← home

Lazy Cassoulet

Ingredients

one large carrot
one large onion
head of celery
3-6 cloves of garlic depending on your garlic preferences
one of those little 6oz cans of tomato paste, but you only use like half, which is a shame
three of those big cans of whatever kind of bean you want (I like to do butter beans, roman beans, and canellini)
1 package cremini mushrooms
as much kale as you like (between zero and two cups of ribboned kale)
some bread crumbs, or if you fancy, some actual bread, crumbed
some soft butter
parsley, herbes de provence, salt, pepper
~3 cups of vegetable stock. Any stock you please.
some cheap red wine
your preferred meat (good options: kielbasa, andouille, duck, chicken thighs, pork belly, pork shoulder), cut into ~1” pieces unless it’s a chicken or duck leg/thigh, which should be left whole

Directions

Preheat your oven to 400.
Put some oil in a cast iron dutch oven on the stove and get it up to medium.
do a fine dice on your carrot, onion and celery – that’s right, it’s mirepoix time. dice the cremini mushrooms.
Sauté your mirepoix until it’s deliciously fragrant and getting a little brown. add the creminis and keep going until they’re brown and soft. If you need more oil, put more oil, no bigs.
By this point you should have a good amount of brown deliciousness sticking to the bottom of that pot. It’s everyone’s favorite step – add in about, ehhhhhhh, 1/4 cup or so of that wine. Drink the rest. Scrape that pot like hell and make sure all the browning comes up and into solution. Add about a cup of stock, a little at a time, so that you keep it all hot. Add in about 3oz of that tomato paste. Stir it all and bring it to a simmer. Add in some herbes de provence, some parsley, two bay leaves. It’s a bouquet garni in disguise. Also add your garlic.
Drain the three cans of beans and give them a little rinse. Let them drain for a minute there while you cut your kale up. If you are using 0 kale, then it’s pretty simple, basically just skip this step. If you are using >0 kale, I like to use scissors to cut it into strips.
Add your beans and your meat to the delicious simmering liquid in the pot. give it a good stir and mix your kale (or nothing) in. Add enough of your leftover stock to just barely cover the beans. Give it all a good sloshy swirl with your big spoon to get it all arranged.
Cover the pot and put it in the oven for 2 hours or so, or more, this dish kind of doesn’t mind, whatever your schedule is like.
While it’s in there, mix some bread crumbs (about a cup should be good) with some softened butter (about 1/4 of a stick) and some parsley. If you really want to go wild, grate some asiago into this as well. Mix it all with your hands because that is the most pleasant way to do this. Squish it all together until you get a crumbly mixture. Refrigerate this.
After 2 hours or really whenever you like, take the top off your cast iron, and leave it alone again for another hour or so.
Once you’ve got some good bubbling and some thickening on top of the beans, it’s time to add your bread crumb topping. Break up the surface of the beans, and dump the breadcrumbs on. Smooth them out and kinda poke in through the breadcrumbs so the liquid will be able to bubble up on top of it (CRUCIAL). Put it back in the oven for about 45 minutes, or until you’ve got a nice crispy brown going on.

Now the easiest part: eat it. But try to only eat a little bit! Because it will be infinitely better tomorrow. And even better the next day. This is a meal to enjoy all week.

Oh and don’t eat those two bay leaves that are floating around in there somewhere. It’s sort of a king cake situation.