Salade Lyonnaise

One positive thing about the rainy weather we've been having since the beginning of April is that the lettuces Walt planted in the garden have been and still are fantastic. They're full, leafy, and green. They've grown so vigorously that not even all the moisture-loving slugs and snails out there can keep them down.

Salade Lyonnaise the way we had it for lunch last week

The two varieties of lettuce Walt grew this spring are Laitue Romaine Blonde Maraîchère** and Chicorée Frisée Grosse (which is sometimes called "curly endive" in the U.S.). One head of either has been giving us two or three big tossed salads. With the Romaine, we've been making Caesar Salads with grilled chicken breasts, and today we're going to enjoy a Caesar Salad with hot-smoked salmon fillets that we made over the weekend with the help of our friend John, who has a smoker.

One Chicorée Frisée « Grosse » from the garden
filled up one side of our kitchen sink.

With the Chicorée Frisée, there are a lot of ways to make tasty salads. Frisée needs to be dressed with a mustardy, vinegary dressing flavored with garlic, onion, or shallot. Roasted red beets are a good accompaniment because their sweetness tones down the bitterness of the salad greens. Toasted walnuts or pecans do the same, and that kind of nutty salad is good with some chunks of Roquefort or blue cheese added in with the greens.

It's a good idea to dress and toss a Frisée salad in vinaigrette
15 or 20 minutes before you plan to serve it.
That wilts and tenderizes the greens.

Salade Lyonnaise is another standard French recipe that features Chicorée Frisée. You might see it called Frisée aux Lardons in cafés or restaurants in Paris or elsewhere in France. At least one recipe I found on the web (at Marmiton) calls for making the Lyon-style salad with dandelion greens, but these days it's more common to see it made with Frisée. Either way, it's a kind of bacon, eggs, and toast salad.

The Frisée washed and spun dry

The Lyon-style salad includes a couple of ingredients that also bring out the best flavors of bitter Frisée greens — smoked pork lardons (chunks of cooked bacon or ham) and freshly made croutons (cubes of toasted or fried bread, with garlic if you want). The dressing is the same kind of garlicky or oniony vinaigrette, heavy on the Dijon mustard. Finally, and literally to top it off, a lunch-size portion of Salade Lyonnaise will feature a couple of poached (or fried, or soft-boiled) eggs.

After the salad has "cooked" in vinaigrette, add the
pre-cooked bacon or ham and toss again. Do the
same with croutons if you use them.

That was our lunch a few days ago, though we didn't make croutons because we had a freshly baked and delivered baguette to eat with the salad, which was our main course. Instead, I boiled a couple of new potatoes and served them, sliced, on the side. The salad with eggs, lardons, and potatoes, plus some cheese afterward — and dessert — made a satisfying meal.

Here's a link to a good step-by-step recipe for Salade Lyonnaise, in French.

** The French word maraîcher (fem. maraîchère), describing a garden, translates into British English as "market garden(er)" but into American English as "truck farm(er)". I looked up "truck farmer" and was surprised to see that the "truck" in the expression comes not from the U.S. name of the vehicle that the farmer uses to take his produce to market, but from the French word « troc », meaning "barter" or "trade". The farmer barters or trades with his produce at the market.

Red food: lasagne

Lasagne or lasagna? In other words, singular or plural? In Italian, lasagne is the plural of lasagna. You use more than one lasagna noodle when you make lasagne. Language, eh? In French, you often see the Italian plurals re-pluralized, with recipes for lasagnes, for example, or a plate of spaghettis with tomato sauce and meatballs.

Anyway, I've been favoring the Italian lasagne, plural, in English, but when I search on the terms in Google, also in English, I get 5 million results for lasagna and only 3.5 million for lasagne. In other words, it's almost a toss-up. Let's move on.

Lasagne made with Petit Trôo and Pecorino Romano cheeses

When CHM was here week before last, he bought a little cheese called Le Petit Trôo at the supermarket just a day or two before he went back to Paris. Since we enjoyed a string of restaurant meals over those days, we never even cut into the Petit Trôo cheese, and CHM left it for us.

The cheese called Le Petit Trôo

Trôo is a village on the Loir River. I do mean the Loir River, not the Loire. La Loire (f.) is our region's biggest river, and Le Loir (m.) runs parallel to it a few miles north for several dozens of miles, flowing toward the west. The biggest town on the Loir is Vendôme, and another biggish town is Montoire-sur-le-Loir, about 30 miles / 50 km north of Amboise and 50 miles / 80 km northwest of Saint-Aignan.

I think when the label doesn't specify otherwise, it's wise to assume
a cheese is made with cow's milk rather than goat's or ewe's milk,
despite all appearances to the contrary.

And Trôo? It's a small village (pop. 350 or so) just west, downriver, from Montoire. It's a village troglodytique — that means that it is made up partly of very old cave dwellings dug into the side of a promontory along the north bank of the Loir River. And by the way, the name is pronounced [TROH], not [TROO], which would be the French word trou, or "hole" — the word trou is used to describe a remote, nondescript or even ugly town or village, the way we would say a place is "a dump", derisively. You might see the name written as Troo, Trôo, or even Troô, and it is not a dump. Here's a 2008 post I did about it, with a few pictures.

All that said, the cheese called Le Petit Trôo isn't even made in Trôo itself, but in a dairy in the bigger town of Montoire, which I mentioned earlier. And it fooled me when we bought it. Because this whole area is known for its goat cheeses, and because the Petit Trôo is a little round ball of a cheese, a thick disk really, and it is sold either "naked" or coated in black ash the way many local goat cheeses are sold — Selles-sur-Cher cheeses, for example, and also Valençay, both local.

Making a pan of lasagne using noodles that don't require
pre-cooking and Petit Trôo cheese

I decided to make lasagne last week, and I made a big batch of meat sauce using ground turkey breast and finely chopped mushrooms, with tomato sauce, onions, garlic, and herbs. I made a lot of sauce, so I had enough for two pans of lasagne. In the bigger one, I used ricotta and mozzarella, which I got at the supermarket, and I put some grated Italian cheese (not really Parmesan, but the same idea — grated hard cheese made from cow's milk) on top.

For the second pan of lasagne, I decided to use the Petit Trôo, thinking lasagne made with goat cheese would be good and interesting. I also had some Pecorino Romano cheese, which is made with ewe's milk in Italy, that I could grate over the top of the pan of lasagne instead of Parmesan — making the lasagne that much more unusual and exotic, I figured.

The tomato sauce is made with ground turkey breast
and finely chopped mushrooms

So I made the lasagne and then when I started to blog about it last week, I looked up Le Petit Trôo in French Wikipedia. Imagine my surprise when I read that Le Petit Trôo is a cow's milk cheese. I think it's disguised as a goat cheese. What it really is, however, is a little round of cream cheese, but slightly grainy and not so smooth as Philadelphia-style cream cheese (did you know that the Philadelphia in that appellation is a village in Upstate New York and not the city in Pennsylvania?).

Lasagne

The salty black wood ash that the little cheeses are coated with gives it flavor. Petit Trôo cheeses are also sold plain or coated with garlic and herbs or black pepper, according to what I see on the Laiterie de Montoire's web site. The Petit Trôo is made with pasteurized cow's milk and the dairy or laiterie was a co-op that was originally located in Trôo itself but moved into a newer facility in Montoire in the mid-1970s.

So what do I think of the lasagne? I don't know, because I haven't tasted it yet. The other pan was pretty good. The Petit Trôo-Romano cheese lasagne went into the freezer. We'll get around to thawing and eating it one day soon.

Shades of red

In the past, many French towns and villages had their own brick-makers, or briquetiers. I guess the advantage of having a local briqueterie was that heavy loads of briques didn't have to be transported over long distances to building sites.

A "red" brick made in Saint-Aignan years ago

This Saint-Aignan brick is one of several that we found in our yard, garage, and garden shed when we moved here nine years ago. It doesn't look very red, but it is surely what we'd call a "red brick" if we saw a house built of such material. I can't find any reference to the G. Maupou company on the Internet.

Houses at La Renaudière outside Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher

Red tile rooftops like the ones above —these are our neighbors' houses — are very common in the Loire Valley. The roof tiles are made of the same material — clay — as bricks. They last indefinitely (if not forever). When the roof needs to be rebuilt, the tiles are carefully taken down and stacked for re-use. The wooden slats underneath are replaced, the terra cotta (terre cuite, or "cooked earth") tiles are carefully brushed and scrubbed, and then they're put back up on the roof.

Callie out on the edge of the vineyard

Did you know that Callie is a "red" dog? I know that when we decided we wanted a border collie five years ago, I imagined that we would get a black and white dog. In fact, border collies — the breed has existed for only about 125 years — can have coats with black, brown ("red"), yellow, white, or mottled colors.

A red dog in a green yard

Some are tri-colored. It seems funny in French to call a dog's coat color rouge or "red" because there's a different word for that in French — roux or rousse. "Red hair" in American English is not called rouge in French, but roux. In fact, roux is "rust red" or "brick red" — in England, they use the term "ginger" for the same kind of color. According to the dictionary, a "ginger tom" is a chat roux — I'm not sure what we say in American English. "Tabby"? "Orange"? Maybe either or both.

Callie sleeping on a dog bed that my mother made
years ago for our previous dog, Collette

Anyway, I've seen dogs like Callie called « rouge/chocolat » on different breeders' web pages. Chocolat makes more sense — we say "chocolate lab" for a brown-colored Labrador dog. Callie's brown fur really is chocolate-colored. But she's a red border collie, according to sites like the ones on this Google search results page. And here's a page in French for border collie rouge.

Violets are blue...

...but roses are red. Did I mention that this is a theme?


For a few years now, we've been meaning to dig these red roses up and plant them elsewhere. Somewhere sunnier. But somehow it never happens.


If they were edible, we'd probably be more motivated. Wait, maybe they are. I've been to Provins. Have you? I'm thinking confiture de pétales de roses.


Tomorrow I'm going to stretch the red theme a little. It's comforting to see these bright colors when the skies around Saint-Aignan are so gray.