En panne...

« En panne » in French means "out of order" (a vending machine or telephone, for example), or "broken down" (speaking of a car). One expression the dictionary uses to translate the expression is incapable de fonctionner. What's en panne here is me this morning. Physically, I feel fine, but I'm busy with things other than this blog. The weather, which the Télématin presenter just described as une pertubation par jour (one rain front after another), hasn't been conducive to a lot of photo-taking.

 These are some gratuitous photos of a broccoli quiche we made a while back....

Maybe we'll make a quiche later this week. But first we have to have all the New Year's food that we like to have. Oysters, for example. We'll be going down to the special Monday market on the main square in old Saint-Aignan this morning to buy a few dozen of them.

We'll spend New Year's Eve with friends who live about an hour from here, and they are planning the rest of the menu. On Wednesday, January 1, back at home, we'll have a sort of cassoulet with Toulouse sausages and a couple of pieces of confit de canard that I made back in September or October. It's ready to eat now, after "curing" in its own fat for three months. Oh, I'll make my cassoulet with black-eyed peas, because eating those on New Year's Day is a tradition where I come from.

...just because I think it looks appetizing,

Meanwhile, the mayor of our village (population 1100) has asked us to give her a batch of photos of the local area and vineyards so that she can run them as a slide show during her cérémonie de vœux this coming Saturday. The vœux du maire are a tradition in all the villages of France — it's the mayor's official greetings to her or his constituents and a kind of kick-off for the new year. We've burned some 130 photos onto a CD that we'll take down to the village hall this morning. Then it's off to shop...