Ce que nous allons manger ce weekend

Well, it's not these exact birds (which I photographed in 2005), but we are going to have chicken. Coq au vin, or Poulet au vin rouge if you prefer. This morning I'm preparing the ingredients for a marinade and cutting up the chicken, which I bought at the supermarket, into pieces we can braise in red wine (with smoked pork lardons) after they've spent the night soaking in the marinade.

Rain rain go away

I suppose plants like the ones above, which seem to be two different kinds of cyclamens, need weather like what you see below. Right now, it rains nearly every day — not hard rain, but never-ending rain, or fog, or mist, or drizzle. Today's forecast is for more of the same. As they used to say in Rouen (Normandy) when I spent a year there: Ici il ne pleut pas beaucoup... mais il pleut souvent.

Pouding au pain

Pouding means "pudding" and pain means "bread." So "bread pudding", which is a kind of pain perdu. I made some yesterday and flavored it with diced apple, whole pecans, yellow raisins, apple brandy, vanilla extract, sugar (cassonade which I remember being sold as "raw" sugar in the U.S.), and a small amount of maple syrup. The three main ingredients are stale bread — in our case, that means stale baguette cut into cubes (crusts and all), whole milk or even half-and-half, and eggs. Above is a photo of the pudding as it came out of the oven.

Here's is a photo showing what it looked like before I cooked it. And here's
a link to a post with a recipe that I published a decade ago.

2026 N.C. snow report

My home town, Morehead City in North Carolina, has a foot or more of snow on the ground this morning. My sister lives just two or three miles from the local National Weather Service Office, which reports 15 inches of snow. That's the biggest snowstorm that the area (Carteret County) has had since December of 1989 — or maybe in the history of weather record keeping. I remember my mother telling me about digging out after that 1989 storm. I had moved to California in 1986.

My sister, who still lives there, says she is snowed in and doesn't know when she'll be able to get out again. She doen't want to try to drive on snowy, icy roads and bridges. There is more water than land in Carteret County. All this makes our weather here in Saint-Aignan seem pleasant. Actually, the sky is clear here this morning.