If you are a fan of 10-minute meals, dinners in a dash and other fast food, read no further.

But if you enjoy spending time in the kitchen, creating unusual dishes with less expensive cuts of meat, here is a technique I have been using recently with good results. It is based on the confit, where the meat is slowly cooked in its own fat or with added fat if you are starting with a leaner piece of meat.

In fact, the method can also be used for fish. I remember tasting a piece of salmon which had been slowly cooked in goose fat; it was sublime, moist and full of flavour. Dentici would also be a candidate for this method of cooking, as it is a dense fish which can overcook too quickly .

Duck, goose and pork lend themselves readily to this process as in such dishes as confit de canard, which makes good use of all the extra fat. I used the method to make a rabbit confit and the leftovers were almost better than the original dish, producing rabbit and gravy to serve over pasta, and some potted rabbit confit.

But the best version was with a piece of lamb, an inexpensive boned shoulder. You could also make a confit of lamb shanks in the same way. Although fattier than a leg of lamb, the shoulder still required extra fat, and the first time I cooked it I used stored duck fat, and the second time I used ground nut oil; extra virgin rapeseed oil would also work very well.

The other elements of this preparation are the brining and the long cooking at low temperature, followed by pressing and refrigerating. This is a dish to do over two or three days, the ultimate slow food, one which will fill your kitchen with warmth and rich aromas as the weather turns colder.

Be careful not to make too strong a brine solution; 30 grams of salt to one litre of water is sufficient to season the meat. There is no need for brining of the kind our ancestors used to store their meat through the winter months. I have also included a recipe for duck confit, this time using a dry cure rather than the wet cure used for the lamb. This is easy to make and well worth doing because you then have on hand a luxurious instant meal.

It also makes a fine addition to a cassoulet, and now is just the right time of year to make cassoulet, a splendid dish for cooler weather, not at all difficult to make, but the kind of dish best made for a crowd. It is the perfect party dish, especially for a long, lazy Sunday lunch.

My recipe is based on extensive research in the Languedoc, at the end of which I concluded that every cook and every chef has their own version. One was shocked at the idea of using tomato in a cassoulet, using only beans, confit of duck, Toulouse sausage, and some shoulder of pork.

Another included tomato and used duck only in the form of duck fat, in which shoulder and shin of pork was cooked, together with sausage, stock and a little salt pork. His beans were lingots, but other chefs use cocos, a smaller bean.

A discussion with Jean-Claude Rodriguez, chef-patron at Restaurant Trencavel in the 12th century Chateau St Martin near Carcassonne, convinced me it is perhaps the largest of the beans, the lingot, which holds better in cooking than the smaller haricot and even smaller coco, however aesthetically appealing.

Of course, before Columbus introduced the haricot and its relations to Europe, the cassoulet would almost certainly have been made with dried feves, broad beans, or lentils.

I do not think it is worth worrying, therefore, too much about what exactly the authentic ingredients are; the cassoulet is a very forgiving dish.