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.

Recent photos

I don't think I ever showed you how the roasted red bell peppers came out the other day. They aren't the plumpest peppers I've ever found, but they taste good. I saved the liquid they produced and "dressed" the red pepper flesh with it, adding a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Picking all the seeds out didn't take too long.

This is a stir-fry of chicken breast meat, broccoli, red bell pepper, and onion that I made the other day. It was delicious and very colorful. I'll make it again (maybe with shrimp).

Looking west along the road where it passes our house. It's nice having the hedge beautifully trimmed. The south-facing windows you see are glass-block windows that we had solar-powered blinds installed over because in summer, on sunny days, the windows get so hot. We hope the white shutters will reflect some of the sunlight and heat away from the house.

Sunrise yesterday, 15 Feb. 2025, in a view of the neighbors' property taken from our kitchen window. Predictions are for sunny skies all week!

The shutters, the house, the yard, the neighborhood...

We enjoyed a rare sunny day yesterday, with an afternoon high temperature of about 50ºF. As a result, there was no cloud cover overnight, and this morning the temperature outside is just below freezing. The good news is that we're supposed to have another sunny day.

Above are a couple of shots of our house and some of our new shutters. They are solar-powered roll-down shutters. Push-button shutters are great.The black strip on the top left corner of each window is the photovoltaic converter that sends power to the shutters. On the right just above is a shot of our back yard, with its linden tree, two apple trees, and a garden shed that is slowly being taken over by ivy. I took the photo yesterday afternoon. No fog for a change...

Above left is a shot of the north side of our house, with its small window into the loft space over the living room (with the big window) and with, now, a new solar-powered shutter upstairs.

This is a photo of our Blois neighbors' house-in-the-country. It's just across the street from our place. The neighbors are supposed to be here this weekend but so far no sign of them. I hope everything is okay.

Le nouveau volet, et des poivrons rôtis

Here's what the new volet roulant in the kitchen looks like. By the way, un volet roulant (a roll-down shutter) is also called un store. In the first photo, the store is closed but the sheer curtains are open. In the second, the sheer curtains are closed.

While the five new shutters were being installed, I was in the kitchen roasting peppers that I bought at the supermarket the day before. I roasted them in the air fryer. Five of them fit perfectly in the fryer drawer. They came out looking beautiful. Now all I have to do is peel them (in theory, the skin just falls or slips off) and then de-seed them (also a fairly easy job but messy). The roasted flesh of the peppers will be good in salads or eaten on crackers or toast with some goat cheese (fromage de chèvre) or cream cheese (fromage à tartiner) and a little glass of wine.

La fenêtre de la cuisine, et les nouveaux volets

This is the window in our kitchen. It faces east, so it gets morning sun. It's cooler and shadier in the hottest part of the day, which is the afternoon. The window opening measures approximately 50 inches in width and 50 inches in height. It's a sliding, double-glazed PVC window that we had installed when we first came to live here, replacing an old French window that was single glazed.

French windows and doors traditionally open into the room they are installed in. In the case of this kitchen window, and in the case of similar windows in two small bedrooms in the house, that meant that as the the windows opened the glass panels pretty much swept across the entire room. One day, the woman who sold us the house in 2003 told me that one negative feature of the house (which her husband and his first wife had had built in about 1970) was something like les fenêtres sont trop grandes pour les pièces.

It took me a while to figure out what she meant. I think that was it. Sliding glass windows made a lot more sense, given the way the house was built. The window installer who put ours in told me later that he had been skeptical. He was pretty sure that we were going to hate the sliders. We didn't. It's what we had in San Francisco. I think they're great. Only the shutter (le volet roulant) on the kitchen window is a pain. First of all, it seems to take longer and longer to crank it up manually in the morning and down, again manually, at nightfall, as it ages. And it's dark when seen from inside the house as above.

Back in 2004, we had three windows on the back side of the house replaced with sliders. The old ones were leaking not just air but water. They faces west. We kept the old metal shutters for a few years but in 2018 had those windows fitted with roll-down shutters that are electric-powered. All you have to do is press a button and the shutter goes up or down. You can stop it when it's down or up far enough by pressing the button again. These shutters are solar powered, actually. You don't have to worry about power outages. And the sensor that re-charges the battery is powered even by dim daylight, not just sunlight. In other words, if we have a week or two of gray fog and rain, it doesn't matter. The shutters work just fine despite gloomy weather. They've been reliable for 6 or 7 years now. It's nice to be able to open an close the shutters without having to open the windows and let either hot or cold into the house.

Here's what the kitchen window looks like when the glass panels are closed or open and the old crank-operated shutter is closed. The wand and the crank mechanism are on the left. The new shutter that we're having installed today, along with new shutters on four smaller windows in the house, will be made of white PVC (vinyl). Two new shutters will also go on south-facing windows that really heat up when the sun shines brightly in summertime, making the house very hot. Two other new shutters will go on small, old, French-style windows that are single-glazed and drafty. They're up in the loft where we watch TV where we sleep. It will be nice to be able to "black out" the room in the daytime, and to be able to reduce evening and nighttime draftiness and noise.

Here's the kitchen window with the brown shutter and the curtains closed. Too dark, basically.

"The Endive Show"

I'm naming this post after one of Julia Child's many shows about French cooking. I found it in her book titled The French Chef Cookbook (30th aniversary edition). She cooks endives in several different ways, including my favorite way, which she calls Endives et Jambon, Mornay. It required first making Endives Braisées à la Flamande. As you can see in the photo above, I wrapped my braised endives in streaky bacon instead of sandwich ham (jambon de Paris).Here is a link to a video of Mme Child's endive show. The segment about ham-wrapped braised endives starts at minute 21:53.

The smaller pictures just above and below show the endives I made at four stages of cooking, the first three in butter, a squeeze of lemon, a glug of white wine, and four cloves of garlic. The picture on the right below shows the bacon-wrapped braised endives covered in cheese sauce and melted cheese after cooking in the oven.

This last photo shows the leftover endives in that cheese sauce and the boiled potatoes I cooked to accompany them and sauce. I've blogged about gratin d'endives au jambon many times in the past. Type "endives" and hit Enter in the Blogger search field to find the posts.

"Pulled" turkey "barbecue"

This how to make "pulled" turkey "barbecue (you can do the same with pork or chicken). In my case, I bought two leg-and-thigh sections of turkey. I seasoned them with spices including salt, pepper, paprika, etc. (to taste). Then I cooked them for about an hour in the air-fryer at medium temperature.

I took the pieces of turkey out of the fryer and let them cool so I wouldn't burn my fingers.The next step is to pull the cooked skin off the turkey meat and then pull the cooked turkey meat off the bones. Discard the bones. Wash your hands. Brown the chunks of turkey meat a little more in the oven or in a frying pan if you like it with more color and texture.

Take the chunks of meat that fell or got pulled off the bones and pull then into smaller pieces. Taste for seasoning and add what you like (BBG sauce, vinegar, spices, wine, a little duck fat (the turkey meat is very lean), and so on. It's is good on a sandwich bun with cole slaw; wrapped up in a burrito, enchilada, or taco; or in a kind of shepherd's pie (un hachis parmentier) made with mashed potatoes. It's all in how you season things.