The day I fell in Love with a Cassoulet

Sometimes I don't know how a recipe will turn out until I try it. I am not an expert in French cuisine and I've never had a Cassoulet before. Wiki told me it's cooked in earthenware and it's a rich, slow-cooked casserole. This Cassoulet was, in a sense, a fraud, but a delicious fraud nonetheless :)

I adapted the following Sausage and White Bean Cassoulet from epicurious.

Ingredients:

• 3 Sweet Italian Sausage Links
• 1 tsp olive oil
• 1 medium onion, halved and sliced lenghtwise
• 1 1/2 cups of sliced buttom mushrooms
• 1 green pepper sliced lengthwise
• 2 garlic cloves chopped fine
• a handfull of dried oregano, basil, and rosemary crushed and sprinkled
• handful of chopped curled parsley
• 2 bay leaves
• 2 cups cannellini beans
• 20 oz whole peeled tomatoes

Cook the sausage links for about 8 minutes and then set aside on a towel lined plate. In the same skillet, cook oil, onions, peppers, and mushrooms. Add dried herbs, parsley, bay leaves, and white beans. Slice sausage into 1/4 inch slices and add to skillet. Pour tomatoes and, using spatula, cut up tomato. Mix all together and cover on medium heat.

While that is cooking, chop one garlic clove and a hadful of parsley. Then cut up 5 slices of challah bread and toast bread, parsley, and galic in a tsp of olive oil in a separate pan. Pour sausage and bean mix into cassrole dish and top with bread topping. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and pop the cassrole into the oven for 20 minutes.

I would also skip the bread topping and just get some really really good crusty bread and dip in the stew. Sigh, I couldn't stop "taste-testing" the dish.

And now a view from the side :) Look at those layers, that Cassoulet is thick :)

When Kheema met Rajma

I don't cook Indian food often enough. I have always felt that I could never cook Indian food as well as my mother or my grandmothers, so I just don't bother. But it is hard to be away from home and really want good Indian food. Indian restaurants are never good enough: there is always too much butter, too much oil, and not enough love (so cheesy I know :) ). The other day I really wanted Rajma, which is essentially Indian vegetarian chili, and some Kheema. Sooooooo...if you put it together, you essentially an Indian spiced chili. Now, the pictures and the recipe will not do this dish justice. The smell is what excited me so much that I stayed up late at night to finish making it. If I were to do it again, the one thing I would do would be to cook the beans longer so they were softer.

Here is kind of what I did. Unfortunately, since I never use measuring spoons to do anything, I don't have exact measurements. I guarantee that I added quite a bit of each spice and I truly which smell-o-vision or a scratch and sniff sticker could be used to describe this. Here is how the marriage of my two favorite dishes went....

First, the Rajma....

1/2 bag of dried kidney beans. Soaked over night. Then put them in 5 cups of boiling water, add salt, and boil for about 30-45 minutes.

Then, get the Kheema ready....

Usually Kheema is made with ground lamb. I grew up with ground chicken kheema. I, however, only had ground beef on hand. So here is kind of what I used...

1 lb ground beef
4 cloves of garlic, minced
1 inche of ginger, grated
1 tsp oil
1 onion, diced
1 Tbsp Garam Masala (I was lucky to have mama moho's fresh garam masala)
1 Tbsp Coriander
1 tsp Chili Powder
1 Tbsp Toasted Ground Cumin
2 Bay Leaves
12-oz can of diced tomatoes

In a skillet, add some oil and heat. Then sautee onion, garlic, and ginger in oil. Add ground beef and then play with spices. I just kept added spices until it tasted good to me (I taste as soon as the ground beef is cooked). Then add the diced tomatoes and let simmer.

Then, when the kidney beans are cooked. On some page I read the 5 bean rule. Taste 5 beans, if they are all cooked, then you're good to go. Once I added it to the beans, I let it all cook together for 20 minutes. And VIOLA...with some quinoa, this ish was fantastic :)

Blackberry Compote and Cottage Cheese

I used to hate cottage cheese!! I always thought of it as a diet food, something you forced down your throat for the sake of weight loss. About 4 years ago, I realized I was wrong. I started eating whipped cottage cheese and then started expanding my horizons. Now I hearts it because it's so versatile and filling. The other day I was looking through the freezer and saw a bag if frozen blackberries we had bought from the farmers market over the summer. Now, I have some weird food "worries." For instance, I hate getting fruit on the bottom yogurt because I worry that there is too much sugar and preservatives in them. But I don't, for some reason, worry about the jam I bring home. Weird, I know!! Anyways , I had been wanting to try fruit and cottage cheese for awhile when I decided to go about making my own compote. This was the easiest thing to make and made me warm to the idea of "fruit on the bottom" anything.

All you need is fresh fruit, a pinch of salt, honey (I used agave nectar) and you bring all that to a boil. Then you mix 2 tbsp of water and 2tbsp of cornstarch together to thicken. Add that to the fruit until you have a nice thick compote.

This was the perfect amount of sweetness and made a great post workout breakfast with cottage cheese and some cereal:)