I don’t have the setup to cold smoke, which is how lox is done. Cold smoking requires an external smoke source. Mine is hot smoked, like smoked whitefish or mackerel.
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Happy belated birthday!
(your cake this year looks a fair bit healthier! 
)
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Cassoulet. Do it.
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Yes, at a minimum of one’s a month. I can’t do without.
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It was healthier, but if you cant have a cake oozing with chocolate on your birthday, when can you?
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My people call it Cholent. Food that can sit simmering from sundown Friday to Saturday afternoon.
Tonight we had different Jewish soul food: Pot roast & kasha. My mom’s recipe is amazing, you roast the meat with a pile of veggies like tomato, red pepper, onion, parsnip, and puree them in the drippings for the gravy.
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Drool. Good gravy is the best. The. Best.
Also, no such thing as ‘too much gravy’. Ever.
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Is that a squash?
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Nah, looks like there’s plenty of room in that fridge.
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I’ve had revelations a number of times when it comes to provençal dishes. The first was ratatouille, risotto, followed by paella . Cassoulet is next on my list of dishes that are impossible.
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No, seriously, it’s actually quite easy yet staggeringly impressive. Risotto is much harder, there’s no stirring here.
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I guess what I am saying is there is so much tradition, memory, and history in each one of those dishes, if you didn’t grow up with it then inevitably you are gonna miss a note or beat. I’ve only had restaurant cassoulet, and was underwhelmed. (Same with restaurant risotto)
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If your wife ever leaves you, I might consider marrying you. But you would have to keep up a steady supply of smoked fish.
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Then you should definitely read this article. There is not as much tradition as they’d have you believe.
"You thought local sports fans are insane? You should head over to one of those medieval walled cities—Toulouse, Castelnaudary, and Carcassonne all have claims to the dish—and chat with some local cassoulet chefs to see what a true fanatic is like…
“Le true cassoulet must have mutton in it,” they’ll say in Toulouse.
“Mais non!,” the chef in Castelnaudary will cry. “Only a vache Espagnole would put anything other than confit de canard and pork in their cassoulet!”
“Sacrebleu! You are both le wrong! In Carcassonne we use the goose and the partridge!”
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Any time serious eats is linked to, I am obliged to point out I was featured there briefly in 2009. And had a small conversation with the magnificent Mensch Kenji (exec editor). He is good.
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Then I don’t understand why you’re not reading his article and having a paradigm shift on cassoulet. 
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Yer really holding me feet to the fire 
Fine, you win, I’ll read it!
(and you are invited over for dinner)
ETA
Just as in a good risotto, the cassoulet flowed slowly across the plate, spreading out into a loose sauce. None of that solid-enough-to-mound stuff I’d seen everywhere else. Flavorwise, it was different too. Rich, meaty, and overwhelmingly simple, there were a few background notes from aromatic vegetables—onions, carrots, celery, a few cloves, perhaps some bay leaf and parsley—but the main flavor was just that of the cured meat, a good stock, and beans.
Like I said: simple, peasant fare.
The beans were cooked to the point of maximum creaminess—like a good loose hamburger, they were held together with nothing more than hope
oh yeah
ETA
So what’s the solution? Well the obvious one is to just make your own goddam stock. It’s actually way easier than it sounds, though it again requires a bit of a time commitment. I’ll admit it: sometimes even I’m too lazy to make my own stock when I’ve already got a day-long project ahead of me.
So what’s the next best thing?
Just fake it.
BWAHAHAHAHA!!! There’s a reason I respect Kenji so much
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My wife’s solution is to make meals that support other meals. So she’ll boil turkey legs for “BBQ pulled turkey” and have a pot of stock left for recipes that require it. Another way is to save all your chicken carcasses and bones in the freezer till you have enough for soup. This backfired sort of this week, when it turned out that some of the bones in the soup for our Rosh Hashonah dinner were from smoked chicken, the soup was smoky flavored!
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