Getting behind

I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted. The trip to the States and Canada has nearly done me in. It was so much fun, but we were never idle for even a moment. And this past week, since we got back, has been just as busy. Tons of laundry to do. Lunch in Montrichard. Dinner with friends Friday night. Zoom zoom zoom.

The weather suddenly turned warm and humid. This time of year, the sun is so strong that when it peeks through the clouds the temperature rises quickly. And the hours of daylight are very long. Yesterday afternoon thunderstorms threatened, and it did rain some, but we didn't get the hail that weather forecasters warned us about.

Portrait of Bertie the black cat

We haven't even begun to plant our vegetable garden. Walt's got the lawn under control now — a solid month of rain from mid-April to mid-May certainly stimulated growth. There are shoulder-high weeds around the edges of the vegetable garden plots. And now, this morning, it's threatening to rain again, so it won't be easy to work out there.

Threatening skies yesterday afternoon

Callie and Bertie have settled back into their — our — routines. It's almost as if we never left them behind. They were well taken care of in our absence, and that made all the difference.

Stormy weather moving in from the southwest

And what's going on in France? People are out and about, busy and happy, because the weather has improved. The new president is out and about too, and he has a 61% approval rating with the public. His prime minister is the most popular holder of that office in many decades, with 65% positive opinion in the polls.

The good dinner cooked by Sue from Australia Friday night

The Cannes film festival is wrapping up today. The Roland Garros French Open international tennis tournament starts today in Paris. Before long, the Tour de France bicycle race will begin. It's summer already, and we hardly noticed it coming.

An international dinner

We were invited out last night and didn't get home until about 2 a.m. The bread lady woke me up at 8:30 this morning as she tooted her horn out on the road to announce her arrival. I had to quickly throw on some clothes before I stumbled down two flights of stairs to get the day's baguette.

Sue and Walt having an aperitif at the table before dinner.
I'm not sure why Sue is holding two glasses...

Leon and Sue from Melbourne (Australia) have been staying with friends of theirs over across the river from our village, and those friends invited us to dinner. There were eight of us — two Australians, two Americans, an English couple, and a French couple. Sue cooked. It was delicious and a lot of fun.

That's Leon in the middle, with one of our English hosts
and their French neighbor.

Now we're getting a late start on our Saturday. We had plans to do a lot of running around this morning, but I don't know if we'll have the energy. But we will have a very nice memory of the evening we spent, sitting outside until the wee hours, enjoying the fine weather and the fine food. I'm just putting a couple of pictures here to give you an idea.

Look at this nice chocolate dessert, served in a tea cup.
I'm not sure who deserves the credit for cooking it.

I'm sorry I don't have better pictures, and more of them. If I could display my memories on the screen, I would. I should have thought to take a video.

Montrichard for lunch

Yesterday, summer started. We were lucky. We had a nice lunch in Montrichard, at the invitation of our friends Susan and Simon of Days on the Claise. It turned that we were 8 à table, because we were joined not only by Susan's sister and brother-in-law, but also by Sue and Leon of Melbourne — Our Home on the Bay. Sue and Leon are traveling around France right now, and blogging about it.

The bridge across the Cher River at Montrichard

Walt and I were the only Americans present — the only non-Australians, really. Australians are great travelers. We've met many people from Down Under over the past few years, and I happen to know that some Australians have now bought a house in Saint-Aignan. Others have a house, I believe, in our village, but we haven't met them.

We were lucky to be able to have lunch
outdoors yesterday, here.

Montrichard is the next town down the Cher River from Saint-Aignan, and it's a 15-minute drive from our house. Walt and I seriously considered buying a house there back in 2003, but we decided on Saint-Aignan instead, for a number of reasons. It's a lively little town with a pretty riverfront, a busy Friday morning market, a medieval chateau, and plenty of attractive shops. Montrichard is also close to Amboise and Chenonceaux, two of the areas main attractions.

The restaurant, La Villa, has several "menus" at lunchtime,
priced from 11 to 24 euros per person.

Being virtual "locals", we all chose the restaurant's special of the day, the lowest-priced menu and the one the restaurant focuses its efforts on daily. That was the 11-euro menu — a menu in France is what we call a prix fixe meal in good English. What we call the menu is la carte in French, and you are free to order your meal à la carte instead of taking a menu — but you'll pay more.

The view in Montrichard just down the street
from the restaurant La Villa.

Our menu included an appetizer of cooked lentils and white asparagus with a vinaigrette dressing as the starter course, and then a sauté de veau à la provençale — braised veal with tomato and garlic — as the main course. Dessert was an apple crumble. We washed it all down with rosé wine served in half-liter carafes — rosé is the wine you drink in France when the weather turns warm — and finished off the meal with a little cup of espresso coffee. It was all very pleasant, and we spent nearly three hours at the table, tasting and talking.

Poulet à la crème

Have you ever roasted a whole chicken in a pot on top of the stove? There are French recipes that call for cooking a chicken that way. It's less messy but just as effective as cooking a whole bird in the oven. I'm not talking about boiling, but about roasting or braising, or a combination of those two methods.

One recipe is for a chicken first browned in butter and/or oil in a thick-bottomed pot and then simmered in milk an inch or two deep, with frequent basting. The milk tenderizes the chicken and makes a rich sauce. Another is a whole chicken first browned in butter and then cooked with a cup or so of cream in the bottom of the pot, again with frequent basting. The cooking time is about 90 minutes.

Poulet à la crème, un poulet cuit à la casserole

That's the recipe I based my Poulet à la crème on yesterday. It comes from Ginette Mathiot's book Je Sais Cuisiner, a French classic first published in the 1930s under the title La Cuisine pour Tous. An older French woman gave me a copy as a birthday present back in the late 1970s. She knew I liked to cook, and I learned a lot about cooking from her and from the book. My copy is (c)1970.

Brown a chicken in butter and/or oil in a pot on top of the stove,

and then put on a lid and let it cook slowly until it's done.

It's interesting to think that most people didn't have ovens in their kitchens until relatively recent times — since the 1920s and '30s, at the earliest — and cooking methods that required just a pot on the top of the stove were popular. Here's the recipe, which actually is a combination of two recipes in Mathiot's book. One is a recipe for roasting a chicken in a pot, and the other tells how to add the cream sauce, mushrooms, and shallots to make Poulet à la crème.

Ginette Mathiot's two recipes — Poulet à la crème is a variant

based on Poulet à la casserole.

Here's my version of the recipe, in English:

Chicken roasted in a pot with cream sauce,

mushrooms, and shallots

Melt two tablespoons of butter in a thick-bottomed pot, along with a tablespoon of vegetable oil. In the butter, brown a whole chicken, trussed, starting the chicken on its back and turning it so that both sides and the breast are lightly golden brown.

Cover the pot and let the chicken "roast" over low heat for 30 minutes per pound (about 90 minutes in all). Optionally, pour in half a cup of water or white wine and add some bay leaves or other herbs for flavor.

After an hour of cooking, add two chopped shallots and six or eight large mushrooms, sliced, to the pot. When the shallots and mushrooms have cooked slightly in the chicken juices, pour in 1½ cups of cream. (Optionally, thicken the cream with a white roux made with flour and butter.)

When the chicken is cooked, take it out of the pot, cut it into serving pieces, and spoon the sauce over all. Or serve the chicken whole and carve it at the tables. Serve the extra sauce separately.

This Poulet à la crème is more of a method than it is a precise recipe. It's easy to imagine many variants. Garlic, onions, tarragon, sage, thyme, rosemary, or other aromatics and herbs could enhance the flavor of the chicken and the sauce in nice ways. Some lemon juice would brighten it up. You could even substitute a light tomato sauce for the cream, making a kind of Chicken Cacciatore.

Lagging in gray and green

I've always found jet lag to be worse coming to France compared to the little bit of jet lag I get when I fly from France back to the U.S. That's the conventional wisdom, too. It has to do with traveling in the opposite direction of the sun — from west (North America) to east (Europe).

It also has to do with spending the night on an airplane and not getting a good night's sleep. When I fly to the U.S., the very long day that I spend on the plane turns into night, and bedtime, when I arrive. Our flight over to Boston from Paris, for example, took off at 4 p.m., and we arrived at 6:00 p.m. We spent the evening having dinner and catching up with our friend Bob, who put us up for the first two nights, and then we slept from midnight until 8 a.m. We were nearly back on schedule by then.

I'm not sure why this piece of farm equipment is just parked
out in the vineyard. Maybe it broke down.

Coming back on Saturday and Sunday, we had a 7 p.m. flight. We slept just an hour or two on the plane, and we were on the ground in Paris at 8 a.m. We had a full, sleepless day ahead of us, especially because we had 6 hours to kill at the airport before catching a train back to Saint-Aignan. Taking a nap was not really a possibility.

Sage in in bloom in the back yard.

This morning I was awake at 4 a.m., but I went back to sleep around 6 and had a hard time dragging my groggy body out of bed at 7:30. Yesterday afternoon I snoozed from about 3 until 6, despite my best efforts to remain awake and active. All the gray skies we're experiencing don't help. The rain has stopped, but the sun hasn't yet broken through. Sunshine is the best antidote when you're jet-lagged.

This picture would be a lot greener if herbicide hadn't been
sprayed up and down the rows of vines.

One thing about all the rainy weather that has descended on the Saint-Aignan area since early April — everything is certainly green. We needed the rain, because drought conditions were threatening. Now we need warmth, and MétéoFrance is promising us temperatures in the 70s F over the next three days. The grass will grow even taller. There are shoulder-high weeds out in the vegetable garden plots.

Even the vines on the old stone hut in the vineyard seem
to be late. Lack of sunshine is probably to blame.

We won't be able to plant tomates, aubergines, and haricots verts until the ground dries out enough to be tilled, so the garden won't be an early one this year. Yesterday we were remarking to each other on the state of the vineyard out back. The vines seem to be a month behind where they were a year ago, when we had a dry, sunny, warm spring.

With some sun, the vines and tendrils will grow pretty fast.

After the grass dries out enough to be mowed, we'll go to one of the local outdoor markets or to a plant nursery and buy the tomato and eggplant seedlings we decide to plant. Walt will grow green beans from seed. I think I'll try again to grow some okra from seeds — I brought some back from the U.S. Planting okra proves how optimistic I am, because okra need hot, sunny weather in order to thrive.