French Classics: Cassoulet

I am very sorry France. I'm sorry because I'm going to attempt to cook a classic in my own style - Cassoulet. Everyone knows you don't mess with the original. Well that's boring. I want to do this Georgie-style. For anyone who doesn't know, a cassoulet is a dish mainly comprising of beans, toulouse sausage and duck. It originated in the south of France and is a slow cooked dish. In order to create my own (slightly budget) version, I researched a large variety of different cassoulet recipes and they all have their own method and use different ingredients. 

Georgie Porgie's Cassoulet

To Serve 2

Ingredients

6 Toulouse sausages (or sausages that include herbs, wine and garlic)

1 can Cannellini Beans

Fresh Parsley

1 White Onion, diced

1 Large Tomato, diced

1 500ml bottle of Dry Cider

1 handful of Bacon Lardons or Pancetta

1 tbsp Duck Fat

1 clove garlic

1 sprig of fresh Thyme

Method

Heat the duck fat in a large, heavy bottomed pan (a large Le Creuset style casserole dish would be ideal).

Add the sausages and bacon and cook until browned. Remove from the pan.

Add the onions and cook gently in the duck/sausage/bacon fat until lightly browned.

Add half of the cider and scrape any tasty residue off the bottom of the pan.

Add the beans, garlic, thyme and tomato and cook gently for ten minutes. 

Cut the sausages into bite size pieces and then add back to the pan with the bacon.

Chop a small amount of parsley and add this to the pan also. Season to taste.

Top up with cider until it just covers the ingredients. 

Place a lid on the dish and cook for half an hour.

Remove the lid and cook for another 15 minutes, letting the liquid reduce until you have a nice thick sauce. 

Chop some fresh parsley for garnish, spoon the cassoulet into a bowl and serve.

Sausage, Red Wine and Broad Bean Risotto

Continuing the Foodie Pen Pal theme, after my delicious 'Broad Bean, Beetroot, Pea and Ricotta Ciabattas', I still had more broad beans to use up. Alongside these was a jar of Soffrito paste, a creation unknown to me before now that I was given by Paula of 'All About the Bake' fame in my parcel. She had told me that she uses it as a base for risotto. I've never been a particularly big fan of risotto and my one previous attempt to master the tricky dish was nothing short of a disaster. But I'd had time to think over our disagreement and had decided that I, Georgie, would be queen of the risottos. 

This is an adaption of a Waitrose recipe.

Sausage, Red Wine and Broad Bean Risotto

Serves 2

Ingredients:

• 1 tsp olive oil
• 6 Extra Lean Italian Pork Sausages
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 red onion, chopped
• A good handful of fresh Broad Beans
• 1 jar of Soffrito Paste
• 250g Riso Gallo Carnaroli Risotto Rice
• ½ pack fresh rosemary
• 100ml Italian red wine (e.g. Chianti, Montepulciano or Sangiovese)
• 500ml Boullion
• 1 tbsp freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, to serve
• Salt
• Freshly ground black pepper

Directions

1. Heat the oil in a large pan and cook the sausages completely. Remove and put to one side.  
2. Add the onion to the oil in the pan and cook until the onion has softened.
3. Add the garlic, broad beans and soffrito paste and saute for 2 minutes.
4. Stir in the rice and rosemary and let the rice crisp slightly.
5. Add the wine and blast with a high heat until all of the liquid has disappeared.
6. Pour in the stock and cook until the liquid has been absorbed and the rice is soft.
7. Chop the sausages up into smaller chunks and add to the risotto. 
8. Season with salt and pepper.
9. Divide the risotto between 2 plates and sprinkle with Parmigiano-Reggiano and freshly ground black pepper. Serve with a peppery rocket salad.

Brilliant Breakfast

Today I want to tell the world how much I love breakfast. Don't worry, I'm not about to spurt out a load of cliched matriarchal advice about how breakfast is the most important meal of the day and it gets your metabolism going and ensures that you digest your food with as much pzazz as your body can manage - because we've all had enough of that in our lives. Plus, I've still got at least 8 years (I hope) before I'll have to start torturing my own kids with gems such as the importance of breakfast. 
Breakfast is seriously underrated, and I don't think that, until today, I've really appreciated just how good breakfast is.

Marc enjoys porridge.

At breakfast time, you can literally eat anything you want. It's the social norm to douse your body in greasy animal fat and to fry slices of stodgy white bread in said animal fat and stuff it down your gullet followed by an entire tin of sugary baked beans and a huge mug of whole milk, four sugar tea. Everyone loves a fry up, it's the king of breakfasts. Even when an "all day breakfast" is on the menu, part of you would still feel a bit guilty and dirty ordering one because of it's sheer volume of artery clogging goodness. But at breakfast time, there is absolutely no guilt. Because you need the energy... in fact you need as much energy as you can get - that's what your mother told you, right? A fry up is nearly impossible to turn down. Even if you just take the individual ingredients from fry ups - bacon, sausage, egg... people will still eat these for breakfast every day, almost because they feel they should. What's that you say BBC News? Eating bacon every day is going to give me cancer? I'm an adult I'll eat as much fucking bacon as I want, I'd inject maple smoked bacon straight into my veins if I could, I'd roll it up and smoke it if people weren't going to look at me like I was mentally deranged. Breakfast is the only time of day when you can eat juicy Gloucester old spot sausages and thick cut smoked bacon with the glistening juice running down your face and genuinely feel proud of yourself.

Alex enjoys a fry up.

 It's not just fry ups that make breakfast amazing. It's that you can say "I'm going to get a latte and a big sugary almond croissant on the way to work today" and it will constitute breakfast. Do you know how much butter goes into a croissant? To make the pastry, it's rolled out, slathered in an entire stick of butter, rolled out again and this process is continued until all the butter in the world has been used. Then for chocolate or almond croissants, it's stuffed with so much sugar that you are basically getting the same high as a class A drug. But that's the best part, at breakfast time it's totally normal to eat these things - because you tell yourself that's what the French must do. The same goes for danish pastries and muffins. If I want to feel even more smug about eating sugar treats for breakfast, I'll help myself to a 'skinny stem ginger muffin' from Starbucks, which is absolutely covered in icing but it says skinny so I'm basically going to lose weight while I eat it.

Breakfast is also a great excuse to be super pretentious. Sometimes I want to be one of those people who do yoga and eat greek yogurt with granola and fresh berries for breakfast and put linseed on everything but I don't think my bank account or my relationship could take the strain. Or at the weekend I might have toasted English muffins with steamed spinach, poached eggs and homemade hollandaise sauce. It's breakfasts like these that make me feel extremely smug, like I'm leading a life where I get to stay in my fluffy white bed on a Sunday morning in my light and airy loft apartment reading The Guardian and having my feet rubbed by Rob while I cuddle my pet daschund and eat crumpets ladened with so much butter I think I might die. 

For the normal everyday, clockwork breakfast eater, there's cereal. I'm not sold on cereal to be honest. Sometimes I love it and have to purchase 3 different boxes with my weekly shop but they always go stale so quickly - yes I know you can buy those airtight cereal dispenser things but who really thinks about buying those when they're at the shop. What I think cereal brings to the table is the "fun" aspect of breakfast. Cereals in crazy shapes, cereals that taste of chocolate, cereals that have toys inside (who can say they still wouldn't get excited about finding the toy in a cereal packet), cereals like Weetabix. Weetabix are great because it's impossible not to try and see how many you can eat before they absorb all the liquid in your body. They do also taste like hay, which is, you know, a bit of a downside. Cereals are also laden with sugar, and if you're eating the ones that aren't, then you're just wasting your life.

Rob enjoys peanut butter TOO much.

Did you know, that breakfast can also be incredibly romantic and cute? I didn't either until I discovered the grapefruit situation. Grapefruit is a funny one because it's a very acquired taste. My mum has been known to eat grapefruit in the past and put sugar on it. This I don't see the point of now because it just spoils the amazing taste of grapefruit... This is coming from a girl who will literally eat a whole lemon. But the best part about grapefruit for breakfast is that you cut it in half. I've noticed Rob's parents do this when staying at their house many times and it is, without a doubt, the most adorable ritual of food sharing I've ever seen. It got me thinking, what happens when one of them is away?! What happens to the other half of the grapefruit?! It made me want someone to share my grapefruit with. It made me want to force feed Rob half a grapefruit each day just so that we could be as cute and other couples would envy us and our harmonized daily grapefruit sharing. 


To sum up, breakfast is amazing. Breakfast is the best meal of the day because you can eat anything and by the end of the day you will have used the calories. This is the time of day when you should be eating the most and tastiest food possible. So you should listen to your mum, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Just as long as it's not porridge.