Ten wintertime pictures

(You can click on the pictures to see larger versions.)

In December 2005, we had very cold weather. It snowed a couple of times at the very end of the month. This picture, taken from the kitchen window, shows our neighbors' house and yard.

From the front deck, this is another shot of the neighbors' property. They have two lots totaling about 2½ acres. This is their country house, and they spend summers here. Their main residence in in Blois, 25 miles north of us. They bought the country house in 1970 and it was basically a ruin at that point. It's not very big but has a big kitchen, a recently remodeled master bedroom suite, and a dormitory with about a dozen single beds upstairs where the grandchildren sleep.

This is the view out of our bathroom window. It's our back yard and the other neighbors' houses. This is about as much snow as we have gotten here in three years. It's really just a dusting, as you can see -- a late friend who lived in Buffalo said it looked as if somebody had sprinkled talcum powder over the whole yard.

Since January 1, we have had temperatures above freezing and no snow. We had some rain, but not enough -- we are in a drought. Our total rainfall in 2005 was about 17.5 inches, compared to the annual average of 26 inches or more. Above is a view from the bedroom window, taken with a telephoto lens. You can see the vineyards and a man working on pruning the vines and burning the clippings in a custom-made apparatus -- a kind of split-open oil drum on wheels -- used for that purpose. In North Carolina, people use such split-open barrels as barbecue grills, on which they roast whole pigs. People stand around the grill and pinch off piece of meat to eat with their fingers -- hence the name for the event, "pig-pickings." Here they use the same kinds of things for burning grape-vine clippings.

Above is a recent sunrise. There was heavy fog, and the sun came up as a glowing disk on the horizon, visible through the bare tree limbs. It looks more like the moon rising, doesn't it?

Sunrise and sunset are special times of day here. It's always a treat to open the shutters on the kitchen window, which faces east, at about 8:00 a.m. on a winter morning and see what the day looks like. One of the things I love about living here is that clanging and clattering noise of opening shutters in the morning. Why don't we have shutters on our windows in America?

And this was a sunset last week. The sunsets are the best. This is the view from the bedroom window, boosted by a telephoto lens. The colors are authentic.

Here's another sunrise. I was out walking the dog in the vineyards behind our house. We are lucky to be the last house on the road, which turns into a gravel tractor path just at the end of our yard. It's like having a back yard that covers 15 or 20 acres.

That same morning, there was a heavy frost and the air was clear and still. The sun was just coming up over the horizon. The oak trees along the paved road don't lose their leaves in the fall the way other trees do. The rust-colored leaves just hang there all winter. I guess the new growth of leaves pushes the old ones off in the spring. This particular December morning, the sunlight was striking them just right, so that the contrast between the leaves and the frosty grass was spectacular.

This is another sunset shot. The sun is going down off the left side of the picture. The sky is clear, with just a layer of clouds off to the north, over the vineyards. That way is Brittany and Normandy, 100 miles distant.

These are the woods closest to our house. The little deer called roe deer (chevreuils in French) live in these wooded areas. They are about the size of a big dog, and we see them all the time around here.

Oops. Picture number eleven. So much for the accuracy of titles (see above, the title). Saturday 1/14 was an especially nice day. Collette and I went out for a walk in the vineyard and we ran into the guy who prunes the vines and who has a dog named Max. Max and Collette have recently started to be friendly, after months or even a year or two of avoiding each other. And on Saturday I noticed for the first time that Max is a female -- her name must be Maxine. I had always thought that Max was Maxime and a male. The two dogs get along fine. Collette just turned 14, and Max is a lot younger.

House for sale in Mesland

Our friends who live in Mesland have decided to put their house on the market. Well, it's two houses, actually. They operate one of them as a vacation rental (a gîte rural).

Mesland, with its church and community vegetable gardens, a five-minute walk

Mesland is a wine village on the north side of the Loire, just across the river from the famous château de Chaumont-sur-Loire. Mesland and its Touraine-Mesland red and white wines are well known in France. The village is located (map) just three miles west of the bigger town of Onzain, which has a supermarket and a range of shops and businesses, and only 10 miles or so from the city of Blois (pop. 75,000). It's about a 20-minute drive up the river from Amboise, and not more than an hour by car from either Tours or Orléans. The area is about two hours southwest of Paris by train or autoroute.

The main house is an old stone maison de vigneron, completely updated

This is the house my friends operate as a gîte rural (Gîtes de France)

My friends are selling for work reasons. He runs a real estate office in a town a good distance from Mesland, and to get to work he drives about an hour each way on little winding roads. He works long hours at least six days a week, with the long commute in addition. He has found a property that is much closer to his office, and that also has two houses on it, one of which his wife plans to operate as a vacation rental. She runs the gîte and also a catering business, while he operates the real estate business.

Main house on the left, rental house on the right

Here's the message my friend sent me announcing the sale: Nous vendons effectivement notre maison. Cela comprend une maison principale (cuisine ouverte sur salle à manger), 3 chambres de plain pied, salle d'eau, salle de bains, mezzanine, grand salon. En plus, une maison exploitée en gîte (Gîtes de France) comprenant cuisine/salle à manger, 2 chambres et salon à l'étage. Nombreuses dépendances (grange, garage, écurie, box) sur 1 ha de terrain (dont 8500 m² de prairie).

Translation: Yes, we are going to sell our house. That includes a main house with a living room/kitchen "great room," three bedrooms, bathroom and WC on the ground floor; a mezzanine; and a large family room upstairs. In addition, there's another house on the property that we operate as a gîte (through the Gîtes de France organization) and that has a large kitchen/dining room on the ground floor with, upstairs, two bedrooms, a sitting room, and bathroom. There are numerous outbuildings (barn, garage, stables) on 2½ acres (1 hectare) of land, much of which is meadowland.

The living/dining room in the main house

Details in the upstairs family room in the main house

I can add that the main house is an old stone house (a maison de vigneron, or winemaker's house) that my friends have spent the last few years updating. Everything is new inside, including the kitchen and bathrooms. You can easily walk into the village, where there is a post office and a café-tabac. There's a nice front yard. The rental house is right next door but is completely private. Friends of our stayed there for a week in 2003. Nearby is a well-known hotel-restaurant called Le Domaine des Hauts-de-Loire.

The large kitchen/dining room in the rental house

The upstairs sitting room in the rental house

Note that I have no financial interest in this property. I post all this just as information and because I think it's interesting to read about and see the houses. I can put any interested parties in touch with the owner. The asking price is €350,000. That's about $425,000 US at current rates. Here's the real estate site.

Je m'occupe de mes oignons

That's a French expression -- "occupe-toi de tes oignons" means "mind your own business," and "ce n'est pas mes oignons" means "that's none of my business."

I made the potato-and-
onion gratin dish but it didn't work out exactly as planned. The liquid didn't all evaporate as I thought it would, even after 90 minutes in the oven. (The picture here was taken before I put on the top layer of potatoes.)

I had some lardons so I cooked them in a frying pan and put them in with the onions on top of the bottom layer of potatoes. I also put in some thyme along with the bay leaves, plus plenty of black pepper, and I used chicken broth. I had not quite two pounds of potatoes (800 grams) and I used about 5 little onions.

When I thought it was done, there was still a lot of broth in the dish. I sucked it out with a turkey baster and added the broth to the leftover onion soup from the day before. Nothing was wasted, and the potato-onion dish was excellent.

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Yesterday afternoon I took at drive out into the country south of town. The sun had come out and I felt like taking some pictures of something besides food.

Just a couple of miles from our house, on the southwest edge of Saint-Aignan, there's a farm compound that I think is very picturesque. I wonder if the vineyards you can see in the picture belong to this family.

On the road that leads up to the farm, there is a little collection of newer houses. Somebody has built an unusal place, for here -- a house constructed entirely of wood. Here's the little "neighborhood."

Farther out in the country, maybe eight miles south, there's a château called Lestang. I don't know anything about it, except that all the roads leading into the property are posted with Propriété Privée signs. From the main road you get this view.

I haven't found out much about it by googling. Maybe I'll have to go to the town hall in the nearby village and see what information they have. Here's a closeup.

A few miles further south, I came upon the ruins of an old farm. The buildings are all covered in ivy and other climbing plants, and the tile roofs are starting to fall in.

There are 4 or 5 structures on the site. The main house appears to be in the best shape, but even its doors and windows are standing open, and it is obviously abandoned. This must be the old barn.

Just down the road from the ruins, the fields were full of crows (or ravens) feeding. When I approached, they all flew off, and some of them landed in this tree. The image seemed to fit the mood set by the tumble-down farmstead.

Across the way, I could see a more prosperous-looking farm in the distance. The landscape is gently rolling hills, with fields and small wooded areas.


And then I saw this house off in the distance. A lot of these pictures were taken using a telephoto lens.

Soupe à l'oignon gratinée

Last week we went out to do some errands in Saint-Aignan. We stopped chez Ed to pick up a few grocery items. In the produce section, Ed had five-kilogram bags of onions for 0.85 € — 85 cents. That was too good to pass up — twelve pounds of onions for about a dollar U.S. So we've had to think up creative ways to cook onions, or to cook with onions. Last Friday, we made onion and potato pizzas, with lardons and gruyère cheese. Those were a success. We also figured we could cook the onions and freeze them for later use. This is the kind of stuff you find really exciting when you don't work for a living.


Today we made soupe à l'oignon. That was a success too. Since Collette's illness back in November, we've been feeding her cuisses de dinde — turkey legs — that we buy chez Ed or elsewhere and that I usually poach in water and then cut up into small chunks for the dog's breakfast. The side benefit of that poaching process is broth — good turkey broth that we can make into soups, cook rice in, or use to make sauces. Yesterday I cooked another cuisse de dinde for Collette, so there was a liter of fresh broth in the refrigerator.


Onion soup is pretty easy. You thinly slice a pound and a half of onions (that's 750 grams). You sauté them quickly in some butter and oil, and then you turn down the heat, add a good pinch of salt and a teaspoon of sugar, and let them stew in their own juices for 45 minutes or even an hour at a very low temperature, until the onions are caramelized, golden, and soft. At that point you stir a tablespoon of flour into the onions and let that cook for a couple of minutes.


Then you pour in 2 liters (that's 2 quarts) of water or, in my case, turkey broth, and you let the soup cook for 30 minutes or so. You can use vegetable broth, chicken broth, or beef broth if you want. Put in a bay leaf, some black pepper, and a pinch of dried thyme to flavor it well, and add a good glug (say half a cup) of dry white wine. Once it reaches the boiling point, turn down the heat and let it just simmer. When it's cooked, taste it and see if it needs more salt.

Voilà. Soupe à l'oignon. You can strain out the onions and eat it that way if you want. Or eat it with the onions floating in the soup.

What makes it really good, though, is the gratinée part. To do that, pour the soup into individual oven-proof bowls or into one big oven-proof dish. Take thick slices of dry (not to say stale) French bread and float them on the surface of the soup. Put a good layer of grated Swiss cheese (a.k.a. gruyère or comté or emmenthal) — or other cheese if you like — on top of the bread slices, which should pretty much cover the surface of the soup. Put the bowls of soup into a hot oven for 15 minutes or more, until the soup is bubbling and the cheese is melted and starting to browned. Don't burn it!




Take it out of the oven and let it cool for a few minutes before you try to eat it. You'll burn the roof of your mouth if you aren't careful. C'est délicieux. Especially on a cold winter day.

So let's see. Onion pizza used up a pound of onions. Today's soupe à l'oignon used close to two pounds. We have nine pounds to go. Any other ideas? Onion omelets, somebody said. Pissaladière (that's an onion tarte with black olives that they make in Provence and in Nice). Deep-fried onion rings? Sauce soubise? Help me out here.