How did we get there from here, Mr. Bachmann? Well, I’ll tell you. Three days and four grocery stores later, behold!- the fully assembled cassoulet.

There are two types of cooking adventure. The first is when you take very simple everyday ingredients and do some technical wizardry and Voila-puff pastry, for instance. The other, like this here cassoulet, is not technically difficult, but require days of cooking, resting, and perhaps most adventurely, obtaining the right ingredients. First, get the meat.

The 55 bus took us out to the Dogpatch, a neighborhood which didn’t exist in name when I moved here. It was always there but didn’t become popular until the City by the Bay starting living closer to it in by filling in the old warehouse district into a young urbanite’s paradise. This includes wonderful restaurants, coffee shops, boutiquey food places, and an absolutely wonderf French butchery called Olivier’s.

Duck legs, ready for confiting? Check! Toulouse style sausages? Check! Cute young butchers with long white aprons, handlebar mustaches, eager to please? Check! This place had everything. Those beautiful duck legs pictured above were subject to a quick confit for the cassoulet which included nutmeg, allspice, gin, and plenty of salt. It needed to brine for a day, and the beans needed to soak overnight to soften.

Day One. Oh yes, and I cooked the ham and pork shoulder to tenderness in water, which became stock. That too. I’d forgotten, or perhaps not put together in my mind in the first place, that I would be at work all day on Thursday and not able to do anything with the cassoulet unless I got up very early in the morning and worked constantly until the very moment that I had to rush out the door and catch BART. Which is exactly what I did. I roasted the duck confit for two and a half hours, I seared the sausages, I simmered the beans in the pork stock with onion garlic, onion, carrot, and herbs for an hour. For you see, every element of this dish is cooked separately before cooling, resting, processing, reassembling, and then recooking. That’s where I started to get worried that three days wasn’t enough, and dish wouldn’t happen. Well, when I pulled the duck legs out of the oven, I sighed with relief.

I am serving the cassoulet this evening. It is in the oven now with its mixture of breadcrumbs and walnut oil on the top. I tasted the bean in their liquor yesterday and they were absolutely wonderful. The scent in the house right now-ham, garlic, allspice, walnut, gin, savory meat. It is other worldly. I imagine it is what elves make in their little hovels at the base of the old oak tree. It is the food in fairy tales.

Now that it’s cooking, I seem to have forgotten any anxiety about getting to this point. Finding the all the ingredients, meat aside, were trickier to find than I thought. The beans for instance. It wasn’t the type of bean, Great Northern Beans were easy to find in cans. But finding big dry ones didn’t happen until grocery store number three. The walnut oil was worse, that was shop number four. When I’m making something as big and complicated as this I really want to make it to the letter of the recipe, and when I get into a situation where I may have to substitute ingredients, well, look out. I can get really grumpy. Same with timing, if I run out of town and I start to feel that I have trim minutes from the process, then you got some serious trouble. But, here we are. Everything is going to be fine, good even. And the pizza man is still just a phone call away.

Friendly reminder- I can no longer edit or change anything on this platform so this is all basically raw, unedited stream of whatever writing. For instance, in that last paragraph I wrote “if I run out of town”, when of course I meant “run out of time”. Ya know, that kinda thing. OK, more to come.