Dry, dry, dry

And I'm not talking about the wine (though it's dry too). I'm talking about the summer of 2009. Everything around Saint-Aignan is parched. The water holes (les trous d'eau) scattered around the vineyard are either dry or nearly so. The level of the little pond out back is very low.

It's not so much that it's hot. Our high temperature did not go above 27ºC/81ºF yesterday afternoon, and it is cool this morning — 14.5ºC/58ºF. It's true that Saturday and Sunday were 90º days (or close), with temperatures near 32ºC. The weather report on TV right now says it will be that hot again today.

The pond is very low and the fish are at the surface, gulping
for air. It has also been invaded by a non-native weed. (Here's
a link to a picture of the pond in winter a couple of years ago.)

But this is nothing compared to the summer of 2003, the year of the great canicule or heat wave, when so many died of dehydration and exhaustion in France. But it is probably just as dry this year as it was back then, our first summer in Saint-Aignan.

I just looked back at rainfall statistics we've kept since 2005. Summer precipitation totals, for June, July, and August, look like this:

It seems obvious that a normal summer's rainfall here would be between 4 and 5 inches. Look at 2007 — that explains our failed garden that year. The surprising year is 2008, because looking back on it, it seemed like a cool damp summer. Maybe it was humid and cool, but it wasn't all that rainy, according to the figures. The impression depends on whether the rain falls steadily and often, or hard and infrequently.

Callie us used to getting a drink from this water hole
in the vineyard. But right now it is pretty much dry.

And August 2009 isn't over yet. The weather might change. We are probably due for a rainy spell. September is often a dry month, however, and that's good for the grape harvest.

Hot but still green

We're having a string of 90º days here in mid-August. It hasn't rained in I don't know when. It's great for the garden, but the ground is very dry and we have to water our plants for the first time in several years.

The vineyard is very green still. And the grapes are really filling out. Our routine of walking Callie twice a day continues. Each of us goes out with the dog once every day. Walt went this morning. I'll go this afternoon and tomorrow morning. Then he'll go out tomorrow afternoon and Wednesday morning. It keeps us busy. We walk a couple of miles each time.

The vineyards are carefully trimmed and beautifully green.

Callie sees deer and rabbits several times a week and of course takes off after them, chasing them into the woods. But she never stays out of sight for more than a few minutes. I call and whistle for her a couple of times and here she comes, running back. She is pretty much bonded to us and doesn't like to lose sight of us either.

This part of France is like a big park, with trees planted
in straight rows and neatly manicured.

A few days ago I was walking along a path that passes by a stand of fruit trees, a little orchard, not very far from the house. Callie was walking along ahead of me, nose to the ground, taking in all the interesting scents. I looked off to the right and saw two adult roe deer bounding away from us. We had startled them. They were probably feeding on fruit in the orchard. Callie never even noticed them. I was glad of that.

In Touraine, rows of vines appear to hug the rolling hills.

If you're American, you might wonder about racoons, opossums, and skunks here. Well, we don't have any of those (except at the zoo). The animals we do have around Saint-Aignan are two kinds of deer — smaller roe deer and bigger white-tailed deer — rabbits (hares, actually, I'm told), foxes, badgers, and red squirrels. There are no American gray squirrels in France. We have moles, but no gophers.

Our yard is fenced in, so rabbits and deer don't
get to munch on our garden plants.

There are a lot of little mouse-type mammals — more kinds than I can keep track of. Dormice, for example, which the dictionary says are "squirrel-like," and shrews, which are insectivores, not rodents. Little red mice I've seen too, but don't know what they are. There are frogs and toads, of course, and there are snakes, including poisonous vipers and harmless garden snakes. And lizards. Hedgehogs. Snails and slugs. I won't even try to start naming birds.

Stuffed tomatoes again

To make stuffed tomatoes, first you need tomatoes. Those we have got. Then you need stuffing. They sell that at the supermarket, in butcher shops, and in charcuteries in France. That makes it easy.

The stuffing is ground pork with seasonings already in it: garlic, parsley, salt, and pepper. You can add some more, of course. I added dried thyme, fennel seeds, and some more garlic and black pepper when I made tomates farcies the other day. Chopped onion would be a good addition. The stuffing is sold as farce à tomates. Or you can buy chair à saucisses — sausage meat, which is just ground pork. Fancier meat stuffings — farce fine, for example — might include some ground veal.

Tomatoes for stuffing

Anyway, I've been reading that there is a tomato shortage on the U.S. East Coast. A lot of fields of tomatoes and back-yard gardens have been affected by something called "late blight,"which can also infect potatoes. It's a kind of mildew, I think — mildiou in French — and it attacked our tomatoes here in Saint-Aignan in 2007 and 2008. It attacks the grapes in the vineyards whenever conditions are warm and humid.

Stuffed and ready for the oven. Drizzle olive oil over all...

For once, our tomatoes are completely healthy. The weather is extremely dry. Our yard is brown and crispy. We don't water it. We do water the vegetable garden, as much as we have to. On TV, they said we are under water restrictions here in the Centre region, but we have gotten no official notification of that.

After an hour in the oven

This text is designed just to "frame" my pictures of the stuffed tomatoes, which are the best I think I've ever made ... or eaten. Fennel seeds give the stuffing a really nice anisy flavor. Put the stuffing in raw, with a little raw rice in the bottom of each hollowed-out tomato. The rice will cook and soak up some of the tomato and meat liquid.

Ready to serve and eat

Cook the stuffed tomatoes in a low oven (325ºF/160ºC) for an hour or so. Turn up the heat for a few minutes at the end of the cooking if you want the tomatoes to brown a little.

It's the sugar pectin!

I only recently became aware of the fact that you can buy special sugar for making jellies, preserves, and jams — gelées et confitures — at the supermarkets in France. It costs more than plain granulated sugar, but then it contains pectin, which helps thicken the jelly. The other ingredient in the product, besides sugar (98.7%) and fruit pectin, is citric acid.

Too much jelly, but it is so good.

I had thought about trying to buy some pectin, so that my jellies and jams would be less runny, but I hadn't seen any in the supermarkets here in Saint-Aignan. I was also being kind of a purist about it. Me, need pectin? No, there's plenty in the fruit I'm picking. A few years ago, I made quince jelly — gelée de coings — and the first batch didn't jell sufficiently, in my opinion. The next batch I made, I boiled until it reached a temperature of 225ºF (107ºC) and it jelled perfectly. I concluded that cooking it until it reached that high temperature was the key to good jelly-making.

Jelly-making sugar, with pectin and citric acid in it

But when I tried it later with other jellies and jams, the end product was still too liquid. I made a huge batch of apple jelly a couple of summers ago, and it came out great — thick and jiggly. They say apples contain large amounts of pectin, and I boiled not just the apple pulp but the skins and seeds as well. That's where the pectin is. It worked great.

A couple of months ago, I made cherry preserves — confiture de cerises — using the good sour cherries from our neighborhood trees. I followed a recipe that said the way to be successful was to pit the cherries, put them in a big pot and just barely cover them with water, and boil that for 10 or 15 minutes. Then strain off the juice, put the cherries themselves aside, and make jelly with the cherry juice.

Plums from the trees in the back yard

To thicken the cherry jelly, this particular recipe called for adding a good amount of apple jelly — a pint or more, for the pectin — into the mixture. Once you've boiled the cherry and apple mixture for a few minutes, you add the cooked cherries back in and you put the confiture up in sterilized jars. The result was supposed to be a thick jelly with pieces of not-overcooked fruit in it. Mine didn't really jell, though. It stayed too liquid. And that was after I boiled the juice until it reached a pretty high temperature.

Back to square one. In July an old friend from Nomandy visited, with one of her neighbors. We were talking about jellies and jams, for some reason. The friend's neighbor asked me if I had bought special sucre gélifiant at the supermarket for my jelly-making. That such a product existed was news to me. I soon went to SuperU to check out the sugar shelves. There it was — but it was expensive. At something like €2,25/kg, it was more than twice as expensive as regular granulated sugar (€0.89/kg). I passed.

Here are the directions, in French of course.

On the way home, I stopped to buy a few things at the Ed hard-discount store. There I saw Ed's brand of jelly-making sugar, and it was only €1.50/kg. I wasn't even planning to make any more jam or jelly until autumn, when the apples will be ripe. Apple jelly is easy to make. And if I could get some quinces, I'd make quince jelly too. Now the neighbors' tree is covered in quinces, and they've said I can have an many as I want.

The fruit and sugar macerate together for hours
before getting cooked.

I ended up buying 4 kg of Ed's sucre gélifiant, figuring I would use it soon enough. And soon enough came sooner than I thought, when the plums on the trees around our garden shed started ripening. I was determined to ignore them, thinking there weren't that many of them anyway. And I had already made two batches of plum sauce this summer. "No more jelly!", I told myself.

One afternoon — it was when Susan and Simon visited recently — I made the grave mistake of tasting one of the plums off our trees. It was amazingly sweet and succulent. How could I possibly ignore such luscious fruit? Well, by just letting it all fall to the ground and get eaten by ants and wasps — that's how. It turned out I wasn't capable of doing that.

It's only six jars. Well, six more jars, in addition to
all the other ones already in the pantry.

A couple of days ago I went out and picked two kilos of the delicous ripe plums. I carefully pitted them, cutting away any soft spots. Some were excessively ripe, but they were in good shape. They smelled incredible. I kept thinking of the jar of perfectly jelled, sweet plum jam that Caroline's mom brought us when they came over for apéritifs a couple of weeks ago. How did she accomplish that? Is it some Dutch secret?

This time, to make the plum preserves, I followed the directions on the packages of Mi Perla sucre gélifiant. Mix together equal weights of the sugar and of ripe fruit, the package said. Do nothing but wait until the sugar completely dissolves in the liquid rendered by the fruit. (I ended up leaving the sugar on the fruit for nearly 24 hours, stirring it three or four times during that period.) After that, what you do is boil the mixture on high heat for 5 to 7 minutes, stirring constantly. That's all the cooking it needs.

At the end of the 5 to 7 minutes, skim the foam off the top of the jam. Ladle the jelly into sterilized jars and screw on the lids. Turn them upside down and let them cool that way. You'll hear the lids pop when they seal.

The resulting jelly is thick and... well, jelled. Now that it's had a chance to cool overnight, it doesn't move at all in the jars when I turn them upside down. Who knew? It's not magic. It's that pectin sugar. It works.

Now I have to persuade myself not to make any more jam or jelly. We have plenty. We don't even eat that much of the stuff.