The nights are drawing in, you can see your breath in the mornings, the air smells of woodsmoke. I’m wearing pyjamas to bed. The fruit bowl is laden with clementines. In short, the time of salad and quasi-vegetarianism is well and truly over. It is time to eat meat.

It’s also, in these recessionary times, time to find creative ways to make the more costly ingredients go further. With this in mind, I decide to make a big batch of white beans. When I find them I splurge on the extraordinary ‘haricots de Tarbais’, a type of bean so truly delicious that it is ‘appellation contrôlée’, in other words, awarded a certificate of authenticity. Only then can they be labelled with the magic word ‘Tarbais’, after the area where they are grown, Tarbes, in the Hautes Pyrenées in south western France near the Spanish border. Tarbais beans have an exceptionally thin skin and a particularly luscious texture; apparently they can only be harvested by hand, which explains why the last kilo bag I bought set me back €15.

Feeling unusually flush, I tried to buy some more the other day from my nearest gourmet épicerie, but apparently there’s a current shortage, and so I am forced to use a dusty bag of beans that’s been in the cupboard quite some time, and comes, I would guess from the Arabic writing on the label, from North Africa. Still, properly prepared these unpromising-looking dingy little pebbles prove perfectly tasty.

Pour a cup of dried white beans into a pan, cover with water by about an inch. Pop a whole carrot, cut into chunks, a peeled and halved onion and a couple of bay leaves in and bring to the boil. If you remember you can skim off the foam at this point, but honestly, I don’t think it makes any difference. Turn down to the lowest possible simmer and cook, covered, until the beans are tender, which might take 45 minutes and might take 2 ½ hours. Check that the beans are covered by water and top up occasionally as necessary.

When the beans are totally tender – make sure they have gone past the chalky point – salt the water generously and add a big glug of olive oil. To check that they are salted to your liking, taste the water, rather than a bean, since the beans themselves take time to absorb the salt.

You can and probably should leave them for a couple of days; the longer you leave them the more flavoursome they become and the liquid they were cooked in becomes delightfully silky. But that requires some forward thinking, which I don’t really go in for, so of course I use them the very night they are prepared, for a lovely end of autumn fish stew, a version of a recipe from the Zuni Café cookbook.

Cut a fennel bulb into eight wedges and brown on all sides in some olive oil. When they are beginning to caramelise at the edges, add a couple of chopped white onions and a few chopped garlic cloves and gently sauté, but don’t let the garlic brown. Add a chopped dried chilli and a slug of ouzo or pastis, raise the heat briefly to boil the alcohol off, then tip in a  can of tomatoes and a glass of white wine. Taste for seasoning, then tip in a cup of cooked white beans. When you’re ready to eat, simply tip the tomato and bean stew into a casserole dish that can go on the stovetop, nestle four pieces of fish (cod, halibut, monkfish, anything with nice big chunks that won’t fall apart as it cooks) inside and poach until the fish is done. This is incredibly delicious with aioli, homemade or at a pinch a scoop of Hellman’s with a couple of crushed up cloves of garlic stirred in.

Now you’ll find yourself with quite a lot of beans left over. Of course you could just toss them with a chopped shallot and some vinaigrette and even a can of tuna, but your family will love you more if you make use of the leftover confit de canard from dinner last week. (I just open a large tin, scoop out the pieces and stick them in the oven at maximum temperature until the skin crisps up so that you need a hammer to break it, but if you’re Karen you make it from scratch – I’ll leave her to tell you how.) Because if you have some leftover confit, some perfectly cooked haricots de Tarbais or de anywhere else, an onion, some sausages and some leftover bread - you have the makings of what’s known in our house as a Cheat’s Cassoulet. Do not dismiss it until you’ve tried it. It’s really very good indeed.

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees. Chop a couple of onions, a carrot and three cloves of garlic and soften in a little olive oil. Add some chopped bacon, raise the heat a little, and fry till the bacon crisps. Throw in a can of chopped tomatoes, a cup of white wine and 1 1/2 cups of chicken stock (I use a cube, noone’s going to notice), along with some chopped sage and thyme. Meanwhile, in another pan, brown some sausages (pork is obviously traditional, but actually I made it last time with veal sausages and they were absolutely delicious) and then add them to the stew. Simmer, uncovered, for fifteen minutes, so that the sauce thickens. Add the remaining beans and some salt and pepper. It should be quite soupy, since it will thicken up quite a lot in the oven as it bakes; if it seems a bit thick, slacken it with a ladleful of bean liquor.

Pour the stew into a wide flat dish. Nestle the sausages and the cooked duck confit (I have even made this with leftover pieces of roast chicken, which is probably going too far if you still want to consider this a cassoulet, however bastardised) into the beany mess, and sprinkle the whole lot generously with coarse fresh breadcrumbs (this is one thing I insist on. Don’t bother with breadcrumbs if they aren’t freshly made from a loaf of sourdough or at the very least a decent day-old baguette) tossed with two or three finely-chopped cloves of garlic and a fistful of chopped flat-leaf parsley. Drizzle with olive oil and stick it in the oven till the breadcrumbs are a deep, crispy golden colour, for at least forty minutes. Longer won’t harm it and in fact it will probably improve it. Serve with a green salad and some more good bread to sop up the juices.