Taking a wintertime break

I've decided to take a break in January. Don't be surprised if you don't get posts on a daily basis. I'm finding it harder and harder to work with the Blogger software. There isn't enough time in the day to write and format blog posts and keep up with all the other things going on in our lives here in Saint-Aignan.

Besides, while my arthritis is much reduced most days, but I feel like I'm developing carpal tunnel disease because I spend so much time searching for and processing photos to post. My multi-tasking skills are not as sharp as they used to be, and that's frustrating. About the only thing I really enjoy doing is cooking, including shopping and meal planning.

Maybe in the spring, when the weather gets better, I'll start to get out a little more and take more photos. In December and January there's often not enough light for me to enjoy taking photos, and my fingers get really cold when I use the camera I'm afraid of dropping it.

There's a ton of work to do out in the yard, but it's too cold to do much outdoors. I guess we got spoiled by the warm winters of the past five years. At the same time, weather forecasters and meteorologists point out that the temperatures this winter are not really extreme by historical standards. It's just that we're not used to them now.

À bientôt ! Et bonne année !

Une chienne et une deux chevaux

This is a photo I took on December 30, 2008. The dog was called Callie. She was a border collie and she died in 2017 at the age of 10.

The car is a Citroën 2CV, meaning "two horses" — the term refers not to so-called "real" horsepower, but is a tax term used to set the cost of registering the vehicle by its first owner. My year 2000 Peugeot 206, for example, is a 5CV car in fiscal terms but it has a 90 HP engine. There is a formula for converting the two French terms (real vs. fiscal "horses") but it is too complicated for me to wrap my mind around it.

I was surprised to learn that the first 2CV cars rolled off the assembly line in 1948. I've always imagined it was earlier than that.

A memory of our white Christmas morning

I specify "morning" in my post title today because the little bit of snow that fell Christmas morning was basically all gone by late afternoon. Walt and have been trying to remember if we'd ever had a white Christmas together before. Not here in Saint-Aignan, I'm pretty sure, and certainly not in San Francisco, we where celebrated Christmas
16 or 17 times between 1986 and 2003.

Another first for our Christmas in 2025 was that we didn't put up a Christmas tree for the first time since we came to live here in 2003. The house and yard in my photo are what we see from our kitchen window when it snows.

Turkey soup ingredients

After I poached the 5 lb. turkey in hot water with aromatic vegetables, I ended up with a gallon or two of of turkey broth. I diced up some of the turkey meat and a lot of the aromatic vegetables (carrots, onions, garlic, leeks, flat Roma green beans, a few boiled potatoes, etc.) I made a soup with the broth and all the chopped vegetables and meat. We added some cream to the soup at the table.

That 5 lb. turkey

Our Chistmas bird was sold as une petite dinde — a little turkey. I assume that means it was a young bird. It certainly wasn't a "birdzilla, I mean." Here's what it looked like after poaching in simmering water for two hours.

And here's what it looked like as served. I took it out of the poaching liquid and put it in a hot oven for as long as it needed to lightly brown and crisp up the skin.The meat was not dry, and it wasn't mushy either.

My plate looked like this. Steamed broccoli, baked bread stuffing, puréed sweet potato, a turkey leg and thigh, and some of Walt's late Aunt Kathy's cranberry relish, made with cranberries and a whole orange, skin and all. It's a kind of chutney, I guess, and it's really good with the turkey. I also made a creamy gravy using more of the turkey broth.

Yesterday I made a big pot of soup using the turkey broth that the poaching water had become, some chopped-up turkey meat, and some of the vegetables that had poached in the broth along with the bird — onions, garlic, carrots, leeks, and bay leaves, etc., all chopped up. It makes a very warming, nourishing soup.

Christmas morning, 2025, at Saint-Aignan

This was the view from our kitchen window yesterday morning.
By early afternoon, almost all the snow had melted, as I thought it would.

Grassy surfaces, tree limbs, hedges, bushes, and piles of fallen leaves had an inch or so of snow on them early in the morning. Hard surfaces like the paved road that runs through the hamlet and our gravel-surfaced driveway showed no accumulation at all. The ground isn't yet cold enough for the snow to stick. Today it's cold outside, but all the snow is gone. It was pretty while it lasted.

Christmas 2025

It's not often that I manage to take and post a picture of our Christmas dinner on the day we are going to cook and eat it. That's one remarkable thing about this Christmas day. The other is that we have about an inch of snow on the ground this morning. The snow will probably melt away by noon.Neither one of us is going anywhere.

Our dinner today will be a turkey and all the fixings for just the two of us. The turkey weighs about five pounds. We'll have a lot of leftovers. As you can see, I'm poaching the bird in simmering water with carrots, leek tops, onions, garlic, bay leaves, cayenne peppers, and spices including allspice berries, black peppercorns, and whole cloves. After it poaches for about two hours, I'll take the out of the poaching liquid and put it in a hot oven to brown it nicely (I hope) and finish the cooking.

 Merry Christmas and Bon Appétit to all.

Christmases past (2)

Inside the church (l'église Saint-Urbain) in Mennetou-sur-Cher at Christmastime in 2004.

Christmases past

This is a photo I took at Mennetou-sur-Cher, a village about 40 minutes by car from Saint-Aignan,
during Christmas week in 2004. Friends were visiting from California. I've always liked the picture.

P.S. Here's something I haven't mentioned in a while: It's soon going to be time for me to go back to see my doctor. It will be a routine visit. I haven't felt the need to go see him for a couple of months now. My arthritis pains are greatly diminished these days. Who knows why? I haven't taken any pain killers like Ibuprofen or Tylenol in a long time. I haven't had any more swelling caused by inflammation of my wrist joints. I still don't know what caused the whole episode I experienced back in September, which sent me running to see my primary care physician and then have blood work done and X-rays taken. Thank goodness all that's over, at least for now.

Seared beefsteak in a creamy, peppery sauce

Yes, yesterday was Walt's birthday. We made the same birthday dinner we've been making on Dec. 21 every year since 1982. We haven't missed a birthday since then. It's called Steak au poivre in French. Here are a couple of photos. To see a historical review of Steak au poivreposts on this blog, click this link.

Christmastime in 2015

  A Christmas cactus and a Christmas sunrise

Minutes earlier

Here's another sunset photo I took two mornings ago. This one has Tasha in it.

Mistletoe at dawn

 My vision is blurry this morning. It's either pollen or just plain old age. Anyway, here's a picture I took at sunrise yesterday in our Blois neighbors' yard, when I was out walking with Tasha.

Memories of summers past

It was the summer of 2003 and we had just arrived in Saint-Aignan. We were trying to do a lot of work and get completely moved into our new house before winter arrived. The problem was, it was so hot in July and August that year that the work was going very slowly. After living in chilly San Francisco for nearly 20 years, we weren't prepared for the heat wave. We didn't have air-conditioning in the new house and we didn't have AC in our rented car either. In early August, we finally found a car to buy and it did have AC. So we spent hot afternoons that summer driving around with the car's AC on full blast. This was one of our destinations. It's the Château de Montpoupon and it's less than 20 miles from Saint-Aignan.

I took this picture at Montpoupon in August 2003 — more than 20 years ago.

Clouds, clouds, clouds

We are suposed to have another cloudy day today, with little to no rain. Accuweather says to expect low clouds. It sounds pretty grim. I have to keep remembering Decembers past. It's hard to go out and enjoy walks with the dog and my camera. But we have to keep on keepin' on. I'm making lasagne with a meat sauce for our lunch.

Brouillard et nébulosité

Yesterday started off very foggy. By late afternoon, the fog had lifted but clouds still hid the sun.
That's just the way December is. Get used to it.

"Le Jade du désert"

Le jade du désert is what CHM called this plant when he brought to San Francisco a cutting from one that he had growing in his yard in Salton City, California, in the Southern California desert. Less than a year later, Walt and I decided to leave San Francisco and move to France.

I asked CHM if we could come and stay at his house for two or three days before we started the long cross-country drive to North Carolina, where we would spent as much time as necessary at my mother's while waiting for our long-stay visas to be approved and delivered. Then we would continue on to France. I also asked him if I could bring him my "desert jade" plant, which had grown quite a bit over the 18 months it lived with us in SF. CHM said he would be very happy to have the plant, because his had died a few months earlier. Anyway, I couldn't bring it to France.

Walt and I moved to France in 2003 and settled in. In 2004, Charles-Henry came to France to spend the summer in Paris. He asked if he could come visit us to see our house and the Saint-Aignan area. I said of course he could. He surprised me when he arrived carrying a cutting from his "desert jade" plant. I've had it growing here ever since. Actually, I have several of the plants because I keep taking cuttings and planting them in pots.

The plant's scientific name is Portulacaria afra, and it's not really a jade at all but resembles one. In southern Africa it's called "elephant bush" because elephants graze on it there. The one above is one I grew in the house here for a couple of years. It grew tall and leggy. I don't know why. Last summer we set it outdoors on the front terrace and this is what it turned into. Now we have it spending the winter in the house once again, and it seems to be happy living near a radiator and a west-facing window.

That big jade plant

Here are two more photos of the big blooming jade plant. I hope it doesn't die after flowering.

Jade flowers

I mentioned a while back that my big jade plant bonsai was covered in flower buds. They had appeared on the plant two or three weeks earlier but only one or two buds had developed into actual flowers. Over the past week, I wondered how I could get the plant to produce more flowers. I couldn't put it outside because our morning temperatures were down near freezing.

The only thing I could think of was watering it lightly every day for a week. It was pretty dry. And it worked.
There are now more flowers on the the plant. They're not spectacular — they're tiny —
but there are about two dozen of them now.

The road through the hamlet

Can you see the airplane flying above us? — Our Citroën rolls through the hamlet just three or four times a month. Mostly we drive the Peugeot when we run errands. The Citroën is our garbage truck, though; we load it up once or twice a month with all our recyclables and haul them to a local drop-off recycling station. It has a bigger trunk.

Looking west (above left) and then east toward our house (above right) from the same spot out in the vineyard.

The dirt road through the vineyard turns into a paved lane starting at our house and running down to the river road, which leads upriver to Saint-Aignan or downriver to Montrichard (and beyond, in both cases). That's our Blois neighbors' maison de campagne above right.

Trees and trunks

Not a forest fire, just a sunrise (left) ; the same sunrise seen through poplar trees (right)

Troncs de vignes : a certain number of the grape vines die every year and are replaced

A twisty apple tree ; a pine cone, called une pomme de pin in French

December weather 15 years ago

These are some photos I took during a morning walk in the vineyard on December 10, 2010.

As you can see, it was cold on that date 15 years ago. It's much warmer today. It's raining this morning and there's no ice or snow to be seen. Actually, we are experiencing what the weather forecasters are calling une vague de douceur — "a warmth wave." You can't really call it une vague de chaleur, but it's the wintertime equivalent.

The frozen puddles on the road through the vineyard remind me of eggs cooked sunny side up (or of raw oysters). In the picture on the right just above, it looks like somebody had been through with a snow plow, leaving little piles of ice on the shoulder of the road.

Pink flowers in December

These are photos I took on December 5 — four days ago. We still have the stray rose. We also have, on the right, the Bergénia flowers that seem to bloom year-round. They are called saxifrages by people around here, which is their family name. In English they are sometimes known as "elephant ears" because of the shape of their large leaves. I'm not sure what the reddish berries or buds are. Maybe laurel.

A rose is a rose is a rose...