Cassoulet

I had been craving a hearty bean soup. Jennifer and I are usually makers of lentil soups and other varieties, but I wanted a bean soup. While at Trader Joe's I picked up three cans of Cannellini beans with no specific plan for them. When I got home I realized we had nothing planned for dinner and thought about making a white bean soup. Then it came to me about making a cassoulet.

I did a quick search of the Internet to find a vegetarian cassoulet recipe. A bunch came up and I searched through them to find which I had the ingredients for and which I could make quickly. This ruled out recipes with dried beans. I noticed a few were similar, and I believe this is because the recipe was taken from Gourmet Magazine. However, I never saw it directly from the magazine and used the original magazine version modified from here. (Meaning I didn't add the tomato products.) It just so happened that the recipe called for three cans of beans and that is what I had purchased earlier in the day.

Everything else we either had in the house (carrots, celery) or in the yard (leeks, parsley, thyme.) Prep time was fairly quick and the cooking time was short enough as well. However, I think of cassoulet as being a thick dish; a stew rather than a soup. I found that with the one quart of broth (I used mushroom,) that I had to simmer it with the lid off to get the consistency that I desired. The first portion of the simmer was with the lid half off. I skipped the bread crumb topping as we did not have a suitable bread in the house, and I didn't really feel like it would add much nutritionally.

In addition, I thought it would be great to add some kale, but we didn't have any leafy greens in the house, so I skipped it. Traditionally cassoulet is always made with meat, but we opted not to have any meat substitutes. I thought some Fakin' Bacon would have worked well to add some smokiness to the dish. With all the beans the dish hardly needs more protein, but I did feel like it lacked something. Jennifer had a vegetarian version at Tilth last year where I believe they smoked the beans in a smokehouse first before making the dish. I don't have that capacity, so it didn't happen. I ended up adding a little dijon mustard to my bowl when eating it. Otherwise I found it to be a little too plain. Perhaps the modification the other blogger did adding tomatoes would have done the trick. But by no means would I be calling it cassoulet at that point. Even still, it was a creamy, hearty dish to have on a rainy winter day in Seattle.