November Leftovers

In November I used these recipes from the internet

*Simmered black beans, a recipe that I have at least six times since it was published in March, I really should have memorised it by now.
*I recently bought some vanilla beans from Spice West on ebay, which seems to be the cheapest way to get them. I used some beans to make vanilla extract using this method, but used half the alcohol and twice the beans. It smells fantastic after four weeks, I probably won't wait eight weeks to use it.
*I finally got around to trying Peter Reinhart's Napoletana pizza dough recipe. The pizza bases made with this recipe were awesome and the long cold fermentation makes a lot of sense during the warmer months.
*I wanted to add something a but different to the lunchbox fruit loaf rotation, coconut-pineapple loaf cake from Martha Stewart looked good. I made mine with yoghurt and a 400g tin of crushed pineapple, it's very nice, but the crumbly texture lends itself more to a cake than a loaf.

October Leftovers

October is a great month for garage sales in Canberra. The Willow ware collection is swelling and it's probably best we just don't talk about the accumulation of French preserving jars. In the kitchen, October was a cookbook month, although all the recipes for bunmania were sourced online. Otherwise:

*google directed me to Gordon Ramsay's caramelised bananas and rum which I made to accompany some hotcakes (can't comment on his hotcakes as I used a different recipe). I did something a bit wrong as my caramel also contained delicious chunks of toffee, definitely worth revisiting when there are too many bananas and another mysterious bottle of rum appears in the pantry.

Le journal intime de cassoulet I

Somewhere in the Pyrenees

Friday September 25

I finally decided to make a cassoulet this year since the warm spring weather seems to have changed its mind and it's cold again. Labour Day offers an opportunity for lengthy food prep and a long lazy lunch. Cassoulet is a bean stew with assorted meats that originates from the south west of France probably from the city Castelnaudary. It is renowned for taking days to prepare and its extreme richness.

I gather from the number and variety of recipes that I have read, that a fairly authentic cassoulet isn't really an onerous a task for the type of cook who can find the time to cook legumes from scratch. Besides soaking the beans overnight and cooking them for up to 6 hours, the number of days of prep required largely depends on the amount of charcuterie you're willing to do. Some recent cassoulet experiences from food bloggers are a good indication of the varying levels of complexity in the preparation of cassoulet

• The Heavy Table makes a cassoulet inspired by Juila Child's recipe
  
• The Accidental Hedonist makes cassoulet from Savuer magazine
• The Amatuer Gourmet makes Daniel Boulud's cassoulet
• Anthony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlman make cassoulet on No Reservations
• From the Canberra Cook develops her own recipe Launching the Cassoulet Project: Duck!, The Cassoulet Project Continues, Finally, Cassoulet

I re-read the cassoulet chapter in my copy of Goose Fat & Garlic by Jeanne Strang (currently available at Clouston and Hall for cheap). Strang describes her recipe as a compromise good for the "Anglo-Saxon kitchen"; like the "original" Castelnaudary version her recipe is principally pork, but adds a Toulousain twist with duck confit. The Strang recipe clearly divides the cooking process into three steps that seem easy to follow - cooking the haricot beans, browning all the meat, and assembling the beans and meats to bake.

From the Strang recipe I noted the first thing I would need to make was salt pork, which is used for cooking the beans. The book doesn't have a recipe for salt pork, so I spent some time searching the Belconnen Fresh Food Markets for pink salt assuming I would need it to preserve the pork. I didn't find any.

Saturday September 26

I googled salt pork and found that there's a recipe in Jennifer McLagan's book Fat which was featured on The Splendid Table podcast; you don't need pink salt to make salt pork as it happens. I retrieved my copy of the book and bookmarked the recipe for Sunday.

I solicited some wine advice from my Francophile mother in law; who kindly provided me with some regional suggestions, Madiran or Tursan. Should Cox Kelly, Jim or Dan Murphy fail me (and I believe that they probably will fail) I looked for some alternatives. I nabbed a copy of Cooking under the Influence by Ben Canaider and Greg Dencan Powell at the Lifeline Bookfair on Friday, they recommend a shiraz grenache blend, a syrah blend from the Rhône or a Barossa shiraz, so I should be able to find something complementary, possibly Canberran.

She also suggested a green salad with a mustard dressing to accompany the cassoulet and oeufs a la neige or madelines or macaroons with coffee. I'm not sure sure there will be space for anything but the cassoulet, but she might be on to something.

Sunday September 27

I bought the pork belly, about 1.3 kilograms. Salting it was simple and I was pleased to use up some more of the quatre épices I bought on a whim at Aldi. I made ther sure as instructed from salt, brown sugar, juniper berries, black peppercorns, bay leaves and quatre épices then rubbed it into all surfaces of the pork belly. It then went in to the fridge where it will sit unmolested until Tuesday. I plan to use the leftovers in baked beans or petit salé aux lentilles.

I did more more reading on cassoulet, leafing through another bookfair purchase, Elisabeth Luard's European Peasant Cookery, I was impressed by her cassoulet recipe which came from a neighbour she had while living somewhere in Languedoc. It is essentially a very similar recipe to the one I started with but adds lamb and lots of bacon rind, it excludes duck confit and the breadcrumb crust (I am undecided on the breadcrumb issue, but leaning towards not having it). I also found the recipe for Toulouse style cassoulet from Paula Wolfert's The Cooking of Southwest France online, no lamb, insane amounts of duck confit and a meagre quantity of crumbs. Both the Luard and Wolfert recipes offer important notes on technique not mentioned in the Strang recipe, so they will be useful when it's time to cook.

Cookbook Shopping

I have a bad case of procrastinators diligence; instead of devoting my time to career making activities, I am compulsively planning and pricing additions to my cookbook library for the next 5 years in exhaustive detail. Memories of a Cuban Kitchen by Mary Urrutia Randelman, Bengali Cooking by Chitrita Banerji and Quick and Easy Tsukemono by Ikuko Hisamatsu and many others have become items of great importance.

Recently launched Australian price comparison site Booko has been a great aid to my compulsive searching and list compilation. You search the site by title, author or ISBN and it retrieves prices and the cost of shipping from an impressive list of book sellers. You can compile a cart of books that gives you a running total of your bill and also accounts for things like free shipping after x dollars offered by some retailers.

For cookbooks, the UK based Book Depository (offers free international shipping), the charitable American retailer Better World Books (cheap carbon neutral shipping) and Australia's Fishpond usually come out cheapest; I even managed to score a copy of the lauded Australian reference The Cook's Companion for less that $60 from Fishpond (it's back to around $110 now). In my experience books will take longer to get to you from Fishpond than the other two.

Booko, bookmark it and don't buy books online without it.