Nothing but trouble

My trouble for the day is trying to leave comments on my own blog. I just don't know why it works one time and not the next. I appreciate all your good comments. If I don't respond, it's because Blogger won't let me. I have no idea what to do to force its hand. One day it works fine, the next it just limps along, and the third day it won't work at all. I'm not yet sure what kind of day this one is... or will be.

Doctor's orders and a case of whiplash — all good news

I went to the local medical center for my appointment with my GP ("primary care physician" or, in French, mon médecin traitant. He and his assistant (or intern) carefully examined my right knee — the one that's been giving me fits for nearly two weeks now. Both doctor and intern pressed and squeezed the knee. They agreed that I had in all likelihood sprained or twisted my knee when I slipped on black ice while out for a walk with Tasha the Sheltie on the morning of January 18. That knee hurt more and more every day for nearly a week, especially every time I was going up or down stairs. And then it stopped hurting. Meanwhile I came down with with a raging cold and cough. All my joints started aching.

The doctor seemed to understand what had happened the same way I did. He said the minor sprain I had suffered because of black ice had basically repaired itself over the nearly two weeks that had passed since the sprain happened and I had come to see him about it and the cold. The right knee is on the mend. I just have to remain prudent and take it easy. He said he saw no need for an x-ray or MRI because it was obvious that nothing was broken. There was no swelling, and all their squeezing and manipulating of the knee didn't cause me any significant pain. All that was good news. The doctor said he would treat the cold symptoms and the coughing, and once all that was under control, the aches and pains I was feeling in all my leg joints and in my upper back would disappear. I hope he's right.

Meanwhile, before we left the house for the medical center a weird thing happened. I felt like I had something in my left eye. A grain of sand or a in-grown eyelash, maybe. I put drops in the eye, and I gently wiped it with a cold-water compress. That's when it happened. I saw a lot of dancing blue points of light with that eye, which is my strong one. Then, suddenly, my vision went blurry, just as if somebody had turned off the sharp, clear vision I had experienced after cataract surgery on that day back in September — the day after the operation. Later that day Walt and I were watching a movie with subtitles, and I couldn't read them. I also couldn't read my laptop computer's screen. Everything was blurry. I was feeling kind of desperate. What if my clear vision didn't come back? Here I was stuck with glasses no longer adapted to my eyesight.

I struggled to read an article on the internet that said the blue-dot thing was something that occurred routinely in some patients who had recently had cataract surgery. It would soon go away and my vision would clear up again pretty quickly. I hoped all that was true, and I went to bed after putting some more drops in the left eye. I hoped that I would wake up with clear vision this morning. And guess what? I did. Right now I can see just fine. What a relief! I can read what I've just typed on the laptop, and the TéléMatin TV screen is perfectly sharp and clear. I feel like I'm suffering from whiplash.

I have an appointment...

...with my GP (médecin traitant in French) on Wednesday 01/29, in the morning. I imagine the GP will refer me to a specialist or two. We'll see.

Thanks....

...to all of you for you sending your experiences, ideas, suggestions, etc. I'm not doing better this morning. I will call the doctor's office this morning to ask for an appointment as soon as possiblee. The good news about my knee is that going up and down on the stairs is not a problem. No pain. When I sit for a while, it's hard to get up and my first steps are pretty tentative and shaky. I have to be extremely careful. I'm going to be kind erratic as far as blogging goes for the next few days and weeks.

Pride goeth before the fall

At 3:30 or so this morning, I found myself on the floor, unable to get up. No, I wasn't sleep-walking. I had gotten up to pee. The little bathroom upstairs in the loft is only about 5 steps from the bed. I don't know what made me fall. I'm pretty sure that my bum knee had something to do with it. I don't think I injured that knee further as I fell.

The problem was that I couldn't get up, even with Walt's assistance. We struggled for 15 or 20 minutesto find a solution, I think, but after trying every move and strategy, I was still on the floor, immobilized. Finally, I was able to pull my upper body up onto the bed, and my legs followed my torso, with Walt's help. I was comfortable enough to be able to sleep until around 6:10 a.m.

I'm starting to think that this sort of accident runs in my family. My mother fell as she was getting out of her car and ended up with a broken wrist. She was around 80 at the time, I think; I'll be 76 in a few weeks. My sister, who is about two years younger than me, fell a year or two ago and broke her arm. She was doing volunteer work in a food mission when it happened. I need to be more careful. I don't even know what made me fall, but at least I didn't break any bones.

La Toux

La Toux is French for "a cough." That's what I've had for a few days now. Walt has it too, and has had it for a few days longer than I have. C'est une toux sèche it's a dry, scratchy cough, and I think my sinuses are causing it. Along with the cough, I have a twisted right knee. I slipped on black ice (du verglas) on the little paved road that runs through our hamlet. The pain is awful, and the danger is that I might fall if my leg gives way when I'm trying to walk and when I put pressure on that knee. I'm taking another day off from blogging.

La tartiflette — a potato, cheese, and onion casserole with lardons

A tartiflette is what is called un gratin in France. It's made with potatoes, onions, lardons (bacon) and Reblochon (or Reblochon-style) cheeses from the French Alps and is cooked in the oven. I picked up this cheese at the supermarket. It's a soft, washed-rind cheese that is very creamy when it melts. The rind is also good to eat.

I just read on Wikipedia that Reblochon is not currently available in the U.S. but substitutes are available there just as they are in France. One substitute is Raclette cheese. Another is a cheese called Délice du Jura, and a third is the cheese called Morbier — a gratin made with it is sometimes called une morbiflette. That's the one I'm going to try the next time I make a potato and cheese gratin.

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Here's a link to the Wikipedia article about la tartiflette, in English. The idea is to cut the cheese into half-rounds or quarter-rounds. Cut each half- or quarter-round into slices so that each one has a rind side and a rindless side and put them, rind-sides up, on top of a couple of layers of pre-cooked, seasoned potatoes, onions, and lardons (more about that tomorrow) and bake it all in an oven-proof dish for 30 or 40 minutes so that the cheese melts and the rind on top turns golden brown and almost crispy.

Here's how my tartiflette came out yesterday. It was good comfort food on a chilly, gray winter day. By the way, the outdoor temperature this morning is 6.4ºC (43.5ºF) compared to low temperatures of between 27 and 33ºF for the past week or 10 days. It's supposed to rain all day...

Biftek haché, sauce au vin rouge, poivre noir, et champignons de Paris

For yesterday's lunch, we needed something fortifying, given the lousy weather we've been having. We both have head colds. Walt is coughing a lot.

I decided to make a variation on steak au poivre. I substituted red wine for white in the sauce, and I added mushrooms. I made it with ground beef, the way I used to make it for my friends in Paris. Ground beef is tender and lean. Grass-fed beef, which is what we get in France, can be a little tough, unless you spend a fortune on the very best cuts. A nice Côtes du Rhône Villages red wine (for less than four euros) went well with it all.

To finish the meal, I made a salad of escarole (scarole in French) and beets (betteraves) dressed with vinaigrette. All this is standard French fare — the kind of food you might get in a little neighborhood café or brasserie. It's hearty and tasty served with good French bread and wine. Beets are a classic addition to winter salads made with "bitter greens" like scarole, frisée (curly endive), and endives (Belgian endive).

It's my turn

I'm taking a sick day today, just like Walt did yesterday. He's still sleeping at this hour, so I don't know what he'll be able to do today. I think he feels a little better, but he'll have to confirm that. I don't have full-blown cold symptoms, but my nose is stopped up and my nasal passages and sinuses are tender and irritated. I don't seem to have any fever, though, and I'm sleeping okay. Temperatures are still near, at, or barely above freezing every day.

The worst thing is that I seem to have twisted my right knee. I think it must have happened when I put my foot down on the road that runs through the hamlet Saturday morning, which was a sheet of invisible black ice. My foot slipped but luckily I didn't fall. I was walking with Tasha, and I've been doing two walks a day with her since Saturday morning, when Walt realized he had come down with a cold.

Our back yard and garden path are icy but not slippery. The ground is very treacherous though, since we had an invasion of moles and other burrowing animals out there in the October and November.

My right knee was giving me trouble earlier this winter. I was having to do a kind of two-step to get up the stairs. Left foot on step, then right foot on the same step. Then do it again, 30 times, several times a day. I couldn't do the steps alternately, one foot going up at a time; it was too painful. After three or four days of two-stepping, the pain suddenly went away. What a relief that was!

On Saturday afternoon, I realized that my right knee was bothering me again. This time, it doesn't just hurt when I climb the stairs. This time, it hurts the most when I an walking on flat surfaces. The pain is not excruciating. I just have to be careful. Maybe I need a knee replacement. Or an elevator. Or a new house — one without staircases.

More of the same, for better or for worse

The weather stays chilly and damp. Yesterday morning about this time I went out with Tasha for a walk. I decided to walk on the paved road because the dirt road was too muddy. When I stepped on the paved road, I realized it was a sheet of ice. It was black ice (verglas) and it was invisible. I had a rendez-vous set up for a meating at our bank in Saint-Aignan. I called and cancelled it, especially sincee Walt had come down with a bad cold.

Here's what the paved road looked like on a dry but gray morning a few weeks ago.

Walt's cold isn't much better this morning, if at all. I haven't developed any alarming symptoms so far, but this morning my sinuses and eyes feel like I'm having an allergy episode. We shall see how things go. Friends of ours from California will be arriving in Paris today or tomorrow for a short stay. We've been planning to meet in Tours (one hour from Paris by TGV, one hour or so by car from Saint-Aignan) for lunch on Wednesday. Walt won't be going. I hope the cold won't prevent me from driving over there. The weather is supposed to turn warmer (around 50F) but a lot rainier over the course of the week. I'll take it.

We're having choucroute for lunch again today. Yesterday we had an escarole and white bean soup. I actually made it with French flageolet beans, which are very good. I posted about the escarole a few days ago. Sorry, no pictures of the soup. It was delicious and hot (temperature-hot), just what the doctor ordered. I've been searching the internet for a gîte to rent in March and I hope the weather will be more spring-like by then. So far I've only found one gîte that looks promising. It's near Limoges.

La (première) choucroute de 2025... chez nous

I did something different with my raw choucroute this year. I cooked it in apple cider. Normandy cider, of course. It was labeled as cidre doux, meaning "mild" or "sweet" cider. In fact, it wasn't what I'd call "sweet" at all. It was no sweeter than Riesling wine, which is made in Alsace (the home of choucroute, they say), and maybe less acidic. This cider has 2% alcohol in it, which is much less than the alcohol in wine. I'll make it this way again. because it was delicious.

Below, you can see some of the meat we cooked to go with choucroute. They include a piece of palette de porc fumée. That's a pork shoulder blade roast that has been smoked over beech wood. The sliced pork is poitrine de porc, similarly smoked. That's pork breast or "belly" (a.k.a. bacon). I soaked the palette and the poitrine in cold water overnight to reduce their smokiness and their saltiness. The sausages are smoked pork sausage, also beech-wood smoked. The ones we might call hot dogs or wieners are saucisses de Francfort (frankfurters). I didn't soak either of the sausages.

Again below, you can see the choucroute cooked in cider with onions, carrots, and spices. I didn't put in lardons, but I diced up a couple of slices of sandwich ham (jambon de Paris) and put them in. The choucroute cooked that way for about two hours on low heat. Cooking the choucroute and meats took all morning, but most of that time was just waiting as everything simmered slowly on the top of the stove.

Meanwhile, I simmered the palette de porc in a separate pot of fresh water. It kind of fell apart, but I like it that way (it's tender and tasty). I added some of the resulting broth to the choucroute for flavor and let two slices of the poitrine de porc cook for about 45 minutes on top of the sauerkraut. I poached the sausages and boiled the potatoes for about 30 minutes in the palette broth. Both of the sausages were sold pre-cooked, so the just needed to be heated up.

Frosty + fog = freezing fog

Life seen through a back window. That's our life right now. Each of us bundles up and goes out every day for a walk with the dog (Tasha) but not for too much else besides groceries. Over the past few weeks, sometimes we see the sun rise, but mostly we don't (despite the fact that I get up at five a.m. every morning. Even when we see the sun rise, often a dense fog forms and blocks it out an hour or two later. Temperatures hover around the freezing point. Sometimes we get freezing fog.

My trip to La Gourmandière was therapeutic. I was worried about black ice (du verglas in French) on the roads, but I didn't notice any. The woman who was on duty at the winery wished me a happy new year and a lot more sunshine this year than we had last year. She said morale is low out here in the countryside because skies are too often gray. I've been known to say that most of the color in our environment at this time of year is in the kitchen. Today I'm making choucroute garnie, sauerkraut with beautiful smoked meats. I'll take pictures.

La Gourmandière, une cave à vins

...près du Château de Chenonceau. That puts it less than 15 miles west of Saint-Aignan. I'm going there this morning, unless I find the roads too icy for me to do the drive safely. I guess I'll wait a little while for the sun to come up and warm up the pavement. La Gourmandière is one of several big wine companies and wine shops (cave à vins) in the eastern part of what used to be the Touraine province in the Loire Valley. It's worth the drive for the variety and quality of the wines it makes and then sells at very reasonable prices La Gourmandière used to be a wine co-op with a membership of several hundred grape-growers, but it was sold to a new owner a few years ago.

La Gourmandière produces and sells "still" (not sparkling) red, rosé, and white wines as well as white and rosé sparkling wines in bottles. It also sells non-sparkling red, white, and rosé wines in bag-in-box containers as well as in bulK (en vrac). In other words, you can bring your own containers to the winery and the staff fill them for you with wine that is stored in huge stainless-steel vats. The wines I'm interested in today are red Côt (a.k.a. Malbec) and Cabernet Franc wines sold in ten-liter bag-in-box containers for two euros per liter. That would be the equivalent of thirteen 75cl bottles for about $22 U.S. Here's a link to the company's web site.

P.S. I just published this post after not being able to do so yesterday. I don't know why. It posted partially, but the result was a post that didn't allow comments and didn't display the blog's sidebar. I hope this one is working today.

This is a test....

....just a test.

Notre cuisine

We spend a lot of time in the kitchen at this time of year, because we don't spend a lot of time outdoors. Years ago — I think it was in 2008 — we painted the kitchen walls. We took the doors off the wall-mounted kitchen cabinets because we had decided to re-paint them. As it turned out, we never put them back on their hinges. We didn't need them; they were just in the way. Here's what the cabinets look like.

Back even earlier, we had bought and installed what I guess is called a pot rail. Now we have two of them, in fact. Ours is not an eat-in kitchen, but just a work/fun space. It's nice that everything is visible instead of hidden. Visibility encourages neatness, I'd say. Yesterday I cooked a French classic called canard aux navets — duck with turnips. That was fun but I forgot to take any pictures.

January moonset

Our temperature is just below the freezing point this morning. I think that's the first time that's happened this winter. Accuweather says our temperature right now is -3ºC (+26ºF). Predictions are for even colder temperatures tomorrow morning, down as low as 21F.

I took this photo yesterday morning (Jan. 12) as the moon was setting out over the vineyard.

I've been slowly working with my new micro PC. I'm really tempted to install Windows 10 on it but Microsoft will be ending support for that operating system later this year. I'm getting too old to learn the new tricks of a new interface, I guess. The micro-computer is model no. N97 and is produced by a Chinese company called GMKtec. Here's a link to a Youtube video about it.

A growing habit

For the past few months, and maybe longer, I've been eating a croissant every morning with my daily cup of tea. I started doing so because I realized one day that even though I've been living in France for more than 20 years now, I was probably eating no more than half a dozen croissants a year. By the way, croissant is the French word for crescent. It's also the present participle of the verb croître, to grow, and means "growing."

I put skimmed milk and sugar in my tea in the morning, but I eat my croissants plain. I admit to buying them, more often than not, at the supermarket. They are baked in the store every morning, so they are fresh. And they are made with butter, not margarine. Butter, flour, a pinch of salt, and a little bit of sugar; those are the ingredients. The croissants I get from the supermarket weigh about 52 grams each. That's less than two ounces.

You-know-who... that would be Tasha the Sheltie... loves croissants as much as I do. I share mine with her. I'm not sure I knew that, at least according to legend, Marie-Antoinette brought the croissant, along with the recipe, to France from Austria in about 1770. Living here, it's a shame not to enjoy one every day. For a special treat, when I'm out and about early enough, I buy a few croissants in one of the half-dozen or so bakeries in the Saint-Aignan area that bake and sell them, just to see how good they really are compared to my everyday croissants.

Snow... but just showers

We didn't get much but it was snowing at this time yesterday morning. The temperature outside, according to our thermometer, was 3.9ºC. It was raining. Then the temperature dropped to 3.1ºC and the rain turned into sleet and snow. About an hour later, the temperature went back up to 3.9º and the snowflakes turned back into raindrops. The temperature is 2.5 this morning and there are patchy clouds. I can see the moon, which is beautiful.

Yesterday's hour of snowshowers was enough to keep me inside rather than on the road on the way to the supermarket. Tasha's back was covered with snow after our sunrise walk.

Greenery

Yesterday Walt posted a photo of part of our hedge after all of it had been pruned back. Here are two photos I took of the long section of the hedge that runs along the road on the south side of our property — one from out back and one from inside the house. You can see that it really needed to be pruned. What you can't see is all the honeysuckle and blackberry vines that were cut out of it. In total, the hedge is about 500 feet (150m) long. It's also very wide and a lot of it is very tall.

And here are two photos of our lunch yesterday. I bought this very fresh, very big head of escarole (scarole in French) at the supermarket (mug for scale). It will make us salads for days. If it starts to wilt, I will cook it as greens or as a soup. Yesterday's salad, with a Caesar-style dressing, was served with diced bacon, hard-boiled eggs, and steamed new potatoes. Not to mention French bread and red wine.

Hoping

I'm here this morning hoping that our friend Diogenes and his house are nowhere near the L.A. fires I'm seeing reports about on MSNBC.

I didn't get anything done on the micro computer yesterday. I'm trying to think of anything I did accomplish, besides some grocery shopping and cooking lunch. Not much, I guess.

It rained all day and all night. We had heavy squalls earlier this morning. We also had very strong winds. I lay awake in bed for a few hours listening to the sound of raindrops slapping roof tiles and skylight (Velux) windows, and wind howling and whistling under the eaves of the house. Finally, at 4:30 I couldn't stand it any more and I got up.

I'm also having serious security problems with my Windows laptop. I finally was able to log in to Gmail a couple of minutes ago after a dozen attempts. I was closed out of Blogger for a while, but I just got it back. I think Google has gone crazy. This is my post for the day.

Following up

Three items today: the landscaping crew showed up yesterday morning at about 8:30 (that's when the sun comes up here in Saint-Aignan right now) and the hedge trimming job is all done. It looks great! It's hard to believe they could do all the trimming and clean up all the trimmings in one day's work. There were three of them.

We got the Peugeot back yesterday morning. According to the woman who runs the mechanic's shop, the timing belt replacement went without a hitch. I wanted to take a drive yesterday just to make sure everything is working but I decided to stay in and start setting up the new "toy" computer (micro PC).

And that went without a hitch too, so far. It will take a while for me to get it all set up, working on it an hour or two every day in between my other daily activities, like writing a blog post, processing some photos, cooking in the morning, walking the dog, watching a movie on Netflix or one of the hundreds of films I have recorded.

As I was typing this post, everything suddenly went dark. Yesterday's internet outage was planned and announced, and all went well as far as I know. This power outage was not announced. I hope we won't start having daily electrical outages for the next few months, as happened a year or two ago.

I'll take some photos of the trimmed hedge once the sun comes up this morning. That'll be about three hours from now.

A happy surprise

We got a surprise over the weekend. It was an e-mail from the guy who runs the landscaping service we've been using for the past 10 years or so for hedge trimming taking down dead trees. He had told us a few months ago that he would send out his crew to trim our tall, wide bay laurel hedge in December. And then we didn't hear from him for a while. Suddenly he contacted us again a couple of days ago and said he'd send out the crew on Monday morning. And he did.

Problem was, the weather was lousy. We were having high winds and heavy rain showers. He said it wasn't possible to do the work under those conditions. It was too dangerous. So now he's supposed to show up this morning to start the job. We hope to see him at 8:30 or so.

Meanwhile, we took the Peugeot to our car mechanic's shop yesterday morning at nine o'clock. I had made the appointment before Christmas. The car, my 24-year-old Peugeot 206, needed a new timing belt. It's a maintenance job that needs to be done every ten years or one hundred thousand kilometers. Our Peugeot 206 has just 200,000 kilometers (125,000 miles) on it, but this will be its third timing belt job since I bought it (used) in 2003.

In French, the timing belt job is called la courroie de distribution, and having a new one put in costs about five hundred euros. That includes putting in a new water pump. I had the Citroën C4's belt changed last year, which was a couple of years early. But I felt better having the job done, since the Citroën is already 17 years old. It has just 103,000 kilometers (64,000 miles) on it. I bought it used in February 2015 — nine years ago already. It looks and drives like a new car. We don't drive much, compared to all the miles I drove when we lived in California, where I had a long daily commute.

If the timing belt breaks, the result can be a trashed engine, and replacing the engine would cost a lot more than 500 euros. In fact, many cars don't have timing belts. They have timing chains instead. The chains aren't really susceptible to breaking, but they do require periodic inspection and maintenance (lubrication). They are noisier and heavier than timing belts, which are made of reinforced rubber. Compared to cars with belts, cars with chains get lower mileage.

My other occupations right now, besides cooking and laundry, have to do with the new micro computer I just bought. It was delivered yesterday, but I haven't had time to plug it in yet. The winds have died down since yesterday afternoon, so I'll work on that today. I don't want the little computer to be damaged by a power surge. Yesterday, we had short power outages several time over the course of the day.

A new toy

Well, I hope it will be more than a toy. I bought myself a new computer yesterday. It's a micro-PC. The box is a cube that measures 3 inches wide by three inches deep by 2 inches high. I'm going to use it to watch American television over the internet. We mostly watch French TV, which comes in through our fiber optic connection. The pictures below show the new PC next to my morning mug of tea and then next to Walt's smartphone. The third picture shows the back of the PC and the connections it offers.

The new PC has 12 GB of RAM, a 512 GB SSD boot disk, and Windows 11 installed. I think I've got all that right. I won't really know until I plug the machine in and turn it on later today. Oh, I bought the new toy on Amazon.fr for 156 euros.

Interruptions

This is what our walks in the vineyard look like this winter. The weather is weird. Yesterday the morning low temperature was minus 3ºC (26.6ºF). This morning it's plus 11ºC (51.8ºF). Day before yesterday, there was a heavy white frost over everything. Then yesterday it rained all day and the temperature shot up.

Here's a photo of two more houses in our hamlet. The one with the fancy iron fence and the two car garage is an AirBnB vacation rental. It sleeps 8 or 10 people. The rent is high, and it's not occupied very often — especially in winter. Nobody ever seems to stay there for more than one or two nights. I think most of them are just going to spend a day at the Beauval Zoo, Saint-Aignan's big attraction. The house next to the AirBnB is lived in by a woman and her two children, plus several dogs and goats.

The two pictures just above show you how I feel about the environment we live in these days . By the way, we've been notified that we will have an internet outage starting tomorrow (Monday) evening and ending Tuesday morning (maybe later than that). Not so long ago, that would have meant no telephone service and no television for us. But now that we have smartphones, we'll be able to work off the cell phone network instead of off our fiber optic cable.

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 Day

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.