It's not really cassoulet is it?
A few weeks ago we had my parents over for dinner, and I made sausage cassoulet from a Jamie Oliver recipe. Because we were having guests, I even followed the recipe! So rather than describing that, here’s the link:
My favourite bit of the dish, was the bean-y stew-y goodness underneath; utterly brilliant and the leftovers were great as a pasta sauce.
So I’ve decided to recreate the dish, except that I don’t have any sausages. So I’m not making sausage cassoulet at all, but chicken legs, with tasty bean stew.
As it’s so completely inauthentic, I will deviate completely from the recipe above. I also don’t have any dried porcini mushrooms left (which is an error, they’re pretty amazing).
So, I fried some smoked bacon lardons whilst I finely chopped two carrots, celery, garlic, ordinary mushrooms and two onions, and added them to the mix with a pinch of salt. After they’d cooked I added whatever was left in the bottle of red wine from the weekend, a bay leaf, and the leaves from a couple of sprigs of thyme and rosemary.
I let that simmer down for a bit, before adding a tin of borlotti beans and a tin of tomatoes. Whilst that’s cooking for about ten minutes, I chopped a couple of slices of bread and tossed them in olive oil with salt and pepper and some more roughly chopped thyme and rosemary. I didn’t have any nice bread – I used the end bits off our normal loaf.
- Beany mixture bubbling away... (Ignore the marks on the pan. They're from a previous haggis mishap.)
I put the bean mixture in the roasting dish, set a couple of chicken legs on top, season with salt and pepper and add the croutons around and about them. I put this in a preheated oven at 200 degrees celsius (I don’t know how to do the little degrees sign on this…) for about forty five minutes, and, ta da:
(I really ought to use my camera rather than my phone for these pictures, but that's a little more labour intensive)
We had it with greens, as we’ve eaten extremely well over the course of this weekend courtesy of other people making tagines and roasts for us, so I didn’t think it warranted extra potatoes. It's an insane amount of food for two people, so the rest is going in the freezer so wecan have bean stew another day.
Whilst making this I was mostly listening to: The Beta Band.
This weeks soup: Carrot and Coriander. It was about 40p for a kilo of carrots from Lidl, so it’d be foolish not to.
Chicken legs are awesome as a stew-y casserole-y ingredient, I refuse to call anything that comes out of my kitchen a cassoulet but I will give your stew recipe a bash!
ReplyDeleteDid you brown the chicken legs before putting them on the bean mixture?
I did respond to this before, but for some reason it didn't work. To recap, no browning necessary, as on top of the beany goodness the just roast and go crispy. Hope the curry was good! x
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