My 2022 kale crop

This is the extent of it. I sowed Tuscan "dinosaur" kale in pots about a year ago. Walt transplanted the seedlings outdoors in late May, I believe. The weather turned so rainy and chilly over the summer that slugs and snails thrived, but the plants in the garden didn't. Weeds took over. We finally pulled up and composted or burned everything except the kale and chard I had out there. And we weren't the only ones. Friends down the road did the same.

I thought the kale and chard plants would come back over the winter — as they had done in past years — but they didn't. Gastropods continued their attacks, sporadically. Every time the plants put out big new leaves, I got optimistic. And then those leaves were eaten too. The weather just didn't cooperate. I suppose I should go pick as many of the little kale leaves as possible. I think I'll do that this morning if it doesn't start raining again.

Le Jardin potager de 2021...

...est une catastrophe. La totale, as they say. Yesterday I got out an old camera and snapped a few photos of the garden plot as I was leaving the yard for a walk in the vineyard with Tasha the sheltie.

Some days I think I should get out there and do some trimming and weeding, but what's the point? It's over. Even so, Walt has succeeded in keeping the grass mowed. Here's a link to a picture of the 2020 garden in late August.

Friends of ours in the area who also garden every summer have told us they just pulled out most of their plants earlier in August. Walt has managed to harvest three fairly big batches of green beans and maybe two dozen little tomatoes for sauce. C'est mieux que rien.

The only plants that have produced faithfully are a couple of courgettes (zucchini). We've been enjoying those. Walt has cooked a lot of them on the barbecue grill.

I'm holding out hope for a fall crop of chard. I managed get in there with some scissors and shears a few weeks back and trim the tall grasses that were crowding out the plants. They can spend the winter out there as long as we don't have any really hard freezes.

The same is true of kale. Despite slug and caterpillar attacks, I still have six Tuscan ("dinosaur") kale plants that so far have survived.

The kale isn't thriving, but it keeps sprouting new leaves to replace the pest-eaten ones. Once in a while I can find kale on the markets here in Saint-Aignan, but not often. I'd like to have some for the fall and winter.

Eight kale pictures

So I've mentioned a few times now that I've been harvesting kale for the past few days. Walt took and posted a picture of the kale plants as they looked in the garden just before I started cutting them down.

We planted this kale 9 or 10 months ago. Attacked early on by little black "flea" beetles, and then by extreme drought and weeks of high temperatures, it suffered through the summer.

The kale plants survived and started to recover in November, when the winter rains began. It began to look very pretty only in January. We let it keep growing. It's called kale or chou kale in France, where it is not yet very well known. I did see some curly kale in the produce department at our local SuperU store recently, but it was pretty neglected-looking.

This is a variety of kale called Red Russian or Siberian. It is about the tenderest kind of kale you can eat. It more resembles spinach in taste and texture when cooked. I see it called kale rouge de Russie on French Wikipédia.

There were 8 plants, I believe, or maybe 10. I cut all but two of them a few days ago, pulled the leaves off the stems, which went into the compost pile, and cooked the leaves. I ended up with about two kilograms — 4½ lbs. — of cooked kale.

I cut the last two plants yesterday. One of them was very different in appearance from the others. The leaves it produced were rounder and less ragged looking that those on all the other plants.

Red Russian is a flat-leaf kale, and that makes it much easier to wash than the better-known curly-leaf variety. It's also very different in texture from the "meatier" kale called Dinosaur or Black Tuscan (kale noir in French), which I've grown in the past and really like too.

Yesterday I blanched the leaves of the last two kale plants. Today I'm going to cook some kale with garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice for our lunch, alongside half a smoked chicken.

Comments and cookies

One of the web pages I read yesterday when I was trying to get some information about difficulties people have leaving comments on Blogger blogs included this discouraging assessment: The Blogger software is outdated, over the hill, and decrepit. It came on the market more than 20 years ago. Since blogging is a dinosaur in the new world of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, not much is being done to keep the Blogger software alive. So goes the world...

Meanwhile, I really don't like the new pop-up comment display I've chosen for my blog. I miss being able to comment to each commenter individually the way I could when comments on this blog were in the embedded format. And I read this: the problem that makes reader comments vanish into thin air resides in the person's browser settings. Enabling Accept Third-Party Cookies — unblocking them — in your browser settings will allow it to work with the embedded comments.

I use Firefox. There, the setting that might need to be modified is in the Privacy and Security settings when you open Options on the menu at the upper right-hand corner of the Firefox browser. Under Enhanced Tracking Protection, choose the Custom option. Then look at the settings for Cookies. Choose to have the browser block only "Cookies from unvisited websites"; do not choose to block all cookies or all third-party cookies.

In Safari, at least on Windows, click the little gear icon at the top right corner of the browser window. Open Preferences, and then click the Privacy option. Under Block Cookies, click Never. From the reading I've done, this will work on MacOS and iOS versions of Safari as well.

In Chrome on Windows, open Settings by clicking the three-dot icon at the top right corner of the browser window. Click Settings and then choose Privacy and Security. Click Site Settings. The first item on the next menu is Cookies and Site Data. Click that and you'll see Cookies and Site Data under Permissions. Make sure the the Block Third Party Cookies option is turned off.

I know that for some I'm asking a lot when I request that you turn off the feature that blocks third-party cookies. In Chrome, it seems to be turned off by default. In the other browsers, you have to turn it off yourself. Then the Blogger "embedded" comment page will work again and you'll be able to post comments here. Who objects?

Food "interlood" 2 — the first 2019 kale crop

I harvested my winter crop of kale yesterday. It's the variety often called "dinosaur kale" because the bumpy dark green leaves made somebody think they had the texture of dinosaur skin. This variety is also called "black" Tuscan kale. I harvested six or eight plants and picked all the leaves, large and small, off the stalks yesterday morning. That took about 90 minutes I think, and the leaves filled up a 15-liter bucket. That's 1.7 pecks, or 0.43 U.S. bushels of kale leaves. I looked it up, and learned that the U.K. bushel is not exactly the same as the U.S. bushel.

The first photo, above shows just a small portion of the harvest. This second one shows all of it, blanched, filling, for overnight storage, a fairly deep 12-inch baking dish. There are a few baby collard leaves in there too. I wanted to cook the greens in my crock pot (slow-cooker) but 15 liters far exceeded its capacity. So I had to blanch the leaves in boiling water on top of the stove first. That didn't take very long because I didn't need to put a whole lot of water in the big stock pot. When it boiled, it produced enough steam to cook the kale just enough to soften the leaves and make them collapse.

I thought I really hadn't planned this harvest very well, because I didn't have any bacon grease in the refrigerator. Then I remembered that the last time I went to Intermarché I had bought a big chunk of smoked poitrine fumée (pork "belly" or "breast" a.k.a. "side meat"). That was perfect. I try to keep a piece of it on hand. It's sold vacuum-packed so it will keep for several weeks in the fridge after I buy it.

Here is the six-liter insert or liner of my slow-cooker with the blanched kale and the chunk of poitrine fumée in it. There's also about a liter of the blanching liquid in there, along with some salt and plenty of black pepper. The slow-cooker insert I have is an aluminum pot with a non-stick coating on the inside. One advantage of having a metal insert is that I can set it on a burner on the stove to pre-heat it before putting it in the slow-cooker's heating element, giving it a head start so it cooks a little more quickly.

A Tuscan kale plant looks like this. The leaves are not as curly as the leave of the curly kale I used to cook, so they are much easier to wash thoroughly. The result is no sand in the bottom of the cooking pot. I also like red Russian kale, and I have some seeds so I think I'll grow some of that is spring. Notice how the Tuscan kale leaves are a nice dark blue-green color. I'm not sure if you can buy Tuscan kale in the U.S. but I know I've never seen it on the markets or in the supermarkets here in the Loire Valley. The widely available greens here are cabbage ("white" or Savoy), Swiss chard, and of course spinach.

Food "interlood" — slow-cooked lamb

I cooked a leg of lamb over the weekend. It was and is un gigot de douze heures — I cooked it for 12 hours or a little more in the slow-cooker. I've seen recipes for slow-cooked lamb that call for roasting the leg for either five or seven hours. Nowadays, with slow-cookers a.k.a. crock pots, the lamb can cook at very low temperature for 12 hours.

 The lamb leg just barely fit in the slow-cooker. It weighed 3+ kg (7 lbs.) and simmered with:

• 2 cut-up carrots

• 2 sliced onions

• 3 chopped garlic cloves

• 2 sliced celery branches

• ½ bottle of white wine

• 2 Tbsp. tomato paste

• 2 Tbsp. dried thyme

• 2 bay leaves

• 1 tsp. red pepper flakes

• 1 tsp. ground allspice

• salt and black pepper

To cook the gigot, on Saturday night I set the cooker's temperature to low and its timer for 10 hours. And when I got up Sunday morning, I checked the lamb's temperature. It was at 190ºF or slightly higher (90ºC). At that point, the meat is starting to fall off the bone and is perfectly tender. I took it out of the slow-cooker, put it in a roasting dish, and set it in the refrigerator. At noontime, I reheated it for a hour or so in a slow oven.

It is pretty tasty too. There was a good amount of liquid — more than half a liter — in the pot, and a good bit of rendered lamb fat too. I de-greased the broth using a gravy separator and served the lamb with that flavorful broth and the onions, carrots, and celery that cooked in the crock pot with it, along with some pale-green flageolet beans out of a jar and some home-grown Tuscan "dinosaur" kale out of the freezer. Lamb is always good with beans, be they pale green, red, or white. And beans are always good with greens.

We had slow-cooked lamb for our Sunday dinner but, as you can imagine, we have quite a bit left over. This week, I think I might cook a dish of moussaka with eggplant, tomato-and-chopped-lamb sauce, grated cheese, and béchamel. And I plan to "pull" (shred, effilocher) some of the lamb and season it with barbecue sauce for sandwiches served with cole slaw. It will be good in Mexican-style tacos or enchiladas too, seasoned with ground cumin and chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. Some of the cooked lamb can go into the freezer for future meals.

Winter greenery

We haven't yet had a flake of snow this winter. It's been coldish on some recent days, but we've had very few days with frosty mornings — yesterday was the rare exception. However, this morning it's 6ºC (at least 10ºF) warmer than it was yesterday morning at the same time.

The other day (Tuesday, Jan. 15), when I took these pictures of the vegetable garden, it was downright warm outside, considering we're in mid-January. It felt more like early April. Today, I thought I'd do a report on how my winter greens are growing.

First, let me say that the collard greens were a disaster again this year. Maybe I planted them too late (end of September). They were immediately attacked by pests that ate all the leaves. So no pictures of those — I wonder if I'll ever be able to harvest beautiful collard plants like the ones I harvested in February 2015.  Today I'll focus on the kale instead.

By mid-October, the kale plants — called lacinato, dinosaur, or black Tuscan kale — had already grown pretty tall. Look at this post from back then. Pests, probably snails and slugs mostly, chewed all the leaves off the collard seedlings, but the kale was too tough for them. I had hoped for some cold weather to kill caterpillars and make the gastropods go into hibernation, but no luck with that.

The Swiss chard, also attacked by pests, hasn't fared very well either. But I'm optimistic that the plants will bounce back and grow tall and bushy as the days get longer. A year or two ago, I had some really beautiful chard plants in March and April.

One other green plant, while not one you can eat but you can enjoy cooking with, is bay laurel. I dug up a volunteer plant last summer and planted it in a pot. I meant to get it planted in the ground by November, but rainy weather prevented me from doing it. It's doing fine in its pot, which I set out on the tarps in the garden plot to help keep the tarps from blowing away. If we have a really hard freeze, I can always bring it into the greenhouse.

Une potée à ma façon

The other day, in writing about oven-roasted magret de canard, I mentioned turnips. They're a classic accompaniment for roast duck. Just look at some of these French recipes for canard aux navets. For our lunch a few days earlier, I had boiled and then sautéed some turnips — both yellow and white — for a dish called a potée, and some of them were still in the frigo.

A potée is a boiled dinner. Every French region has its own style, with different meats and vegetables according to what the local specialties are. Sausages, different cuts of fresh, smoked, or salt-cured pork, and even beef or poultry can go into the pot, with winter vegetables including turnips, parsnips, cabbage, carrots, onions, leeks, potatoes, celery... and even beans.

I put kale from the garden in our potée. I just went out and pulled two dozen pretty leaves off the Tuscan "dinosaur" kale plants growing in the garden and cooked them in the broth with the other vegetables and with the meats you see below. This is my favorite kind of wintertime cooking. I learned about making potées from a woman who ran a charcuterie (pork butcher's shop) in Paris, when I lived there back in the early 1980s. The charcutière liked to explain to her customers how the different cuts of pork she sold should be cooked. It was always good advice.

As usual, again this time I made far too much food for the two of us — too many vegetables and too much meat. Veal shoulder roasts were on sale for a good price, and even though it's unconventional, I decided to include one in the potée. I also put in a smoked garlic sausage (saucisson à l'ail fumé) and a big chunk of lean pork "belly" (poitrine de porc), which was sold already cooked and just needed reheating in the broth (photo above).

Here's how we ate the potée the day I cooked it, with some butter on the veggies and Dijon mustard with the meats. We had a lot of meat left over, including most of the long plain pork sausage (saucisse de Toulouse) you see in the first photo above. I put what was left of both the sausages in the freezer to re-cook during the holidays (we always make a cassoulet on New Year's Day...). I didn't have a firm plan for the bounty of cooked vegetables, but I knew that they wouldn't go to waste. That's how I ended up having those turnips to serve with the pan-roasted duck breast and white beans. To be continued...

Lacinato kale

Posting this makes me realize I really need to go out and water the kale we have growing in the garden. No rain, you know. At least it's not so hot outside, so the kale plants are really starting to grow.

I know the plants would like some rain, but they'll have to make do with some spray from the garden hose. I hope they'll grow bigger, up to three feet tall, with a lot more leaves.

This is the variety often called "dinosaur kale." That's because its leaves are sort of dark green and bumpy, resembling somebody's idea of what a dinosaur's skin might look like.

It also goes by the name of "lacinato kale," or cavolo nero, meaning "black cabbage" in Italian. Other names, according to Wikipedia, are Tuscan kale, Tuscan cabbage, Italian kale, black kale, and palm tree kale. It's my favorite variety of kale. The leaves cook up to a "meaty" texture, like collard greens, and the flavor is good too.

Some of these photos were taken early in the morning, before the sun was fully up in the sky. Others were taken late in the afternoon, in bright light. The differences in the quality of the light make the leaves look very different.

Like chard and collards, kale will survive all but a very hard freeze and can grow all winter out in the garden. Frost supposedly improves the greens, making them sweeter (January 2017 photo). I'm looking forward to harvests of dinosaur kale in December, January, even February...

C'est la fin des haricots tomates

Yesterday was rip-out-the-tomato-plants day. They were looking pretty scraggly. They were still covered with a lot of tomatoes, but nearly all of them were rotting on the vine. Sun damage was probably the main cause. Alors, quand les tomates sont cuites, on passe à autre chose.

And the fact is, we harvested so many tomatoes over the past six or eight weeks that we were feeling overwhelmed. The freezer is full of sauce, the cellar is full of jars of dried tomatoes and tomato paste. It's time to call it a season.

The first step was to untie all the tomato plants and free up the squiggly metal stakes that supported them. Then we pulled all the stakes out and let the plants fall to the ground. Then we collected as many healthy tomatoes as we could find.

The tomato plants were surprisingly easy to pull out of the ground. Here's what we ended up with. Weeds, mostly crabgrass, had set tenacious roots in the rock hard clay soil. It's been so dry in August and September — we've had about a third of our average rainfall for the period, and very hot weather.

So what's left in the garden? Greens. Tuscan "dinosaur" kale, for example. The plants have really suffered through the drought and the high heat. But they're already starting to look better now that it's not so hot outside. I watered them thoroughly yesterday, and I'm hoping for some rain soon.

The kale is planted along the eastern edge of the garden plot, and along the western edge is a line of Swiss chard plants. Those also have suffered sun and heat damage, but they are hardy. I trimmed them up, weeded around them a little bit, and watered them well. Even if rain doesn't start falling soon, we have a small number of plants to worry about now. They'll be easy to keep watered.

In this climate, leafy greens like kale and chard should continue producing until Christmas, and even into January and February. So I've also planted some collard seedlings in a big clay pot. I hope they will thrive, and at some point I might plant them out in the ground. After I've tilled the garden plot, that is. Luckily, Walt and I are both big fans of these kinds of greens.

Pretty pots, bad beetles, and green greens

The last place Sue and I went into at La Borne was the first one we had tried to get into after arriving in the village. We had arrived too early, it turned out, after having a good lunch in the nearby town of Henrichemont. It was about 2:15, but we soon learned that all the pottery shops and workshops didn't open until 3:00 p.m. for the afternoon. We decided to take a long walk around the village while we waited.

Above is just an example of the pottery we found in this shop when we finally got back to it around 5:00. In the meantime, we had had a good time looking around in the ceramics center and the pottery museum, as well as three or four other boutiques. As I've said, all the people we met were cheerful, curious about us Americans, and informative about the ceramics and pottery.

I'll get back to La Borne in posts tomorrow and over the next few days, but right now I have gardening on my mind. Specifically, greens, including kale and collards. Both these varieties of cabbage that don't form a head, but instead grow as a bunch of loose leaves, are coming back into fashion in France. Just above are some collard greens seedlings that I've had planted in a jardinière out on our front terrace this summer.

This is a gratuitous photo of Natasha the Sheltie with another favorite plant of mine.

Collards and kale are members of a set of vegetables like, for example, parsnips, which have now come to be considered légumes oubliés — "forgotten" or heirloom vegetables — in France. Collard greens are known by names like chou cavalier (I don't know why), chou en arbre ("tree cabbage" because the leaves grow on tall, thick, semi-woody stalks), 'or chou à vaches ("cow cabbage" because the leaves were formerly fed only to livestock).

In May, I had grown some lacinato or "dinosaur" kale (a.k.a. Tuscan kale) from seed in a planter box. The seeds came up abundantly and a couple of weeks ago Walt planted the seedlings out in the vegetable garden. They started growing faster but now they have been attacked by an insect pest called the "flea beetle' in English, or des altises in French. At least I think that's what they are. These beetles look like the ones you can see the on this rose, in a photo I took over in La Borne a month ago. The variety of altises infesting our garden must be ones that loves to eat cabbage leaves.

A lot of people love to eat cabbage leaves, too — collards included. Not only are they a prized food in the U.S. South, but people in Portugal, northwest Spain, and Brazil enjoy them too. In regions with mild climates, including those and the Loire Valley, they are a green vegetable that can grow all winter long. Before refrigerators and freezers, they were among the few green vegetables people could count on in wintertime.

Yesterday I thinned out my collard green seedlings and replanted them in other planter boxes and pots. One planter box of seedlings gave me three, plus one round pot, as in the photos. I'm glad I hadn't yet planted them out in the garden, where flea beetles wouls surely have attacked them.

Maybe the altises won't find them up here, and the leaves will stay as pretty as they are right now. I hope they will grow big and strong so that they can resist future flea beetle infestations. I'm going to keep them up here on the terrace for a few more weeks, or maybe a month, before I transplant them out in the garden plot. They should give me green leaves all winter.

Red Russian this time

It wasn't even two weeks ago that I harvested a big crop of Tuscan "dinosaur" kale that had over-wintered in the garden. Yesterday I was at it again, but the harvest was red Russian kale this time. I don't think I'll need to grow any kale in this year's garden.

Red Russian kale in the vegetable garden, growing...

The two kale varieties are pretty different from each other. Red Russian is more like spinach or chard. The leaves are fairly tender, but with a little bit of croquant or "crunch" to them. In a way, they remind me of mustard greens, but with a milder flavor. Tuscan kale has dark green leaves that cook up more like collard greens, "meaty" and flavorful.

...in the kitchen sink, washed and drying...

There must have been eight red Russian kale plants out in the garden, where they too had over-wintered. After the recent rains, they were beautiful and hadn't yet been attacked by bugs and slugs. I cut them off at ground level and brought them in. Each plant was made up of three, four, or even six thick stalks covered in leaves.

...in a big pot on the stove, seasoned...

I didn't take very long to strip the leaves off the stalks and then strip the tender greens off the leaf ribs. When I had finished, using no tools but my hands, I had two kilos of pretty leaves — more than 4 lbs. That was enough to fill an 11.5 liter pot twice, with the leaves packed down tightly.

...and in plastic containers for the freezer.

I seasoned the kale with fat and broth left over from roasting a capon a while back, some white wine, salt, pepper, a little bit of garlic powder, and just a small quantity of hot red pepper flakes. As the first batch cooked down and made room in the pot, I gradually added the rest and let those leaves cook down too. Cooked, the kale came in at between 2 and 3 liters... for the freezer and future meals. We'll be looking for more kale recipes and ideas, for sure.