Une fleur

I'm not sure how long we've had this jade plant. At least 10 years, probably. Maybe 15. I'm also not sure if it has ever had a flower on it before. Maybe not. I happened to notice the tiny flower a couple of days ago. I was admiring the plant's deep, bright green leaves. We have to bring it into the house in autumn when there's a danger of frost and we put it back outside on the terrace in the spring. It seems happy in an east-facing window.

Our late friend Charles-Henry, who passed away nearly a year ago now, said he would describe our jade plant as a bonsaï. I'm not sure if it would officially be described that way, but I agree that it resembles a bonsaï in some ways. I wish more flowers would appear on it. French Wikipédia says the name of the plant in French is arbre de jade and says jade plants préfèrent un endroit ensoleillé. Surtout en hiver, il est judicieux de placer la plante devant une fenêtre. Pendant les mois d'été, il fait très chaud derrière une fenêtre orientée au sud. Il est préférable de placer la plante d'intérieur jusqu'à 3 mètres derrière la fenêtre.

Dinner on New Year's Eve

Do you recognize these? They are duck legs (including thighs) that I cooked for our January 01, 2025, dinner. They aren't confites (slow-cooked) but quick-cooked in our air fryer. They fit two at a time in the fryer basket. One nice thing about the air fryer is that there's no waste and very little clean up required. The duck fat that the legs release as they cook stays in bottom of the fryer basket (a drawer really) and doesn't scorch. You can save it for making biscuits, sautéing potatoes, and seasoning beans and greens. As you can see, I also air-fried two Toulouse-style pork sausages before I turned the air-fryer off.

Speaking of beans and greens, I cooked black-eyed peas and greens to go with the duck and sausages. I "sweated" some chopped garlic, celery, and shallot in a wok before putting in the beans, some bean liquid, and a couple of bay leaves along with the beans, which (chef's secret) came out of a can imported from Portugal. I haven't been able to find fresh or dried black-eyes for a while, but the canned ones are good. I also flavored some greens — in this case they were cooked curly endive (salade frisée) but I could have used kale or spinach — with the mixture of duck fat and aromatic vegetables.

Hamlet houses, etc. (2)

This is a view from our back gate. The house on the left above is much larger than it looks to be in my photo. It's lived in by people who bought it three or four years ago. The house on the right is also a big house. It's owned by a woman who lives in the Paris suburbs. She comes down here less and less frequently these days. I think she finds the weather here too depressing. She also owns an apartment down on the Côte d'Azur, where she spent a couple of months last summer. She has two adult children. I don't know if either one or both of them would be happy to inherit and live in the house at some point. More pictures below...

Houses like these would probably sell for about 250,000 euros. Each is on at least half an acre of land. There's another house of similar size and style behind them, on even more land. All three of the houses I'm writing about have been nicely remodeled inside over the past few years. They are sort of jammed together on a big piece of land.

As I've mentioned, a lot of vineyard parcels out back have been dug up over the past year or two. The parcels are a muddy mess nowadays, since we've had so much rain over the past year or so. One day they will be replanted and the owners, who live about a mile from us and own some 75 acres of vineyard land around the area, will start making and selling wine with the new grapes. They'll probably be planted with Sauvignon Blanc grapes, which seem to be replacing other varietals around here.

Here's a late-December view of the dirt road, which is a public right-of-way, runs for a mile or two through vineyards before connecting with another paved road. The dirt road is full of pot holes (nids de poule) because of all the rain we've been having.

Happy New Year from our house to yours

Et bonne année ! It was 22 years ago — Dec. 2002) that we first saw this house. I don't know what kind of house we expected to find in France when we started our search. As it turned out, we saw and considered 15 houses in four days back then. But we knew immediately that this house was the one we wanted. We hadn't even decided whether or not we would move to France once we bought it. We hadn't yet put our house in San Francisco on the market.

At that point, it only took us a few days to figure out that it was time for us to get out of California. By mid-March, our SF house was sold. In April '02, we paid cash for our house in Saint-Aignan. It didn't hurt that we sold the SF place for nearly seven times more than we paid for the St-Aignan place. In June '02, we got on a plane and, well, here we were, visas in hand. By July, we were all moved in, and by August we had bought a car, a used Peugeot that we still have. We were on our way. The two photos above show the back side of the house, which faces the yard.

You can vaguely see our house despite the fog we've been living with for the last week. It's at the end of the dirt road that runs through a vineyard. A paved road takes us to Saint-Aignan, all of 2 miles away. Today's weather forecast says to expect wind and rain now for a few days. We don't need the rain, but at least it will be a little warmer outside.

Coming to the house on the paved road that ends near our back gate, this is what you see.The photo on the right just above is our garden shed.