Cooking with olives

Earlier this week, I bought a pork tenderloin roast over at Intermarché. It was for sale at a good price. I brought it home not knowing what I was going to do with it. I thought about cooking it in a cream sauce with mushrooms and onions as a kind of blanquette de porc, but we had made and enjoyed eating a blanquette de veau the week before, and we have leftovers from that in the freezer. Looking through my blog, I came upon a recipe for veal in tomato sauce cooked with onions and olives. I decided to make that.

I wanted a lighter tomato sauce, so I used a couple of fresh tomatoes (with a squirt of tomato paste) along with some chicken broth for the sauce. It kind of resembled a stir-fry, so we decided to eat it with steamed white rice — round rice in English, I think, and riz rond in French. The pork, onions, and sauce cooked together for about 90 minutes. I added some pitted black olives about 10 minutes before the end of the cooking time. Green olives would be good too — or maybe some of both.

Here's a photo of the veau aux olives I made back and 2009 and based this porc aux olives on.
And here's a link to that post.

Waiting and watching

They are doing it again. TéléMatin is saying that today is the next-to-last time that we will have to re-set our clocks in Spring and in Fall. Winter time and Summer time will be just a memory. Problem is, they've been saying that for about 10 years now. We shall see.

Above is a photo I took in October 2015 — ten years ago.

This coming week we'll be getting our influenza and covid 19 shots. One in one arm, the other in the other arm. I hope I don't get the flu. Back in California, for three years in a row I got a flu shot and, each time, not long afterward, I came down with the flu. So I stopped getting them. I haven't ever had the shot or the flu again since then. We'll see this time.

October storm clouds over Saint-Aignan

We have had a lot of unsettled weather this past week. I took these pictures of our October skies three days ago. Since then, we've had rain and a lot of fierce wind. We're waiting for the weather to settle down and for the landscaping contractors crew to show up and start trimming our long, tall, and wide cherry laurel hedge before winter sets in. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying watching and taking pictures of puffy white clouds against a bright blue sky.

Re-planted vineyard parcels

The noise of stormy winds and heavy rain kept me awake for a while last night. I've been sitting here in front of my laptop for nearly two hours now, and the winds are still fast and and furious. The worst weather is along the coast though, so in a way we're being spared. Did you know that a tornado touched down just north of Paris (10 miles from Notre-Dame cathedral) a few days ago?

Here are some recent photos of new stakes and wires that will support newly planted grape vines next year. The newly planted parcel of vines is less than half a mile from our back gate.

Yesterday's afternoon walk

The tree on the left above is my plum tree. I planted it in 2010. I had grown it by potting up pits from plums growing on a neighbor's tree. A few weeks ago, its leaves were a deep purple color. Now they've turned a brighter shade of red. Above right is a snowball bush growing in that same neighbor's yard. It's looking good this year.

There aren't many Queen Anne's lace plants this late in the season, but I noticed a pretty one yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday Tasha and I had an encounter with two border collies when we were out walking. One of them, a female, was friendly and curious to see Tasha. The other one, a male pictured above, was more aggressive. The woman who keeps them came running over to get them back in her yard. Somebody had left her front gate open, she said. This is the same woman whose billy goat attacked Walt after escaping from her yard last winter. She seems like a nice person, but she needs to pay more attention to her animals, I'd say.