A NEW Vegan Cheese Brand_! Making French Cassoulet, Sheep Shenanigans _ Vegan Virtuosi

Okay, so I'm back in the garden today. I'm going to just get some chard and celery for what we're making. We're also having a big event this weekend, a donor appreciation event, and And I'm... we picked a chard of pickle, pickle, pepper, pickle, pickle, chard. We picked a lot of chard already for the event, so I need a little bit more for today. So here's some. Oh, I think that's chard for the animals. I don't need a lot, but I'm going to pick this stuff. Not tons. I guess we did pick most of it. This is for kind of a surprise dish. We got a few surprises. I wonder if there's anything in here I can pick. Oh, I mean, that looks fine, doesn't it? We can just use that. Okay, let me just pick through this pile here. That looks good too. Oh, I've got some nice thyme here too. This looks like it's lemon thyme, and I'm going to use that I'm going to do that today in my cassoulet that I'm making. And uh... Here's the celery. It just kind of grows funny. I'm not gonna, I don't need a ton. I'm just gonna cut some here. Okay, stop. Okay, two. That's enough celery, and I've got some more thyme over here. It's a different kind of thyme. This is French thyme, I think. Oh, this will be delicious. Oh my god, I love thyme. I always have thyme for thyme. Okay, and since the rosemary is finally growing, one of my My favorite herbs of all time. I'm going to pick a little bit of that too. Do you want to eat this? No, that is not to your taste. Oh, you're picky. You guys are picky. How about celery? Do you want some celery? Ricky, do you want some celery? No celery? Oh, okay. You'll eat celery. There you go. Ricky and Lucy. Hi, how are you? Came to us from a Louisiana kill lot. A lot of donkeys, you know, as you know, you're probably reading, we are rounding up Mustangs and donkeys and just killing them and sending them as basically meat to Mexico and Canada. And so these guys were about to meet that ugly fate and they got rescued. They came here gosh maybe about eight years ago and they were so emaciated, patches of fur missing, they looked awful. Lucy is fairly friendly with me and she loves to cuddle at times, not all the time. Oh, not today. Not today. You're not going to come over here today because someone is over here. But Ricky is very hard to even get close to. But, you know, but Lucy will insist on being cuddled at times. She comes over and if I step away, then she follows me. And I got 30 minutes of nuzzling I have to do with her. Princess is here. Yes, you are. Hi, Hi, Princess. Hello, Miss Princess. Wait a minute. The door is open. Why is the door open? Oh my gosh. We better hurry up. I don't know what's going on. Things have been knocked over. Oh no. Oh no. Pepper, are you up here? Is Pepper here? Hi Pepper. Pepper's in the house. No, no, no. Hey. No, hey, so he's eating this protein powder, this vegan protein powder. No, no. Hey, I had to throw out this protein powder because we had a little mouse that kind of moved into the house and got into, I had, I put it here. Here's my cabinet. Look over here. I had to put everything in containers because the mouse was getting into it. And every night, every morning I'd wake up and this place would be a mess. So I put everything in these containers like this. And I finally had to get one of those humane release things because it got into the protein powder. It opened the container and it was inside the protein powder. Hey, stop it. No, you cannot have it. Okay, so I gotta get him out. And so, anyway, oh, you don't like that. Nope. Pepper. All right, Pepper. Pepper, come here. Koan's guard dog now. I'm here for you. Come here, Mr. Pepper. Look what I've got here. What does it look like? Cottage cheese. Okay, so I have a feeling Pepper is going to be bothering us all morning, but I, after all of that, I just need a little nourishment. Good things coming. I have a whole, okay, to be honest, I've been working on something with some people, and I know a lot of people have asked for cottage cheese, and there may be something coming down the pike. Can't tell you exactly when, but this is not tofu. It only has four ingredients. It's basically two ingredients and then, you know, minor ingredients like water and salt. High in protein has about the same amount of protein as cottage cheese. So hopefully this will be coming to you in some format soon. Don't hold me to a timeline, though. But anyway, I'm really happy with the way it turned out. And... It's delicious. And where am I sitting? I'm sitting out here. Take a look at my seats here. This is my dog, Koan. This was a set that I got from a garage sale. It worked very well for a few years. It was nothing wrong with it. It was one of those, you know, when you sell a house, you stage it. And so it was one of those staging sales, you know, like they were getting rid of furniture from staging. So I got it for just a few hundred dollars. It was a really great deal. And then this summer, my dog decided to dig through them like this. So he basically tore Tore up all the cushions. And I have that event coming up this weekend, so I got to figure out how to cover them. I think I might just flip these over for right now. Um, So that's probably the color is different too. So that's probably what I'm going to do so that I can get on with the event. Yeah, but that's what happens when you have a dog that just, yeah, there's a little color difference here, but at least a few days it might bleach it. It might, you're right. It might bleach it in a few days. So well, such is life. You know, when I got divorced several years ago, you know, we split things up and so I had to like figure out how to put seats in the back of the yard for not a lot of money. And so I was able to get one of these really great deals. But that's what happens with doggies that you love. I don't know where he is though. He likes to sleep out here and then he starts digging just from anxiety. Kwan's inside. Kwan's inside. Oh, he probably wants to come outside. Okay. He's, he's resting. He's resting. Yeah. We see him right here. All right. So I'm telling you about this event we're having this weekend, this donor appreciation event, and it is a concert. We have two amazing musicians. The Vegan Virtuosi is their name. Joanne Kong, pianist, and Christoph Wagner, cellist. And we will have this beautiful chamber concert on the afternoon of Saturday to honor all of the donors for Rancho Compasión, people who have given. And I'm making up a lot of different, lots of yummy nibbles and libations and that sort of thing. But the musicians are going to be staying with me for two nights. And tomorrow we're going to be prepping all day long for the event. And so they're coming tomorrow night, the musicians are, and I have to be able to feed them in the evening. So I'm making a dinner for them today. So I can just, something that I can keep in the refrigerator and reheat. So I'm making a really easy cassoulet, Which is a French Dish with beans and typically lots of meat, but I'm going to use mushrooms instead. So we're going to make that today and I've got a couple of other things too. So let's get started in the kitchen. Okay, so what is this? In the garden, we have so many vegetables. I, you know, I got to figure out how do I preserve them. So I did this little experiment and this is, these are all shishito peppers and some other peppers and I salted them. I thought, what if I made dried salted peppers? And then I put them outside in the sun and then I forgot about it for about a week. They completely dried and the white on here is basically salt and the green turned white. So this is the shishito pepper that got salted and dried. I'm gonna try it. It's kind of like potato chips. A little crispy, chewy. I mean I wouldn't say this is the biggest success story of my life, we'll put it that way, but that's what happens you put something out and you forget about it I thought, hey, you can sun-dry tomatoes, let's do sun-dried peppers. They're okay. I'll put them out anyway. Anyway. But it was an experiment. Next time, I will pay more attention and do better. That's better. I tend to forget about things a lot, so that is one of my problems. This is another thing I forgot about. I hadn't made bloomy rind cheese in a while, so I started doing that, and you can see the fuzzy Penicillium candidum and the Geotrichum candidum growing on here, but I completely forgot that I was doing this, and you have to flip it every single day for a while. I totally forgot to do that, so I think it won't be ready for donor appreciation, but I do have a couple of other Maybe I'll share that with you later. I can't remember what I made that out of. That might be, oh my God, I think it was some leftover soy yogurt that I turned into cheese and then I grew the mold on it. So, you know, I'm constantly. experimenting and iterating. So that's how it rolls around here. As I mentioned, I'm starting out. Pepper is right there, by the way. He has followed us. He's trying to get back in the house. Pepper, he knows how to open the door. Oh gosh, I'm taking off my glasses. Okay. I'm starting out actually with some tomatoes. I got to get the tomato sauce started for the cassoulet. And these are, look at this tomato. It's frozen. So this is what you do. You harvest tomatoes when they're ripe. You stick them in the freezer and they are good all year long for making any kind of sauce or soup. And so I probably have 50 pounds of tomatoes in my freezer. So I'm gonna use these. You're gonna just start out by putting them in some boiling water or hot water. And the reason you do that is because then you can slip the skins off like this. And just being in the water for a couple of minutes will soften them just enough to be able to cut into them with a sharp knife. So these are already, they just, the skin slip off so easily. I swear to God. This is the way you keep this flavor of summer all year long. There is no impact to flavor at all. The tomatoes taste just as good. It is the easiest trick in the world. And I am ashamed to say that I didn't come up with this. It was my daughter. I asked her to pick some tomatoes one time and there was no room in the fridge. Uh-oh. Okay, that's why you wear an apron where you don't and you make a mess and that's okay. And she stuck them in the fridge and I was like why did you do that? I was going to chop them first and she just stuck them in their hole and they turned out to be just perfect. So there you have it. I've got my tomatoes here. I could, you know, I could give these skins to Pepper. Shall I do that? I bet he would like these skins. Okay, let me do that. Let me just give these to him for a second. Oh, all these skins. I can fish them out of here. I know that cottage cheese that you saw earlier. I'm going to tell you, I'm working on a project with some other people and it could be a new brand, which will be sort of a political brand, meaning We will be there producing food for a very, the purpose, not only of just creating great products, but to make a statement about what the food system should be like. So stay tuned. I'm really hoping to get it off the ground. You want that too? Oh, is it too hot? Oh no, you're eating it. Okay. That's all I'm giving you today. I'm busy. I'm busy. That's all. That's it for pepper. Pepper, I gotta wash my hands now. Gonna move this. He's such a good kisser, though. I love Pepper's kisses. He's a really good kisser, almost as good as my dog, Koan. Let's get started here. I'm going to chop these up. So it's a little hard. I told you that you need a sharp knife. It does work. And you don't even need to chop them that fine. It's just all going to disintegrate on the stovetop. So as you can see, they're already I'm already chopping up. So just very, very roughly is all you need. Okay, so I got to tell you my cottage cheese story as I chop these, because when I was in high school, I was a cottage cheese freak. Every morning, my breakfast of choice was a dish that I called cottage cheese yummy. And so what I would do with the cottage cheese is I put in honey. I was a vegetarian, not a vegan at the time. Um, mix it with a little bit of cinnamon. That was the key. A little cinnamon, a drop or two of vanilla, and then I would add whatever fruit was in season. And that was my cottage cheese yummy. And I swear to God, I had it every single morning for breakfast in high school. I don't know how I got on that kick because, uh, I guess it was kind of a popular thing back in the 1970s. And then it kind of fell out of style. And now everyone's asking for cottage cheese again. Um, And, of course, you know, there's always been tofu cottage cheese, but it's not the same. Now, cottage cheese has a little bit of tang. All right. It's a little salty because it has salt in it. And so... You know I have a secret ingredient that makes the perfect curds and cottage cheese like flavor and so oh I'll save this for pepper. So that is what we're going to be using. Okay in order to get my tomato sauce started of course I need some garlic first. Let me just move these over here for a second and Little bit of local garlic. We did grow garlic in the yard as well, but we didn't dry them all that well and they kind of got over dried. So I don't have quite as much garlic this year as I did the year before. So I did buy this, but this is from a local farm too. I'm really trying the best as I can to eat only fruits and vegetables either grown right here on the the property or from local Farms, and luckily there are so many around here. I think I probably told you on the last episode, I mean, it is shocking. I can't get over it that, you know, of all the farms that we have in the United States, only 4% of them are dedicated, or of the total land is dedicated to growing what are called specialty crops, fruits and vegetables. It's mostly commodity crops, corn, wheat, soy, et cetera, mostly for animal feed, as well as... Um, you know, basically processed foods. Most of it gets sold to large corporations. I heard a baaah. Oh boy, I hope you didn't, I hope she didn't open the door downstairs. I thought that was the vacuum. Oh, was that the vacuum? Okay, all right. We'll find out. Okay, we'll find out. Okay, I've got some garlic. I'm gonna go over to the stove and get that on. But I, no, that's, that's pepper. I hear pepper. All right. I've got my stove on here, heating up my pan here just to get the tomato sauce started. I've got a bunch of different components, but this is a cassoulet that I'm going to be serving tomorrow night that really we can pull together in about an hour. So because we're going to be filming nonstop and you're going to see how long it takes. So heat up my pan. I'm going to add my estate olive oil, which I'm running low on. But, you know, I am in a Mediterranean climate and my neighbor also has, gosh, she has so many more trees than I do. And so she's been good enough to give me her olive oil for our events here at Rancho. So get the olive oil hot coming over and getting my chopped garlic, which I'm going to add. You know, you don't even need to chop garlic. I mean, in Italy, some people just add... Three or four cloves of garlic. Saute it and then they actually take it out just to scent the oil with garlic and really just do nothing more than that. But here in America we like it a little bit garlicky-er. So I'm going to leave the garlic in there and then I'm going to go get the tomatoes and add them. Okay I got my frozen tomatoes here as you can see and they're going to go right in here. Make that splash. These are going to take a little bit longer to cook. Oh somehow a little cherry tomato found its way in Um, they'll definitely take a little bit longer to cook than if you're making tomato sauce, pomodoro, uh, from fresh tomatoes that aren't frozen, but these will, believe it or not, break down very, very quickly. I'm going to flavor them slightly differently, rather than using basil or oregano, the kind of things you would put over a pasta. I'm actually going to be seasoning them with bay leaves and thyme, because they're going to go in a cassoulet over these, oh my gosh, these beans that I cooked up. So I cooked up these giganta beans today. I soaked them overnight. And that's a little bit of kombu that I cooked. So... Let me tell you a little secret about cooking beans. I obviously didn't have time to cook the beans during this show, and so I had to cook them ahead of time because they do take a couple of hours on the stove. So I did soak them overnight, but one of the things that people often think is you can't add salt during the cooking. Add the salt at the very beginning before you even start to boil. Seriously, that is how you get the flavor. It does not toughen the beans at all. That is some Some crazy, I don't know, wives, old wives tale. And then a little splash of olive oil also helps. It infuses the beans with flavor, helps to tenderize them slightly. You know how the Mexicans add, what is it? Not lard. Lard or what is it? Some, not, is it lard? I don't know. They add some kind of fat sometimes for like refried beans, you know? So a little bit of fat really does help the beans. You can leave it out if you want, but it does help. And then the green thing that you're seeing is kombu, which is a Japanese seaweed. And kombu, since the macrobiotic days, really helps to not only tenderize the beans, it adds more umami. to the beans and they supposedly help eliminate that sort of gassy reaction that some people get. I eat a lot of beans part of it is the amount of fiber and just getting used to that amount of fiber but apparently kombu does help you. So you know get some kombu at the store and put a little piece in there it doesn't have to be big and cook your beans that way. Um, um. Oh my god, the kombu is so full of umami. I mean just picking them out and eating them is great. Just to make room, there's too many pots and pans here, I'm going to put the beans in the bottom of my cassoulet dish because everything else is going to go on top of the beans. Okay, we're going to go back to the cutting board because I'm turning this up, the heat up, just to Get this as hot as possible and melt. We're going back to the cutting board where I'm going to get started on the other ingredients. First thing I'm going to do, get this little piece in there, is make our What's going to substitute for, you know, the meat in the traditional cassoulet, which would be like chicken and pork. I've got this beautiful lion's mane mushroom. I'm going to tear it up like this and we're going to cook this and some other mushrooms, but these, this will be baked. This will not be cooked on the stove top. Now, you probably have seen a lot of people, a lot of chefs make lion's mane and they put the weight on it on the stove and they press it down and all of this stuff. I found a much easier way to do it. And we're just going to bake it in a marinade. And you can flavor it any way you like, but I do have made a cup of broth. I cheated. This is not homemade stock. This is just some store-bought porcini broth, mushroom broth. You can use a vegan chicken broth or Whatever broth you like that's flavorful, make your own if you have the time. Otherwise, I cheated here. And I'm going to add a little bit of red wine to this. Oh, and this is really exciting. So this is Hiromi-san's soy sauce. So she is a woman in Japan that we visited on my trip to Japan last year. And she's a farmer, and she makes her own soy sauce. And interestingly enough, She made it wheat-free by using rice instead of wheat. So most soy sauce contains soy and wheat. And so people who have a gluten intolerance often eat... You know, they'll eat tamari. Tamari is actually a totally different way, a process of making it. And to me, it lacks the complexity of soy sauce. It's just sort of dark and heavy. And so this is a really interesting spin on soy sauce that she made with rice. So I'm going to add a little bit of her soy sauce to this. Uh, and then she also gave me, um, I think this is called shoyu kasu. This is the stuff that's leftover after you grind the soybeans and you know, the, the rice and all of that. And you marinate it for, I don't know, a year or whatever. And then you strain it. You end up with sort of like nut, nut milk pulp. You end up with this, uh, this sort of dried mixture here, and it's not widely available in Japan, but it also adds a lot of umami and flavor, so I'm going to add that as well. Now, obviously, you can't get Hiromi-san's soy sauce or the shoyu kasu, so you don't need to use those. You know, you can improvise on a marinade by adding, could be, what's that, Bragg's liquid aminos. You could just use soy sauce. You could You could put some tomato paste in here. You can add nutritional yeast, any herbs and seasonings you like. I'm going to add some olive oil to this just to give a little bit of richness to the lion's mane. And I'm going to add some of this fresh thyme on the top here. So now I'm going to pour this on top. And I'm going to stick this in the oven and we're just going to let it bake for a while until a while I'm making the tomato sauce and everything else. And then we're going to come back to it. And then we're going to deal with the other mushrooms. And these are going to shrink down and turn super, super meaty. I did something like this for the Rancho Compasión Gala last year, but I made it sort of like a chicken cutlet with chicken flavors. And I served it, and this man called me over, and he said, Why are you serving meat here? Actually, he said, this is cultivated meat, isn't it? He wasn't vegan, but he thought he was being served cell-based meat. It was funny. I told him it was a lion's mane mushroom and he was shocked. So I fooled a meat eater. Okay, get that in the oven. Just going to forget about it. Use the same bowl so I don't have to clean twice. All right. Now we're going to start on the mushrooms. As I mentioned, the mushrooms are going to be the star of the dish along with the beautiful beans. And I just have a variety. I have a bunch of little shiitake here. I'm going to cut the bottoms off of the oysters and just separate them by hand. And we're just going to brown them on the stovetop. You can go overboard with the amount. And if you don't use it all in the cassoulet, you'll have enough for another meal. Okay, so pepper's not going to eat these, so I'm going to toss these. They go in the compost, that is. Okay, I've got some mushrooms here. I want big pieces, so I'm just going to quarter these. These are crimini mushrooms. Got some king trumpet as well. And yes, I am a noisy cook. Get those in there. We're going to go back to the stovetop in a second. All right. So here's what I'm doing. Oh, look at this tomato sauce. It is cooking down absolutely beautifully. Do you see that? That looks so splash, splash, splash. All right. So here's what we're doing with these mushrooms. It's a little bit different. I'm getting a call from United States. I'm going to ignore that. All right. Not the tomatoes. The mushrooms are going in here. I don't want to crowd the pan too much. I didn't put anything in the pan, you notice. But I am going to add water. I know this looks like murky water. This is just the broth container and I just, it'll be fine. I'm going to add water to this. I know it seems counterintuitive, but we're going to let the mushrooms actually exude their water as they boil. And then we're going to add oil and that will actually brown them even better. Now there's another small component to the cassoulet, which is we're going to make a little mirepoix. With onions and the celery we picked up, I've got some funny carrots. Oh, so here's another experiment. I was trying to figure out, these carrots were harvested about two months ago, and I was trying to figure out, can I get them to last until our gala in November? And so I did this experiment. I just kept them in water. I know, they're all like, these are like, I know, these are like human, there's like, these are ballet, these are ballet, look at that, yoga, ballet. Let's see what else we've got. Uh, yeah, this one's here. There we go. See a little, what do you, what is it when you put your leg up like this? I don't know. I'm like the worst, uh, at all of this. See, look at these carrots. Aren't they one? They're wonderful. They're beautiful. Um, but I've kept them for now almost two months, I think without getting, you know, they're still nice and crispy. Um, so I'm Chop these up. Look how beautiful these are too. I actually, I'm going to cook these separately and I don't really care. I'm going to be very imprecise today just because I need to get this done. So, so we're making a little mirepoix that will go into the tomato sauce and that will cover the, the beans and the beautiful mushrooms, which we're going to revisit in a second. So yes, I did buy the mushrooms. We do have a mushroom garden. Nothing's growing right now. We're going to hopefully start having mushrooms again. But right now, we don't. I did have to buy the mushrooms, hence. But, you know, don't shoot me for that. They are also grown locally. And just imagine, like, you know, food is all about community. The reason humans evolved into societies was really because of food. I know it sounds odd, but that's what distinguishes us from all of the other, most of the other species on the planet. It doesn't mean we're better. It just means we're different in that it's food that brought us together because Because we are a species that... ...forage together, that might have hunted together, that cultivated food together through agriculture. And as we did that, it brought us more and more together into tribes and villages and cities. And it was all around the production and sharing of food. The sharing part is very important. And that is what I encourage people to do, is to start... Stop eating alone and start cooking and sharing with your friends. So I'll talk more about that. I will keep talking about it. These are onions that Caroline, our leader at Rancho, just picked, harvested. So I've got all these beautiful red onions here. And I'm going to chop these up as well, too. So I'll get that in half. Look at that. I know, the most beautiful onion you've ever seen. And that's what we want. Okay. So this doesn't have to be perfect, just get them chopped up. You can use the tops as well too. So I've got onions, I've got an onion, I've got the carrots, and now I'm going to cut the celery. They all have a tinge of red in them. The carrots do, the celery does. Okay, this is a pile for pepper. Pepper's pile is always growing. What was that about? Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, how many pickles did Peter Piper pick? That was one of the things that I learned when I was just learning English as a young child. Okay, these are shrinking down. So I'm just gonna add all of these and we have to cook these until they have completely absorbed all the water. And that will have rid the mushrooms of the water. I know that sounds really contrary to what you might think intuitively, but that is going to make it a lot easier for the mushrooms to brown. Look at the tomato sauce. Do you see it's already broken down? And this will have all the flavor of a tomato sauce from freshly picked. Tomatoes. I don't remember if I added salt to this. Did I add salt? Do you remember? Okay, I guess I have to get a spoon and taste. I'm heating up this pan to cook the mirepoix, the sloppily chopped up mirepoix. You must really like them if you're using so many pans, Miyoko. They're amazing. The vegan virtuosi are absolutely amazing. I mean, they rendered people to tears last time they were here. two years ago. They are both world-class musicians that have played in symphony orchestras the world over in Europe and the United States. They're both university professors also. These are solid musicians, absolutely phenomenal, and we are so delighted that they are providing their services to us to entertain us for an afternoon. So if you want to come to an event like that, you can also become a donor at Rancho Compasión. Okay, so I'm getting my pan hot. Where's my olive oil? Get your pan hot first, always. Now I'm gonna add the vegetables and saute them. Very, very sloppily cut today, but it's all gonna melt together. I don't really care. I gotta get some more salt. Turn this down a little bit and keep the heat high on the mushrooms. Until they completely cook down and that looks like it's going to be the right amount for my cassoulet dish. So I'm very, very happy about that. OK, by the way, someone commented on my last video that you have to pick the lemon peppers, lemon cucumbers really small. So I did. This one's really, really tiny. So let me see how it is. Oh, OK. Let me give it a try. The skin's not as tough. Does have a little bit of tang. Not only does it look like a lemon. It has a little bit of a tang of a lemon, but I think I still prefer Japanese and Persian cucumbers. Okay, so I'm going to be making one more thing on the stove here. So I am the master of using up leftovers, figuring out what can I do with leftovers. So I have something that I'm going to show you. Oh, and these are beginning to stick. So they're almost ready for some oil. As soon as that water evaporates, we're going to add the oil and then they are going to brown beautifully. Now, if you want to, I did this for a reason. You can saute the mirepoix first and then add your tomatoes to that. That's how you would typically do it. I did it differently because I want a little bit of The tomato sauce separately for the thing I'm going to show you now, but typically you would do this and then you would add the tomatoes to this and cook it down into a tomato sauce or a, this would be considered a ragu, not pomodoro. This would be considered a ragu. That's what you would typically do. I didn't do that for the reason that I'm going to take a little bit of Consider this for the next special thing. I mean maybe it's special. So last weekend we had an event here. We had a volunteer work day and I made lots of food for like 40 people and I made a big pot of pasta. But when I got to the bottom of the pasta I didn't get it all out. I had this pasta that just was at the bottom of the pan or the pot And it's in all that starchy water. So I did something with this. I cooked it up. I fried it up on both sides to get it nice and crispy. And it was so yummy. I'm going to top it with some of that tomato sauce. So I'm going to get some olive oil in here. And we are going to fry this. I mean this is something you could do with leftover pasta. Thank you. You know, if you have some of that starchy water, just let it sit in that starchy water so it absorbs. And now I'm going to add this. And just to use this up. Now, this is going to take about five minutes on each side, I think. All right, these are beginning to stick now. As you can see, the water is just about gone from the mushrooms. So now I'm going to go in with some olive oil. And this will help brown the mushrooms beautifully. So just let that cook undisturbed. I think my tomato sauce is ready. So I'm gonna just take a little bit out for this spaghetti dish. And I'm gonna add this into my tomato sauce for my ragu. Let me see if these are, all right. They are tender and so, so sweet. So I'm gonna add that and we'll let that cook. I'm gonna add some thyme now. Oh, this is looking beautiful. Nice and chunky. Just look at that. And these mushrooms too. Oh my gosh. They are going to be so flavorful. As you can see, they're beginning to brown. You don't want to be stirring them the whole time or they won't brown. So we're just going to let that sit for a minute. I'm turning the heat down just a little bit. Not low, but I would say medium high Um... And then we have to make breadcrumbs. Cassoulet is always topped with breadcrumbs. So I don't know about you, but I always keep stale bread around, especially baguettes. How many times have you served a baguette and you just end up with, you know, some odd random crusts and chunks of bread, you know, slices, etc. So I let it completely dry out, which is what you want. That one's no good. Um, you let it completely dry out so it doesn't get moldy and then you can turn this into bread crumbs. So I'm going to do that in my food processor over here. I got this little stand here. Ooh, come on. You, you stay that way. All right. Okay. So let me get my bread in there. Uh, now you can use panko or store-bought breadcrumbs if you want. Uh, but you know, I just always have a bunch of, uh, bread lying around. Stale bread, so I let it dry out and then I keep it in the refrigerator and there's also a random Taralli, which is a Puglia, Puglia, Pugliese, is it Pugliese? Pugliese, Pugliese A cracker made out of flour, oil, olive oil, white wine, salt, that's it. It gets boiled first, sort of like bagels, and then baked. But this is from, you know, obviously these are scraps from a little get-together I had. Okay. They don't have to be very, very small. So this was less than successful. It may be the food processor. I think the bread keeps getting stuck on there. I don't, it may be because I put soft bread in there as well. But it's fine because we're going to, this is going to go on top and it can be a little bit chunkier. That's okay. Let's take a look at this ragu. This is done. Everyone, look at that beautiful ragu and look at these mushrooms. Oh my god. Do you see how beautifully they brown? And I think the mushrooms are ready. I'm going to start layering this beautiful cassoulet. We're going to put these mushrooms in here. Do you see how nice and chunky they look? They're chunky. They're brown. They're gorgeous. I still have the lion's mane that's going to go on top of here. Okay. Oh, that looks so beautiful. Okay, couple more things. Let me go check on the lion's mane, see how that's looking. I'm going to turn the temperature up because I got to cook this a little faster, turning it up to 425 in the interest of getting this episode done. So I'm going to flip this over now, I think. All right, you want to cook that until it's really crispy on the bottom too. All right, so I just had another idea. So these are chives I picked a few days ago without really a plan. I just thought, oh, we got so many chives, so I picked them. I think what I'm going to do is make chive breadcrumbs. So I'm going to mix it with the breadcrumbs and some olive oil. You can do melted butter typically. Cassoulet has tons of butter in it, and I got actually so much butter, it's coming out of my ears. This is all butter. So this was made, I did a cooking demo at a store recently. Certainly at a... And so this is all butter. This is all butter. It's all in the freezer, different kinds of butter. My favorite right now is the one made out of shea and olive oil. I love the flavor of olive oil and butter. The spaghetti dish. What I'm going to do is... Get some chard. I don't need all of this. This is the chard we picked earlier, and I'm going to just saute it in the same pan with a little bit of, this is more pepper stuff, a little bit of olive oil and garlic, and we'll put the spaghetti on top of it and then top it with tomato sauce. And that's a whole new way of using up badly cooked spaghetti. Okay, this is ready to come out. Look at that. Look at that crispy. Oh my gosh, it's like a hash brown. I'm going to just move it over here. And I'm going to, in the same pan, I'm going to add the garlic that I just chopped. Yes, Koan, you're in the way as usual, but that's okay. And this, that's the chard, a splash of salt. A pinch of salt, not a splash, because it's not liquid. And once this wilts, I'm going to plate it up with the spaghetti, the fried spaghetti, and some tomato sauce. So chard, you don't have to cook very long. You just want it to wilt because it is fairly tender, and you definitely want to keep that vibrant green color. I'm going to plate this up, spread it out a little bit. Get my crispy. I don't know which side looks better. They both look good. And then we're going to top it with tomato sauce, maybe a little bit of chopped chives. All right. So we're getting back here. So I have all this butter. This is the olive oil butter. I think I'm going to use this actually. It's, uh, if this is a recipe in the vegan creamery, uh, we're just going to make super buttery breadcrumbs that are going to go on top. I'm just going to microwave this to melt it for a second. Okay. So here I've got the Butter. I got the breadcrumbs. It's going in there. I'm going to mix the chives in there too. So I've got buttery chivey breadcrumbs and that's going to go on top of the cassoulet until it's so golden brown and crispy. And now I'm about to make the final touch. Add a little bit of salt to that to flavor it. All right. I'm going to take out the lion's mane. Look at that. All right, I've got the lion's mane. I'm going to show you how does that look. Don't they look absolutely meaty and delicious? They've shrunk down. I'm going to tear that one up a little bit. Nice big pieces. I'm going to take out the thyme. Nice, big, chunky, meaty pieces. Oh, the smell, the aroma. Oh gosh, this is going to be a meal fit for... The queen of vegan cheese. Okay, so I've got a little bit of this broth leftover and that's going right into the ragu. And then we're going to add a little bit of white wine and this will thin it down a little bit. And I think I need a little bit more broth in here. So I'm going to quickly make some broth and add it. You want it to be a little runnier than that. Sorry, Sorry, I'm cheating, I'm using a bouillon cube. I don't have any broth made, so. And I'm gonna stir my broth. So this is going into my ragu and you want it to seep down all the way to the bottom of the beans and flavor it thus. Gonna add a little bit of thyme to this and it's all gonna cook down over an hour or so. And I'm gonna pour this over all of this beautiful stuff in here. The beans, the gigante beans. Now you can use, typically you would use Gosh, is it cannellini or, you know, some other type of bean? And if, you know, if you want to use canned beans, you can. I highly recommend cooking your own beans. Make a big pot, freeze it, then you don't have to cook it again. And finally, we're going to top it with the breadcrumbs and the chives. And we are going to put this in the oven to bake for about... 45 minutes or an hour. I have the oven at 400 degrees right now just to get the cooking process started. And this should be nice and browned and lovely looking. All right, let's check out this crispy spaghetti. Crispy on the outside, tender on the inside with a little bit of charred stuff in my mouth. I mean, honestly, that is just pure comfort food. Wow. You're not worrying about al dente because you can take that mushy spaghetti, You're getting that crispy crust on both sides. And so that's your replacement for al dente. And you could do this with macaroni. You could do this with any kind of overcooked spaghetti. Just let it sit in that starchy water, let it absorb. And the starchy water becomes part of the dish. That is pure comfort food. And it's absolutely delicious with the charred, the freshly made pomodoro. Oh my God. All right, one more bite. I can't eat all of this. It's too good. I need to let Annie try it too. I know, I'm being a pig. I mean, I'm eating like Princess does. She takes a bite of food and she spills it out of her mouth. It's coming out everywhere. My floor is a mess. But when you enjoy something, why not eat like Princess? I mean, she's one of the cutest things around. Oh, that is so good. Yum. Mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm. Oh my God. Okay, can we scrape it out? Okay, this is what happens when you stick something in the broiler. So you can get an episode done and then you get chatting and then you forget about it. That is the story of my life. So I didn't ruin it because to serve the dinner tomorrow night, I can put fresh breadcrumbs on it, but we won't get any beauty shots now. I think it's totally fine. I think it's, ooh, I'm gonna taste this. That is yummaroonie. All right, I'm trying to make this look a little prettier. So the crust is supposed to be very, very brown. Not parched black like this. Okay, here's the thing, guys. I can't cut into this because we're serving it tomorrow. I'm serving it tomorrow. And I don't want a big piece of it moved out. Thank you. Removed, but I'm going to try to remember to take photos tomorrow when I pull it out of the oven for Annie. I am just not as good with that. Whether it's cottage cheese or crispy leftover spaghetti over chard or a beautiful casserole, that's a little bit more upscale. I'm glad you were able to be with me today in the kitchen, in my humble kitchen where I burn things, drop things, spill things, splash things. And I hope to see you again soon. I have a lot more for you coming. I mean, all the produce is from the garden. I pickled all of this.