Bread and Wine: Real Simple Cassoulet

Dear Readers,

If you have followed me on Instagram, you know that instead of being at home in the good ol' USA, my family and I are overseas for my husband's work. It's been an amazing experience, but certainly, um, a little out of routine for us. So. My writing has taken a scoot-over as I've wrestled babies to sleep in unfamiliar quarters, slept in when I could, and then run out sight seeing whenever the stars aligned with the kids' nap schedules.

That said, we're now settled in the last leg of our travels and I have found a few minutes to write. If I don't, this blog will fizzle, and I don't want that to happen. So I got up and got crackin'. 

I made this recipe actually the week before we left, so it's in a bit of a time warp, but the experience and musings are still with me. 

Thanks for hanging with me. I hope you can still enjoy a bit of what I'm dishing up. 

Love,
Laura Beth

I have a secret-- a secret I wish would have dissolved and dissipated after I graduated college and started working. A secret I wish would have turned into smoke when I had my first baby. Or my second. A secret that should have become a joke by now, my head tells me.

But it is still there.

The best way to make a secret disappear is to tell it, so I'll tell you.

I have a deep, ravenous craving to be...famous.

I know, I know. It's okay. If I heard some 35 year old mom say this, I'd be laughing too. Or maybe just nodding sympathetically.

Part of me hates this part of me. I sometimes wish I could be quiet and mousey and content to be so. I wish I loved the four walls of my house and the parameters of my yard so much that I never felt really pulled to leave. I wish my brain could think neatly, in a straight line, instead of curving in and out of dreams and fantasies far beyond my little home in Suburbia, USA.

Life would be neater, then. My heart less jumpy. My mind more quiet.

But there it is. I dream of being famous.

For what? Because of what? Couldn't say. I just want to be noticed and known for something.

Which really means, I am learning, that I long to matter. And that a is a very human desire.

We all want to know we matter, someway, somehow, don't we? Fame, or recognition of some kind, we think, will tell us that we matter.

I can't say how embarrassed I am that this desire has become larger since becoming a mom. I was certain, pre-children, that becoming a mom would fill at least 95% of my heart, quenching and filling, that desire for notice and recognition.

And all the mamas laughed.

If anything, I have found, motherhood can make the desire deeper. Your babies may indeed fill 95% of your TIME, but any recognition, approval, applause is not something, they in fact, give.

It is work with very little of that.

I have struggled more than I am proud to say with what that means. I believe in the work of motherhood. I believe in MY work of motherhood. But I crave recognition, approval, applause.

Naturally at the height of a particularly bad week of wrestling with these desires and feelings, I come to this chapter of Bread and Wine.

It's about mothering. And time. And accomplishing all the things. And it's a message that nourishes and feeds my mama, fame-craving, recognition-wanting heart.

And naturally, it revolves around the most mother-of-all mom foods, the casserole.

So, let's eat.

The Recipe: Real Simple Cassoulet
Ingredients: olive oil, turkey Italian sausage, chicken broth, onion, carrots, parsnips, tomato, cannellini beans, thyme, salt, pepper, garlic, bread crumbs, parsley, butter

The way I've described this dish to friends and family is rather how it sounds: soup plus casserole. It's not soup-y, it's not brothy. Nor is it a dense, cooked-together, comes-out-a-square casserole. It is something in between.

The first time I made it exactly according to directions with disappointing results. While the Italian turkey sausage sounds nice, my family prefers more savory, full-fat flavor. The beans stuck out like sore thumbs, and the parsnips tripped off all of our tastebuds in a not-so-great way. There were too many carrot chunks for our liking, and essentially we couldn't find a frame of reference for the flavors.

Is it chili? Spaghetti? Shepherd's Pie?

My husband gently suggested this may not be a make-again.

So I made it again. I needed blog photos, after all.

This time I went off-grid, using full-fat pork sausage, eschewing the parsnips, and grating the carrots the way we like 'em. I paid closer attention to the simmering part of the recipe (you know, my FAVORITE part of cooking, see my blog on Mango Chicken Curry), so the dish became nice and thick. I upped the quantity of garlic in the bread crumb topping and put in more crumbs and oil until it looked like a crust I trusted.

Voila! Much better.

The beans in the otherwise close-to-spaghetti dish still throw me a little, but it's still very tasty. It's perfect for the cold weather we've been experiencing, and like Niequist suggests, very sustaining with a leaf salad with a good vinaigrette, and of course crusty hunks of bread (we devour La Brea's multigrain loaves slathered with garlic butter).

The kids were a little unsure, but a few tablespoons of Parmesan cheese encouraged my three year-old, and once my 16 month old got the hang of the textures going on, he downed his helping happily. We even cleaned up the leftovers.

The Chapter: What My Mother Taught Me

"One of the most important things my mom taught me--or really, is teaching me over and over even now--is that the best is yet to come," says Niequist (123).

This chapter is about time and perspective, a perspective that perhaps women, that mothers need most deeply. It is one I need deeply: the fact that there is indeed, time.

Niequist talks about her own mother and her roles that have encompassed being a SAHM to minister's wife, to justice activist, to artist, traveler, writer, editor, musician, grandmother...and the list goes on. She is a model, Niequist reflects, of all that being a woman is, all that being a mother is, and that there is time enough for all of it, all of the being, even if it is not all at once.

And maybe especially, that it is not all at once.

"When I get frustrated that there aren't enough hours in a day," Niequist says, "that I can't do enough or be enough or experience everything I want to just exactly right now, my mom reminds me in her gentle way that this is not where she though she'd be at sixty, and that the best is yet to come."

Yet to come.

That means time. That means experience. That means sometimes different seasons than the one I might be in now.

I came across a street sign in England last week, and it's been on my mind ever since. It's a simple traffic sign, but the wording, ah! it applies to my own life so much.

Slow down, children.

Everything need not happen at once.Time builds on time. Circumstance upon experience, and experience on circumstance. One cannot happen before the other, and other Zen thoughts.

But it's so true, isn't it? And if anyone knows about the importance of time, it's mothers as we watch our kids learn skill on skill, build concept on concept. We watch their physical development stage by stage, knowing one cannot happen before the other. These things do not happen before their time.

Now this truth often makes me itchy-- I end up trying to speed up time and push through to other side. I do not settle or get comfortable in the season I'm in, but agonize about getting to the other time, where I can be recognized, maybe famous.

I want to write full-time now.

I want to be a full-time mother now.

I want to be a part-time cook now.

I want to be lovely and in shape and run three times a week now.

For my part, I am finding I cannot do all of these things now.

Maybe a casserole, and all the cooking I love, isn't such a bad metaphor for what I need to do instead. Simmering, baking, sautéing--all of these things connotate an action that delivers a particular result, a result that cannot happen until it is in fact done. Does this make sense? Of course we can simmer a short while, we can half-bake, we can do a short saute, but ultimately nothing is simmered, baked, or sauteed, until it in fact, is.

It takes time to become what it is, and nothing can take the place of that time.

A casserole is a conglomerate of all of those things-- chopping, sometimes sautéing, and simmering-- cooked together into a new thing. But it takes all of the time beforehand to make it.

And then it makes comfort food.

I want this.. I want to allow time to have its perfect work until the next time. In short, I want my life to be a delicious casserole of sorts, full of comfort, tastes, and textures. And preferably, going back to the fame and recognition craving, I want it to be SO good that I get recognized for it! But maybe that is not my serving, maybe that is not my time.

Maybe I cannot write full-time now.

Maybe I cannot run often now.

Maybe I cannot cook and blog all the time now.

Maybe right now I am mostly a mother.

Can I be okay with that? I pray so.

I hope you as my reader know that I am not saying that it isn't possible to do quite a lot in one season. I hope you don't think I am saying that mothers can't write or work, and writers and full-time job parents can't parent.

My musing is personal, realizing that in the time and space of my own energies I can primarily parent in this season, write a little, and that is enough for me and my family.

Mothering is hard work as we juggle our families' needs with our own; our families' desires with our own.

Oh God, sometimes it's so hard.

But this truth--this truth of the power of time, the eternal space for everything needful to happen--if we, if I , can embrace that, and embrace the God who made the times and seasons, maybe we, maybe I, can begin to find our peace--and our comfort-- right where we are.