November in the garden

Stories on the French news broadcasts have been saying that the major airports around Paris and the national government are ready... for snow! They've got contingency plans. They've got equipment at the ready. There will be no repeat of the chaos last year's November and Decembers snowstorms caused for French drivers and international travelers. Everybody is enjoying the irony of it all.

That's because we are still having spring-like weather in northern France, including the Loire Valley, and here it is November 20. Thanksgiving — which is not a holiday in France, of course — is this Thursday (as you U.S. readers know). This kind of Thanksgiving week reminds me of Novembers on the North Carolina coast or in the San Francisco Bay Area — both are places where I spent many years of my (younger) life.

It's almost strange to see the path out to the back gate
not covered in rotting apples.

We were out working in the garden — I'm using that in the British sense (= yard) — yesterday morning and afternoon like it was September or May. What a strange weather year this has been for us. It was unnaturally warm and dry from March through June. Then it was unnaturally rainy and damp in July and August. Now the weather has been fine (again, British English, meaning not just "okay" but "beautiful") for all of September, October, and November.

This is some kind of sage bush that we brought back from the
mild and temperate Ile d'Oléron 3½ years ago, wondering
whether it would thrive in Saint-Aignan. It has.

What did we do in the garden yesterday? Well, as usual, we picked up 1.13 million apples (I counted) that were lying on the gravel path and under some tall grass that has grown up under the big apple tree. This was a year of abundance for that old tree, which at the same time appears to be in decline because of advanced age. A huge branch fell off back in June, when the weight of all the apples got to be too much for it. Next year we won't get much more than 1.13 dozen apples from it.

Callie likes the mowed grass. It makes it easier for her
to find her tennis ball when we throw it out there.

I packed up all the dahlia tubers that I had dug up last week, putting them in crumpled newspaper in a big cardboard box. They'll spend the winter in the cool, dry garage. Next year we will plant a new bed of dahlias somewhere in the yard — if the tubers don't rot or get completely dessicated.

The spruced-up rosemary bushes

Walt trimmed the lavender plants just outside the back door and we started thinking about whether we might move them to a better spot too. I trimmed the two big rosemary bushes that we planted along the south wall of the house five or six years ago. They are quite happy in that spot, and have grown big and, well, bushy. We pledged to start using more rosemary in our cooking, and I tied up bunches of the rosemary clippings to hang head-down in the utility room for drying. That way we won't have to go out in the cold and rain or snow this winter to cut fresh rosemary for all the good things we might cook with it.

Anticipation is growing as we await delivery of a new sofa
that we ordered in October for our downstairs living room.

If it ever rains, that is. I'm sure it will, one day. There are entire winters during which we don't get any snow at all, but we always get rain. I hope I don't have to take that statement back next April.

About prepositions and balconies

I'm fine with the French word « terrasse » as the name for the deck/porch/balcony on the front of our house. It's the English word "terrace" that sounds pretentious to me. But I've been reading the dictionary. Here's what the American Heritage says about "terrace":

1.a. A porch or walkway bordered by colonnades. b. A platform extending outdoors from a floor of a house or an apartment building. 2. An open, often paved area adjacent to a house serving as an outdoor living space; a patio.

I guess the main difference between a porch and a terrace is that a porch is at street level (or very slightly above it). A terrace is the size of a porch (compared to a balcony, which is smaller) but it's well above ground (apartment buildings have terraces). A terrace is a large, spacious balcony, except that a balcony protrudes beyond the walls of the building, whereas a terrace doesn't stick out so much as it fits in.

You can see how our terrace extends out
beyond the walls of the house.

Our terrace sticks out just a little. I have a feeling it was originally designed to be narrower, but then somebody decided to make it wider during construction of the house so that the terrace would be spacious enough to accommodate outdoor furniture. That's why it extends out just enough beyond the roof line that rain falls on the edge of the terrace. When the slope was wrong, the water formed a puddle in front of the door that separates the outdoor from the indoor space.

The roof doesn't completely protect the terrace from rain.

Okay, enough of that. I'm going to get used to calling it a terrace in English and I'm trying to stop feeling that "terrace" is a snooty-sounding term. By the way, a patio, to me, is always on the ground level.

As for « à la terrasse » vs. « sur la terrasse » in French, it seems to me that when you take an outdoor table at a café in Paris, you are « à la terrasse d'un café ». The waiter or host might tell you there's a table available « en terrasse ». At home, when we are sitting outside, we are « sur la terrasse ». But I'm not Parisian or French, so don't count on me for the definitive answer.

Here's how we cleaned the deck in pre-Kärcher days.

In a comment, I introduced two other constructions — « à Paris » and « sur Paris » — for comparison. I was joking. Even so, I hear such expression with « sur », which means "on", more and more often. I think that « sur Paris » or « sur Chartres », for example, means "in the Paris area" or "in the Chartres area." For Paris, it's always possible to say instead, for example, « je travaille en région parisienne » instead of « sur Paris ». But for Chartres, what are the possibilities? « Je travaille sur Chartres », meaning in and around the town, seems useful to me.

This balcony-like part of the terrace on
the north side of the house is pretty useless.

Be careful though, because purists will tell you that the preposition « sur » used with the name of a city or town is simply an error — une faute de français.

Isn't it fun learning a second language? Most native speakers of French never think much about questions like the ones above.

Mowing in mid-November

Did I mention how nice the weather still is here en région saint-aignanaise ? Walt actually got out the lawn mower and cleaned up the yard a little bit yesterday, after lunch. We are doing our best to take advantage of these unseasonably sunny days.

Maintenance

I hope you didn't think I meant blog maintenance. No, I'm not doing that, even though I sometimes think I ought to close the blog down for a few days and work on my index. I stopped updating the index a couple or three years ago. But I'm afraid the shutdown might have to last weeks for me to finish that project, and, well, I'm just not much of an indexer.

No, my title has to do with house maintenance. It has to be done. The chimney has to be swept annually, for insurance purposes. No Certificat de Ramonage, no coverage. And then the roof has to be looked at. We have a persistent leak right over the kitchen. It seems that that part of the roof needs to be re-configured. We've asked for an estimate from a couvreur — a roofer. We'll see, next spring.

The terrace on the front of our house is a maintenance hog.

Right now, it's the terrace that we've been working on. Terrace. Deck. Balcony. What we have is larger than a balcony, maybe. And it's not a deck because it's concrete and tile, not boards and nails. So I guess it's a terrace, but that word bothers me somehow. The term seems more grand than what we actually have. But I don't have another name for it.

Getting the terrace tiled was one of the first improvements we made when we moved into this 1960s French house in 2003. It had been covered with — of all things — "Astroturf," that green plastic horror from the '60s and '70s. Outdoor carpeting. And it hadn't been maintained, so the Astroturf had absorbed a lot of rainwater and grown a lot of algae and moss. It was gross — not to put too fine a point on it.

For some reason, the terrace was built to wrap around the north
side of the house, where it's too narrow to be of much use.

The new tile was a fine improvement, but we had to have a large section of the tiling ripped up and re-done in 2008, because the slope was wrong and a big puddle of water would collect right in front of the French doors whenever it rained hard. You stepped out the door onto the tiled surface from the living room and you were wading in water half an inch deep. That was a bad thing if you happened to be wearing bedroom slippers. We found a tile contractor who managed to fix the slope of the deck and lay new tile. Houses settle — elles « travaillent » — over the years, and they develop unwanted slopes and low spots and cracks.

The way the terrace is designed is strange. There's no provision for drainage if water gets on the surface. It just has to run off the edges. And since the house faces east, the edges don't get any afternoon sun. Shade + moisture in this part of the world means one thing: moss. So moss grows profusely along the edge of the balcony, especially in winter.

I didn't take any "before" pictures, but
you might remember this one.

Add to that the fact that water gets on the terrace tiles with regularity because — guess what — the roof overhang doesn't completely cover the tiled surface. The terrace sticks out farther than the roof does. When any rain falls, it falls on the edge of the terrace and then runs down any slope it finds to run down. I don't know who had the bright idea to build it so that it wasn't all covered by the roof. Maybe they decided to enlarge the terrace after the original plans were done.

Yesterday we blasted it off with a Kärcher* that friends Jean and Nick loaned us to use while we were figuring out which model of this famous brand of power-washers we want to acquire. It was sort of fun, really, on a mild, almost warm sunny morning. We are now certain that we want to invest in a Kärcher for future projects. A couple of days ago, Walt cleaned the terrace tiles with it and it works great.

Does this edge really need to be painted? Eventually,
all traces of white paint on it will have chipped and washed away.

As a bonus, we have another decision to make. Should be paint the edge of the terrace or leave it "natural"? We had it painted in 2003, when we first had the deck tiled. Since then, we haven't repainted it. It seems like a lot of trouble, and it really ought to be repainted every spring. That's what some of our neighbors do. It looks pretty, but still, is it really worth the trouble and expense?

So there you go. This post is about what a 1960s French house looks like. What features it has. And flaws. What maintenance tasks it imposes on its owners.

* Kärcher, a German-brand high-pressure washer, became especially famous when in 2005 French president Nicolas Sarkozy said of the housing projects in the Paris suburbs that somebody needed to take a Kärcher in there and clean out the "scum" that live in the projects. It was not one of Sarkozy's more felicitous phrases.

Sauerkraut, an autumn event

I'm posting here a lot of photos and a brief description of the process of preparing and cooking raw sauerkraut. Sauerkraut is a German word, of course. Some say that sauerkraut is not German, originally, but Alsatian — Alsace being the old province that sits at the eastern edge of France, up against Germany.

The Alsatians have their own language (or dialect), which is Germanic, and they of course speak French as well. Alsace was under German control from 1870 until 1918, but France took it over again at the end of the World War I. In the Alsatian language, sauerkraut is called sürkrüt, and that's where the French word comes from. Choucroute is a French transliteration of sürkrüt, according to what I've read. So choucroute literally means "cabbage cabbage." Never mind.

1.4 kilos/3 lbs. of raw sauerkraut from Chez Doudouille
at the market in Saint-Aignan

Contrary to what you might think if you've eaten sauerkraut in the U.S., choucroute is not vinegary. It is shredded cabbage that has been salt-cured in a brine including juniper berries. It's not vinegary, but it can be salty. To make it palatable, it needs to be rinsed thoroughly in fresh water, and then it needs to be blanched in fresh, unsalted water too. Finally, in Alsace and all over France, choucroute is cooked in white wine. The best wine to use is a dry but fruity wine, like a good Chardonnay or, especially, an Alsatian white wine like a Riesling or a Sylvaner.

Aromatic vegetables and smoked pork lardons (bacon)
enhance the flavor of raw choucroute

According to the Larousse Gastronomique, the process of curing cabbage in salt to make sauerkraut removes some of the vegetable's natural nutrients, but it also makes the cabbage much easier to digest. The fermentation that takes place neutralizes the chemicals in fresh cabbage that cause intestinal distress, and it encourages the formation of soothing lactic acid in the intestine.

Here's the sauerkraut after about an hour
of cooking on top of the stove

It also seems to me to take away that cabbage taste and smell that so many people find unpleasant. Properly rinsed, blanched, and then cooked with carrots, onions, bacon (lardons in French), juniper and allspice berries (or cloves), and white wine, choucroute is mild and flavorful at the same time.

In the U.S., we eat sauerkraut as a condiment with frankfurter sausages, while in France the frankfurter is sort a condiment — a flavor added — to be eaten with choucroute. In fact, there are two similar sausages that can go with choucroute — German saucisses de Francfort or Alsatian saucisses de Strasbourg. Another usual accompaniment is smoked sausage, in the form of either saucisses de Montbéliard or saucisses de Morteau. Both are made in the mountains on the southern edge of Alsace.

Choucroute garnie with smoked chicken

In his book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, Harold McGee calls sauerkraut "a refreshing side dish for rich meats" and describes its aroma as "remarkable, almost flowery."

A lot of foie gras is made in Alsace, so other meats people there might serve with sauerkraut are confit d'oie or confit de canard. I've discovered that it's also very good with smoked chicken, which is always available in the supermarkets here in the form of whole chicken smoked with beechwood. Having chicken instead of cuts of cured or smoked pork with choucroute at least gives you the impression that you've lightened up the dish.

Beechwood-smoked chicken from the supermarket
in France

If you can't get raw sauerkraut where you live, I'd recommend rinsing and re-cooking any pre-cooked sauerkraut that you buy. Instead of cooking it for three or four hours the way I do, you could reduce the cooking time to less than an hour. Don't omit the white wine. I think that would improve the pre-cooked product, and you'll be sure it won't be too salty, vinegary, or "cabbage-y."

Potatoes for boiling or steaming — they're a must
with Alsatian choucroute garnie

That said, one day a few years ago a French friend of mine served sauerkraut for about eight people, including me, my mother, and others. It was delicious — the choucroute itself was sweet and tender, and the accompanying meats were beautiful and delicious. I asked my friend how long she had to cook the sauerkraut to make it so good. She looked surprised and told me she just opened the tins, heated it up for 15 minutes, and served it. I don't know if she added any white wine. So it all depends on the quality of the pre-cooked sauerkraut you can get.

Add some thick-sliced poitrine fumée (smoked bacon)...

The other way to go is to make your own sauerkraut from scratch. I've never done it (no need to here in France) but I know people who have, and they've told me it's not difficult. It just takes time. You have to shred several pounds of fresh cabbage and then salt it down and let it ferment and cure for three or four weeks in a big plastic or ceramic container. Here's a link to an example and to a post about the result.

...and then cook this, covered, in a slow oven for 90 minutes.

I'm not posting a recipe here because I've posted about cooking raw sauerkraut before. It was two posts, Part 1 and Part 2. I've also posted before about serving smoked chicken as part of a choucroute garnie, here. I also once bought some pre-cooked French choucroute in a jar at the supermarket and compared it to my home-made version. Here's a link to that post.