Notre maison et son environnement

Today is my birthday. I'm turning 76 years old. I was born in North Carolina at about 3 p.m. back in 1949, so I'll officially be starting my 77th year tonight at 9:00 p.m. in France, taking in the six hour time difference. Walt and I are planning on spending a quiet day (like most days). We're having couscous with chicken, lamb, and vegetables for lunch, and Walt will be making a pineapple upside-down cake for dessert.

I'll take Tasha the Sheltie out for a walk in the vineyard this morning, and Walt will take her out for her second walk of the day this afternoon. The high temperature around here will be about 17ºC today. That's the low 60s in Farenheit. This morning, our outdoor thermometer reads approximately 40ºF.

These are some photos of our house in March 2009. It's located outside the little town of Saint-Aignan (pop. 3,000) in the Loire Valley (central France, 150 miles SW of Paris). We're 40 kilometers south of the big town of Blois and 60 kilometers east of the city of Tours.

We have half an acre of land in a tiny village (a "hamlet") on the edge of a big vineyard and just two or three miles outside Saint-Aignan. The house was built in the late 1960s/early 1970s, which is when I came to France for the first time. I've been coming back once or twice a year ever since, and Walt and I left the U.S. and moved here in June 2003 — more than 20 years ago.

Looking for signs of spring

Since spring doesn't seem to want to come to us, I'm going back to find it. These are photos I took in March 2008 in our back yard, using a Panasonic Lumix TZ3 digital camera. I gave it to a my niece in North Carolina a long time ago. I don't know if she still has it, but it was a great one. Nowadays I just use my mobile phone's built-in camera. It seems to be a great one too.

March skies out in the vineyard

Believe it or not, we're having calm, clear weather right now. It's time for me to go out walking with the dog. It's chilly outdoors, but that's okay. It's not raining.

These are some pictures I took on a walk with a different dog in March 2008. March weather in northern France is famous for sudden, icy rainshowers called giboulées. I wouldn't want to have to walk through any of those.

Turning a flower into a pie

How do you turn this ....

...into this? (It's called un gratin in French.)

First you have to cut a cauliflower up into what are called florets. Put the florets (fleurettes in French) in a steamer pot and steam them over boiling water until they are just starting to get tender.

Arrange the florets in a baking pan. Add some meat if you want — pre-cooked chicken or pork lardons.

Make a sauce béchamel and turn it into a sauce mornay by melting some grated cheese in it. Pour the sauce over the florets and bake them in the oven until the top starts to brown (see above).

Blois on March 1, 2006

I'm still poking around in my photo archives. This is a photo I took in the biggest town (pop. 50,000) in our départment here in central France back in 2006. It's Blois, and it was a royal town for several centuries. The river is the Loire and the church in the middle of the photo is the town's Renaissance-style Saint-Louis cathedral. The bridge at Blois was built in the early 18th century — an older stone bridge there had collapsed in 1716.

On the home front, I bought a beautiful cauliflower yesterday and my morning today will be spent preparing and cooking it. I don't know if you like cauliflower (chou-fleur in French), but I know I do. I'll make a cheese sauce for it.

20 years ago

I've been digging around in my photo archives — I guess "dig digitally" means something else — to see what things here were like and what they looked like 10, 15, or 20 years ago. Has it changed much? Not really, to my eye. Only the cast of characters (neighbors) has changed. We're still driving the same car and living in the same house. That's it below, the one farthest left in the photo, with our closest neighbors' houses to the right. The land is planted in grapevines.

This is a photo from late February in the year 2005. No, it's not snowing here, at least not today. It doesn't snow enough for us to get used to it. But forecasts say we might see sleet showers before the day is over.

Une pause

I don't have any food photos this morning. So I'm taking a break. Today Walt will be doing the shopping and cooking.

Meanwhile, I was looking back at posts from 10 years ago and found this one. It's the car we bought in 2015, a Citröen C4 model. It's hard to believe it's been 10 years already. I bought it used for about six thousand dollars. It was six years old and had about 60 thousand miles on the odometer at the time. It's done quite a few road trips over the intervening years, and all have been successful except the last one, when the clutch failed. It turned out to be an easy and not very expensive repair, considering the vehicle's age — not bad for a 16-year-old car. Of course, we also still have our 2003 Peugeot, which is going strong as well, and looks good. It's 25 years old now.

In other news, I twisted my other knee the other day in an another walking-the-dog accident. The resulting sprain was not as severe as the one I suffered about six weeks ago, and the pain is already going away. So is my cold, which I've had for since January 20th or so. At this point, it might qualify as a bout of bronchitis. I haven't had any fever, and the cough is nearly finished now. If spring ever comes, I think I'll get a completely better pretty fast. We're still getting a lot of rain... last night and since Monday, for example.

Boulettes suédoises

Yesterday's cooking adventure was Swedish meatballs. I had made them before (years ago), but this time I read about making about them on a website called Serious Eats that I'd found. The advice was good and the meatballs were better than before. Incidentally, I found a second a trick on the main website posted by a commenter, and that one was was a keeper too.

One tip has to do with the meat you should use to make the meatballs. It should be a 2 to 1 mixture of ground beef to ground pork. A lot of other recipes call on using equal amounts and beef and pork. I used a pound of ground beef and one-half of ground ground pork. Here's a link to the Serious Eats website.

The other tip has to do with cooking the meatballs. Instead of frying them in a pan on the stove or baking them in oven, it would be better to cook them in a air fryer. We made three dozen meatballs which, after browning in the air fryer, we cooked in a béchamel sauce made with beef broth and cream.

Beans then, beans now

Did you grow up eating beans? I did. My mother sometimes apologized to me and my sister for cooking and serving beans so often when we were little. Pinto beans, great northern beans, navy beans, black-eyed peas, field peas, crowder peas, butter beans, lima beans, red beans... I can't name them all.

Here in France, we eat a lot of beans too, not because we can't afford anything better, but because we like them. Flageolets, haricots blancs, haricots noirs, haricots rouges, cocos blancs, lingots, mogettes, soissons, pois du cap — they are all delicious. The beans in these two pictures. The beans in these two photos are French white beans cooked with smoked pork lardons and saucisses de Toulouse. They could easily be made into a Southwestern France specialty, cassoulet, or they could be eaten as they are. That's how we ate them yesterday.

A Chicken Curry for a Sunday

Ingredients include: coconut milk, curry paste, onions, garlic, chicken breast, cabbage leaves, carrots, chard, bell peppers, tomato (fresh and paste), brussels sprouts, sriracha... and more. I'm just listing them from memory. I didn't follow a recipe, I improvised. Most of the vegetables were pre-cooked and then added to the sauce. We ate the curry with steamed basmati rice and French bread. I have to say it was pretty good. And there are leftovers for another meal.

Monsieur ou Madame ?

On the left above is the French sandwich called a croque-monsieur. It's made with sandwich bread (pain de mie), a sauce béchamel (a white sauce made with butter, flour, and milk), grated cheese, and ham, and then baked in the oven. On the right is the sandwich called a croque-madame. The only difference it that it has a sunny-side-up egg on top.

Fry an egg separately and then place it on top of a baked croque-monsieur. We made these sandwiches yesterday and ate them with air-fryer French fries, followed by a salad of green beans, diced tomato, and vinaigrette dressing.

A sandwich for a Saturday

It's raining again. And again. Oh well. It's not so cold. The temperature in the greenhouse is about 52ºF this morning. That's a big improvement over the temperatures just above freezing that we were having in the greenhouse a week or so ago. In other words, it's starting to feel like spring.

Today's lunch will be the grilled cheese and ham sandwiches called croque-monsieur in France. They will be home-made. Here's a link to a post of mine about croque-monsieur sandwiches from a few years ago.

Le meilleur croissant...

...de Saint-Aignan... pour le moment. A week or two ago I wrote about my plan to have a croissant every morning with my first cup of tea, and with the dog. We share. At the time, I was buying croissants at the supermarket. I've changed my ways. Here's a photo of the best croissant I've found in the Saint-Aignan area so far.

This croissant pur beurre comes from the Pâtisserie du Château on the main street in Saint-Aignan. According to Google Maps, the shop is just over two kilometers (1½ miles) from our house as the crow flies. Unfortunately, I can't fly but I can drive there. It takes just over five minutes each way. I did it yesterday morning. That would be almost an hour's walk each way, with no sidewalks for most of the distance, so I'll probably be going to the shop by car once or twice a week to keep myself supplied. The croissants freeze well and are easy and quick to thaw out in the microwave. The one in my picture came out of the freezer this morning.

Above is a picture I took of the Pâtisserie du Château on a day in July more than a decade ago.

It was fun to be in Saint-Aignan at 7:00 a.m. yesterday. The Pâtisserie du Château opens its doors at 6:45 a.m. At that hour, the town is very dark, except for flood lights that illuminate the towers and walls of the château and the church. Besides six croissants, which go for the princely sum of 1.10 euros apiece, I picked up a baguette de tradition to have with lunch, and two éclairs (au chocolat and à la vanille) for our dessert. It was raining lightly, which made everything even more picturesque, with my car's headlights reflecting off the cobblestone streets of the town.

I have one more bakery in Saint-Aignan where I want to try the croissants. I'll get there soon and see how its croissants compare to Le Château's. The last time I went there it was about 9:00 a.m. I asked for a croissant, the woman in charge of the place said I'd need to come back in about an hour. She had already sold her first batch of croissants and was waiting for a new batch to to be pulled out of the oven.

Canard braisé aux navets

That means duck (in this case, legs-thighs) with turnips and braised in turnip broth. I first cooked the duck legs in my air fryer at between 170 and 180ºC (about 350ºF) for about 30 minutes). When they were nice and brown, I braised them in a pan on the stove in turnip broth — I had peeled and cut up four fairly big turnips and simmered them in water and white wine for an hour or so. The older the turnip, the longer the cooking time. Poke them with a paring knife or skewer to see if they are tender.

Put the duck legs into the basket of the air fryer (or a convection oven) skin-side up. After 20 minutes or so turn them over and brown the other side. (You could do small turkey legs or large chicken legs the same way.)

These are turnips. If you can get small springtime turnips they'll cook in less time. These were large so I cut them into chunks and put them on to simmer until they were tender. Then I sautéed and browned the turnips chunks lightly with chopped onion and garlic.

After the legs were browned, I put them in a small amount of liquid (vegetable or chicken broth) and let them braise and steam for a half an hour or more until the meat was tender too. Browning the duck first gives it good flavor and makes it look nice. Serve the duck and turnips with the braising liquid as gravy.

Cooking as therapy

Some of you reading this have mentioned that I must be feeling better now because I've started cooking again. A month-long cold had slowed me down quite a bit. From my point of view, the fact that I'm busy in the kitchen is the reason my santé is improving. Cooking keeps me going and the resulting food is nourishing and comforting. Here's a photo of the lasagna I made yesterday, ready for the oven. When it came out of the oven I was too busy eating it to stop and take more photos.

Today's project is a French classic called canard aux navets — duck with turnips. I know there are people who don't like the taste of turnips, but I'm not one of them. I'll cook the duck (cuisses de canard) in the air fryer, and when it's nice and brown I'll braise it with the diced turnips in a pan on the stove.I'm also going to serve it with some cassoulet beans. Pictures tomorrow...

A 'shroomy weekend

It all started when I went to the supermarket late last week. In the produce department, I saw trays of nice mushrooms. I thought, "why not?" and bought one. When I got home with my groceries, I realized we already had a bag full of mushrooms in the refrigerator. I needed to cook mushrooms over the weekend, that was for sure. I didn't want to see them go to waste. (This was about a third of them.)

The first thing I thought of was tomato sauce with pasta. Nothing fancy, just tomato puree from a jar with'shrooms, carrots, onions, ground beef, bay leaves, and red wine. That would make some hearty cold-weather eating, as well as some good leftovers for the freezer. It didn't take long to chop up all the vegetables and to wash and slice a good quantity of mushrooms. I made that on Saturday.

Yesterday, Monday, I still had an abundance of uncooked mushrooms. At the supermarket, I had also picked up a tray of veal stew meat, just because it had caught my eye. In France, that's called blanquette de veau because it's a stew made with crème fraîche (lightly soured cream) along with onions, bay leaves, carrots, mushrooms, veal broth, and white wine.

I just needed to make a white sauce (une béchamel) with butter, flour, water, white wine, cream, and the veal broth I had already made by simmering the veal with the vegetables in a pot on the stove for a couple of hours. Now we have leftovers of both tomato sauce (lasagna today?) and of blanquette for later this week. We're eating it with tiny elbow macaroni instead of rice. These are our idea of wintertime foods.