Hosing her down

Yesterday was one of those days when interludes of deep blue sky with lots of clouds were punctuated by sudden downpours of rain. Our neighbor Bernard drove in from Blois to mow his big yard across the street from us. He can't come do it this weekend because he's working in a polling station for the legislative elections tomorrow. He had been out riding around on his mower for just a few minutes when the bottom dropped out and he had to quit. He gave up and went back to Blois.

Looking back toward the house from out in the vineyard
during a sunny interlude between showers

Late in the day I took Callie out for a walk in the vineyard. Walt had warned me that the dog liked to splash around in mud puddles when there were some, but I hadn't seen her in action. I got my chance. We've had three inches of rain over the past two weeks so the ground is saturated and water is standing in all the low spots. Who knew that border collies were water dogs?

When we started down the gravel road through the vineyard out behind the house, there were a couple of tractors working the vines farther out. Callie is afraid of the sound of engines — a car, truck, tractor, airplane, or helicopter passing close to the house sends her scurrying for a safe hiding place. Luckily, one of the tractors came out of the rows of vines several hundred yards ahead of us and putted on up the road, away from us. The driver had apparently finished for the day. The other tractor went farther out into the vines, toward the paved road over north of us. So our path was clear.

Wild dog running through a big puddle

We got just a few hundred yards from the house when Callie spied the first big puddles alongside the gravel road. She raced into the water and started running like crazy, splashing everywhere. Then she stopped and beat the water with her front paws. She ended up covered with water and wet sand.

She was obviously enjoying it, so I let her play. I figured if we walked a little farther, she would dry out. There was a stiff breeze blowing, and the air wasn't too cold, so it wouldn't take long. On the way home, I'd put her on the leash and keep her out of the water, so she'd arrive at home dry and clean.

Slapping the water with her front paws — what fun!

We hadn't gotten too far up the road past the puddles when I big black cloud started gathering on the southeast horizon. And sure enough, wind-driven raindrops started slapping my face. We had to turn back, or risk getting even wetter.

Here comes the next squall.

I did put the leash on Callie and kept her out of the water as we passed this time, but she didn't have time to dry out. We got back to the house and she was just too wet and muddy to take inside. And the rain stopped; the black cloud scooted by to the south of us.

Recovering from the shock of being sprayed with the hose

At first I thought I would just throw the ball for Callie and let her run back and forth chasing it for a while so that her fur would have time to dry out and most of the sand and mud would fall off. But I lost patience, and Callie too wanted to go inside. Finally, I pulled the dreaded garden house off its rack and sprayed the terrified dog's legs and belly to clean her up. It's just as well that she get used to being hosed down if she's going to play in mud puddles on our walks.

Great weather for ducks ... and for duck

Today is June 15, and we've already had more rain in June than we had in all of April and May combined — almost twice as much. We've had more rain in the past two weeks than we had during the whole month of March, which is one of our rainier months here in Saint-Aignan. And to think that we complained that May was too damp and chilly.

Sour cherries — griottes in French

Let me continue. We've had more rain in the past two weeks than in any whole month since I started keeping track of our rainfall in October 2004. Nous pataugeons, comme dirait l'autre. In June 2006 we had one-sixth as much rain in all of June as we have had in the first two weeks of June 2007. Is the picture becoming clear? If not, turn on your windshield wipers.

Cuisses de canard confites — cooked slowly for 90 minutes
in enough duck fat to cover them, and then drained on a rack

So it's great weather for ducks in Saint-Aignan. Or duck, which is the non-count noun form we use when we are talking about duck as a menu item. Duck with cherry sauce is what I'm talking about, using the last cherries we are likely to get off the famous tree out back, since we had more than an inch of rain just yesterday.

Cook the cherries and some cherry juice in a little
duck fat until they start to cook down and the juice thickens

Here's a translation of the recipe I got off the Lugar do Olhar Feliz blog I found a day or two ago:

Heat up the well-drained duck confit (heat it twice: first in a pan, and then on a rack in the oven). While it is heating up, pit the cherries and cook them in a pan [with some duck fat] until they just start to fall apart. Deglaze the pan with a small amount of (rice) vinegar, and then add in a cup of duck or veal stock.

Put the cooked duck leg portions on a rack
and put them in the oven to turn golden brown

Let the cherry sauce cook down on low heat for about 10 minutes. Finish the sauce by adding three or four chopped stevia (a.k.a. sweetleaf) leaves (to sweeten it a little and add some green to the sauce and make it look nice). Then pour the sauce over the warm duck confit.

Confit done this way, like Calf's Liver with Cherries, is the essence of sweet and sour, which is perfect with duck.

Add some balsamic vinegar, white wine, and
stock (duck, veal, or chicken) to the cherries and
let the sauce cook for 10 minutes to thicken up

Griottes — sour cherries — possess a delicious acidity that needs to be tempered by the addition of a little sugar, or some red-currant or red bell-pepper jelly....

Don't go overboard with the vinegar.

Since I had just finished cooking the confit in duck fat, I didn't need to heat it up in a pan. I took it out of the fat while it was still hot and put it on a rack in an oven pan to drain for 10 minutes. Then I put the pan into a hot oven until the duck pieces had taken on a nice golden color. The skin was crispy.

Pour the thickened sauce and cherries over the duck confit

I used two cups of pitted cherries, and I cooked them according to the recipe, but I decided to use balsamic vinegar instead of rice vinegar. I also added a dash of white wine for sweetness. I had veal stock, but chicken stock would have worked just as well, and I didn't have any sweetleaf (I'd never even heard of it before) so I did without. I also didn't add any sugar or jelly. The sauce was plenty sweet because the balsamic vinegar brings a lot of sweetness. And of course I had put in some white wine. I almost always do, you know.

Confit de canard aux griottes et aux tagliatelles

We ate the duck and cherry sauce with some plain egg noodles, followed by a green salad in vinaigrette. The sweet-sour sauce, bright red cherries, crispy duck skin, and succulent duck meat made a fantastic combination.

And after all that we had a cherry clafoutis [klah-foo-TEE] that Walt made for dessert. We ate all the duck but we have clafoutis left for the next couple of days.

Clafoutis

Life is just a bowl of cherries

Wow, that little artichoke interlude inspired a lot of comments. And I ended up with a lot of new ideas for eating artichokes. It's too bad that our plants are unlikely to produce any 'chokes this year.

I posted some topics last week about the time we spent with Claude of Blogging in Paris and Vieux c'est mieux when she came to Saint-Aignan. Claude has posted a slideshow of her Saint-Aignan pictures on Flickr and the photos she took at the Zoo de Beauval in this blog entry.

Cleaning up the cherries I picked, and enjoying a late afternoon
glass of Gamay and one of my favorite French radio programs

Yesterday was another cherry-picking day. I went out to look at the cherry tree on the edge of the vineyard a couple of days ago and realized it was still covered in bright red fruit. It was supposed to rain yesterday afternoon (but it never did) and I thought I'd better go get more cherries, which are very ripe now, before the rain ruined them.

Thanks to whoever owns the plot of land that the cherry tree is growing on. I hope you will continue to ignore its existence. Be assured that I will take good care of that tree for you.

By the way, this week marked the fourth anniversary of the day we moved into our house here at La Renaudière near Saint-Aignan. The first night we spent here, after four or five days of intensive and extensive house-cleaning, was June 12, 2003.

Life is...

I don't know why it took me four years to find that cherry tree. But given the five apple trees in our back yard, our generous neighbors' peach and quince trees, the new-found cherry tree, and our American friends' plum orchard not far from here, we don't lack for fresh, seasonal fruit. I might never have to worry about confiture again, since in the pantry I now have pints and pints of apple and quince jelly, as well as many jars of peach, cherry, and plum preserves, all of which I've made over the past three years.

So what are we going to do with these cherries? Walt is going to make another clafoutis, which is about the best way to have cherries in dessert form. The cherries are a little sour, so they are better cooked than eaten raw.

Duck thigh-leg pieces and a bowl of cherries

And I'm finally going to make duck with cherry sauce for lunch today. The duck is already cooking. I'm making it into confit by cooking it in a large amount of duck fat, which I had in sealed jars in the refrigerator. Walt bought the duck when he went grocery shopping at Intermarché earlier this week.

Duck legs for €5.10 a kilo — that would be about $2.30 per pound
if the dollar were worth anything. At current exchange rates,
it comes out to something like $3.05 a pound. Still, such a deal!

A while back I did a topic on making confit of duck. It's here. If you search my blog for the word "confit" you'll find several other topics about ducks and geese.

And here's what I'm planning to do today. I found this blog topic called Canard aux Griottes by searching in Google France. Griottes is the French word for sour cherries. And now I've discovered a new blog — Lugar do Olhar Feliz, a bilingual blog based in southern Portugal.

Trimming, cooking, and eating an artichoke

To trim a fresh artichoke and prepare it for cooking, the first thing you have to deal with is the stem. If, like the ones I bought, the artichokes have five or six inches of stem still attached on the bottom, the best thing to do is to break the stem off using your bare (or gloved) hands. It can take considerable effort, but if you succeed in breaking off the stem right at the bottom of the artichoke, you'll see that a lot of big fibers pull out of the 'choke and stay attached to the stem, which you can discard.

The other option is to cut the stem off with a knife. And some people cook the stem along with the 'choke, either after cutting it off or having left it attached. The stem can be a little fibrous, but there is also plenty of good artichoke flesh there to eat.

Prepare a big bowl or pot of cold water to keep the trimmed artichokes in as you work. Add a quarter-cup of white distilled vinegar or lemon juice to the water to prevent the trimmed edges of the 'chokes from oxidizing and turning dark brown.

Trim off the top ends of the artichoke leaves with scissors.
The 'choke on the right isn't fully trimmed yet.

After you've decided what to do about the stems and dealt with that, the next thing to do is to trim off the top ends of all the artichoke's leaves (they're petals, actually, but never mind...). Artichokes are thistles, and there are sometimes sharp thorns on the leaf-ends. Cut off approximately the top third of each leaf with scissors or kitchen shears. Pull off the very bottom six or eight leaves whole and discard them — they're usually too tough to eat.

Leaves trimmed and top sliced off, ready for cooking

After the leaves are trimmed, use a big, sharp knife to cut off the top of the artichoke. Hold the artichoke on its side, grip it firmly, and slice off the top. Now it is ready to cook. Return it to the water bath if it is going to wait a few minutes before boiling.

To cook the artichokes, fill a big pot with water and set it on the stove to boil. Add salt and some vinegar or lemon juice to the cooking water. Distilled vinegar works just fine. When the water comes to the boil, drop in the 'chokes and let them simmer for 20 to 40 minutes, depending on size. Test them for doneness by poking a skewer or a knife into the bottom (where the stem is or was). They should be pretty soft.

Cooked, draining, and cooling in the kitchen sink

When the artichokes are done, turn them upside down on a plate or in the kitchen sink and let them drain and cool before you eat them. You can eat them slightly warm or fully cooled.

Eat the artichoke by putting one upside-down on a plate and pulling the leaves off one at a time. Eat them with your fingers. Put the bottom end of each leaf in your mouth and scrape the soft flesh off the bottom of each leaf with your teeth.

Normally, people in France serve artichokes with either vinaigrette or mayonnaise. The home-made versions of the sauces are obviously the best, but commercially prepared dressing or mayonnaise is OK too. Put a little bowl of the sauce next to your plate. Pull off an artichoke leaf. Dip the bottom end of the leaf into the sauce. Eat. It's good.

I didn't take any pictures after the artichokes had finished cooking yesterday. But Elise of Simply Recipes has published the definitive guide to trimming, cooking, and eating a whole fresh artichoke on her food blog.

As you'll see, after you've eaten all the edible parts of the leaves, you're left with the inedible part called the choke, which is attached to the edible bottom. Scrape the choke off the bottom and discard it. Eat the fleshy, tasty artichoke bottom with a knife and fork and some more vinaigrette or mayonnaise.

The only other thing to foresee is a bowl in which to put the artichoke leaves and chokes as you pull the 'choke apart and eat the edible parts. Be warned: you'll have the impression there's more left when you finish eating than there was when you started. It's just an illusion, and you'll know that because you'll be feeling full at that point.