I have wanted to make a cassoulet for years. It always looked so good on the cooking shows when I saw it. But here, the ingredients have been difficult to find.

Duck is not super popular. You mostly only see it in restaurants. More lately, the odd supermarket has had it, if you were willing to hunt hard enough for it. Toulouse sausages…pfft! With so many other kinds to choose from, we don’t need no fancy French sausages!

Anyway.

We’re down in the city for a bit as DH had to have a small operation (he’s fine and on the mend now). His latest diet kick is to have beans as often as possible, and the doctor has recommended a high fibre diet to ease any strain on internal stitches. We were in our local supermarket and I saw they had duck. Hmmm, I thought.

Then the penny dropped. There’s a yarn shop I go to, in a small shopping centre in the snooty part of town. Strangely, it also has a low cost supermarket which I have discovered is a great place for low cost fish (fish is astoundingly expensive here, and DH loves it) and also a really good range of the more exotic groceries and cheeses. Opposite its entrance is a butcher, which I actually purchased some sausages from the last time we were in the city, as I prefer to purchase meat from a butcher rather than a supermarket and I couldn't be bothered driving half an hour to the butcher I usually go to when we’re in the city. I remembered- they were Toulouse sausages! (I guess cassoulet is a regular thing in Snooty Suburb 😂)

So, I thought- this is the universe telling me it’s time to make cassoulet! I bought all the ingredients (and the duck confit legs were on sale at 40% off! so I bought extra for the freezer 😁) and yesterday I went for it.

It was not a difficult process, but there were a lot of steps involved- soak the beans overnight, par-cook the beans in stock with a bunch of aromatics and the duck bones, cook the meats, cook the duck fat and add it to the crumbs for the topping, cook the mirepoix and add it to the beans, then assemble the cassoulet and put it in the oven for three hours, adding extra stock at the two hour point.

DH said he was really looking forward to it as everything had smelled wonderful as it was being cooked. I said that after all the work I hoped it lived up to the hype.

It did! It was really, really good. I will make it again- it’s a good excuse to visit the wool shop 😉 but since this batch made 8 servings it will be a while as I will freeze the extra servings for POOF dinners.