Ice-cold showers and steaming hot food

It's not very cold outside these days — the temperature right now, at 6 a.m., is about 8ºC, which is close to 50 in ºF. However, we had an impressive wind event from Saturday night until Sunday evening. A storm named Fabien had blown in off the Atlantic Ocean. We didn't get the worst of it; people in the south of France, including the Bordeaux area, did. Then, late yesterday afternoon, after a few hours of spring-like weather with sun and blue skies — maybe we were in the eye of the storm — we had an unexpected ice shower. That's what is called a giboulée, which is a sudden, gusty downpour of cold rain, snow, or ice pellets. It lasted no more than 10 minutes.

Ice pellets on the glass roof of our greenhouse yesterday afternoon

The house already felt cold because the wind had been howling for nearly 24 hours. What do you do when the weather is miserable and the house is chilly, despite the central heating system keeping the radiators hot? Well, you build a fire in the fireplace, or you cook some hot, nourishing comfort food. It had been my plan to do that anyway. On Saturday I went to the new produce market(Terre Y Fruits) in Saint-Aignan, which features vegetables grown in the Loire Valley, and picked up the makings for what's called a pot au feu [puh-toh-feuh] — "a pot on the fire" — which is a kind of pot roast or boiled dinner.


The vegetables I found included some unfamiliar ones along with others that have made a comeback over the past few years and are called légumes oubliés. Into that category I'd put parsnips, called panais. Ten years ago we couldn't find them here in Saint-Aignan.

Into the category of unfamiliar vegetables, I'd put the two turnips you see here. We get purple turnips, but not shaped like or as heavy as this one. And I'd never seen a red turnip before. (Carrots are something nobody has ever forgotten...)

Walt had come home from a trip to the SuperU on Friday with a piece of beef that was sold as viande pour pot au feu, à mijoter — meat for a pot roast, to be stewed (simmered). I don't know what cut of beef it is, but we are hoping it will be good. It has now cooked with the vegetables overnight in the slow-cooker. That will be lunch today. We'll eat some of the meat with the little pickled gherkins called cornichons in France, and with some moutarde de Dijon, and of course some vegetables, maybe with melted butter.

I peeled the vegetables first, and then I cut them into smaller pieces before putting them around and on top of the meat in the slow-cooker and pouring in a lot of cold water as well as a little bit of white wine. We also had a stalk of celery and a head of garlic in the refrigerator (from the same produce market), so those went in as flavor ingredients. In the spice ball you see here, I put some leek tops we had in the refrigerator, along with bay leaves, fennel seeds, black peppercorns, allspice berries, a chunk of ginger root, and a dried cayenne pepper. That has made a good broth, which may become the base for soupe à l'oignon gratinée between Christmas and New Year's Day.