A bright winter weekend

Callie out on the road Saturday afternoon

It's raining this morning, but Walt took Callie out for a walk anyway. He's a better man than I am — if it had been my turn to walk her, she probably wouldn't have had a walk today. W. said he talked to the couple working on trimming the vines out back, and they said they were getting ready to pack up and go home for the day. « Ça ne va pas se calmer » — the rain isn't about to let up — they said.

This dog just loves a half-rotten apple.
Luckily, we have some.

But the weekend was great. It was cold and frosty Saturday morning and again Sunday morning. We need the cold weather — the plants and trees need it, and it kills off insect pests. The afternoons were bright and almost felt warm, until clouds started moving in late yesterday, bringing today's rain. Saturday afternoon, I went out with Callie and the camera, and I took the pictures I'm posting here.

Callie also loves to get soaking wet when we go out into the
vineyard. Click the picture to enlarge it if you want to see
the dog's little pink tongue sticking out of her mouth.

Otherwise, we cooked. As I said, it was crêpes on Saturday for La Chandeleur. And yesterday it was onion soup done the Parisian way: gratinée with good Swiss-style cheese. Onion soup is very simple to make: you slice up 1½ pounds of onions and you cook them for an hour or so in butter or oil on fairly low heat so that they melt down into a juicy mass without burning. At the end, stir in a tablespoon or two of flour, cook that for a minute, and pour on a small glass of white wine.

Then you add the cooked onions to two liters (two quarts) of hot broth — beef or chicken works fine — or simmering water. The soup only needs to cook for about 20 minutes once you put the onions in the broth. The only things you need to add are salt and pepper, and maybe a couple of bay leaves.

Soupe à l'oignon gratinée, version maison

What makes the soup really good is the gratin part. Grate some Swiss cheese — use good Gruyère, Comté, or Emmenthal cheese if you can get it. Dry out some baguette slices in the oven for a few minutes, or use stale bread if you have some.

Pour some soup in a bowl that can go into a hot oven. Float three or four slices of dry bread on it, and cover those with grated cheese. It doesn't matter if some of the cheese falls into the soup liquid. Carefully put the bowl or bowls into a very hot oven and wait for the cheese to melt and start to brown. Remove the bowls from the oven and let them cool for a couple of minutes before you try to eat them.

Frosty leaves on the top of the bay laurel hedge

Cooking really gets me through the winter, as you might have noticed. This morning I got up and headed straight for the kitchen to make a beef stroganoff. It's a recipe I saw in the New York Times last week, and the article and recipe were contributed by a restaurant chef from San Francisco.

This stroganoff uses yogurt instead of sour cream, which is good because I can get yogurt but not American-style sour cream here in France. The recipe calls for slicing up and cooking three good-sized onions along with the beef stew for three hours in a slow oven, and then pureeing most of the onions with yogurt and dijon mustard at the end of the cooking to make a thickened sauce.

Onions make everything better

Otherwise, the only ingredients in the recipe are beef, salt, pepper, onions, white wine, and water. Then the yogurt and mustard at the end, and — oh yeah — some sauteed mushrooms. I need to go wash and saute my mushrooms. We'll see how it comes out.

There isn't much going on here in Saint-Aignan otherwise. But then Walt and I are pretty much hermits, I think. I think most people around here are hunkered down, just waiting for spring. It will be a pleasure to be able to go outside and work the soil again in March or in April. Planting the garden is a mid-May activity in this climate.

Walt heading out for a walk with the dog on Sunday afternoon

Last week we had electrical and Internet problems that took a whole day to resolve. It turned out that an old light switch in our utility room developed a short or a bad connection, and that caused one whole circuit in our house to go dead. Walt's computer was down, as were the TV and all the lights and lamps on the north side of the house. It was only by chance that we found the bad light switch — I happened to turn it on, and I heard it buzzing and crackling. Once we fixed it, everything was fine again.

Callie trying to work up an appetite for kibble

Except our DSL modem. At least I thought it was the modem. I figured it had been zapped by a power surge when we kept turning off all the current and turning it back on at the circuit-breaker panel while we were trying to figure out why half the house was without electricity. I even raced out and bought a new modem at the computer store over in Noyers.

After that new modem failed to work, I did some more investigating. It turned that the power surges hadn't zapped our modem, but had zapped the wireless network router, erasing all the configuration settings I had programmed into it (user name, password, etc.) so that it could connect to the Internet.

Eight hours after the first power failure, with a lot of tinkering and considerable muttering, I got the router and modem working fine again, and I'm not even sure how or why. I tried everything, but it wasn't clear to me which step was the one that did the trick. Finally, the devices were working again, and we realized one more time how hard it would be for us to live without a high-speed Internet connection out here in the countryside.

La Renaudière 
02 February 2008

Last Thursday, we heard from a mutual friend that a woman we had become acquainted with over the past few years passed away earlier in the week. She was about my age, probably not quite 60. She was French, but married to an Englishman who teaches English in a nearby city. Evidently, she had a brain aneurysm or stroke of some kind. She complained of a severe headache, our friend said, was taken to the hospital, and was operated on but didn't recover.

Events like that remind you that it's a good idea to enjoy each day as it comes, and to make the most of the time you have left. Can you tell I have a birthday coming up soon?