Ratatouille

The big weather front I talked about a couple of days ago has gone through now. It pretty much went by, actually. There was wind and rain in Brittany and Normandy, and close to us on the west and north of the Loire Valley. But the storm mostly missed us here in Saint-Aignan.

It was gray and calm, and fairly warm by our standards (maybe 73ºF), all day yesterday, and we got a little bit of rain starting at about 6:30 p.m. During the day, I talked to Bruno, our grape-grower/winemaker neighbor, and said to him how strange the weather is. "We've never seen a summer like this before," he said. "At least it's not raining today. The grapes don't need any more rain."

The other day when I was out weeding in the garden, I found — miracle of miracles! — two little eggplants that were hanging off the bottom of a plant, hidden in the weeds. The weeds, I'll admit, had grown up pretty high. The eggplants looked ready to eat, so I picked them. They were touching the ground, so I figured they were as likely to start rotting as they were to grow any bigger.

The yellow squash gives ratatouille a nice color.

We already had some yellow summer squash that we had picked over the past few days, and I managed to gather six or eight little red tomatoes too. All I had to add was an onion, a couple of cloves of garlic, some dried thyme and bay leaves, and a few tablespoons of olive oil, and I had everything I needed to make ratatouille.

So the garden is not a total bust. Now that I've done some weeding, the plants have breathing room and might start producing. The weeding is hard work because the mauvaises herbes are so well established.

It's embarrassing how thick and high the weeds got.
But it was just too wet to do much about it for weeks and weeks.

The sun is out this morning and the ground must be softened up after the few millimeters of rain we had yesterday evening. I need to get out and continue my garden work. Maybe I'll be able to pull out some of those deeply rooted weeds that are threatening to suffocate the eggplants and bell peppers.