoulet I've been reading that I should really cook the legs in duck fat. No biggy, right? Wrong. Where in world does one source 6-8 cups of duck fat? Turns out you can (like nearly everything) order it online. Mine arrives tomorrow. So, tonight the duck gets salted. Tomorrow, confit. Wednesday, cassoulet.

As if the cassoulet won't keep me busy enough, I'm also baking an apple pie.

3 comments:

JohnK said...

Cassoulet!!!
I normally wait until late January or early February to make some.

It's funny that you have this post I was thinking about you and Cassoulet this afternoon. weird

JohnK said...

oh, right. You do have one little typo. :^)

Anonymous said...

I love me some cassoulet!!! Although I've only really had vegetarian versions...