Balayage

Une nouvelle zone de pluie va balayer la France d'ouest en est... Those are words I hate to hear right now. Another rain front is moving off the Atlantic and sweeping across France today. Oh well, better get used to it. It's only October.

I did enjoy my trip to the "sunnier climes" of Montrichard yesterday morning. LOL. It rained the whole time I was out. I had to go to the bank, and I had to stand in line for 10 minutes or so. I enjoyed observing the people I saw and listening to the conversations around me. It was mostly an older crowd, and I fit right in.

Seen in Paris in sunny July

I went to shop in two different supermarkets, a Netto store (Intermarché's discount outlet) and the SuperU in the Montrichard "suburb" of Chissay-en-Touraine. There weren't many people in the Netto store, but the SuperU was a beehive of activity. People were shopping but also socializing, blocking the aisles with their carts.

I overheard two old men telling each other how old they were (86 both of them). I noticed a younger woman helping her elderly mother (probably) get items down off high shelves. They were accompanied by a man who must have been the husband of the older lady and both of them had to be well into their 80s too.

Spaghetti squash au gratin for lunch

At the checkout line, the man ahead of me was also in his 80s, I'm sure. He and the cashier, a woman my age I'd guess, had a long conversation and I just listened in. Apparently they had a heavy downpour of rain over in Montrichard and Chissay day before yesterday. "It was incredible how hard the rain came down," the cashier said at one point. The showers were localized, and we didn't get that kind of rain in Saint-Aignan at all on Monday.

Back at home, I put together a gratin de courge spaghetti for lunch, along with a salad of mâche with diced beets. Here's a recipe for the simple gratin. I noticed that little spaghetti squashes were selling for 3.89 euros apiece at SuperU. To me, that's expensive, so I appreciate even more the ten that we harvested over the weekend.

Gratin de courge spaghetti

2 to 3 cups of cooked squash pulp

1 egg (or 2)

½ cup or more of crème fraîche

nutmeg, black pepper, and salt

1 cup grated cheese (swiss or cheddar)

butter or olive oil

paprika

Mix together squash, egg, cream, nutmeg, salt, and pepper. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and top with the grated cheese. Sprinkle on some paprika. Dot with butter, or drizzle with olive oil. Bake in a 190ºC / 375ºF oven for 30 minutes or until the cheese melts and turns golden brown.

Dreary days

Walt coughs and then I cough. He coughs again and I cough again. Outside, it's dark. It's mid-October, and the sun already comes up late and goes down early. Even when the sun is up, it's dreary out. We have four months of this kind of weather and these reduced hours of daylight ahead of us. I'm not ready.

The weather forecast for France this afternoon: at least it's not cold out, but it will be rainy and windy.

It's raining right now. The fire wood is not getting cut. The garden is not getting cleaned up. I'd show you photos, but I can't — it's too dark for taking pictures, and I'm not enthusiastic about going outside. But I do have to go out today. I have an errand to run in Montrichard. Maybe that kind of excursion will boost my morale.

Meanwhile, I'll post a photo I took in Paris on hot and sunny July 5th, over at the recently refurbished Place de la République.

La courge spaghetti

Along with a bumper crop of tomatoes in 2013, the other great garden success story this year has to do with squashes, called courges in French. We have about two dozen of them, of three or four varieties: butternut, acorn, one mystery type (they're enormous and dark green), and spaghetti. These are what we call winter squash, and they're good cooked as a vegetable side dish with meats, in soups, or sweetened and baked into cakes or pies.

We cooked a spaghetti squash for lunch yesterday. Big, pale yellow, smooth-skinned, and ovoid, the thing weighed in at 4 lbs. (2.8 kg). We decided to cut it in half and scoop out the seeds before we roasted it in the oven. That was easier said than done, but with a big knife and the two of us working on it, one holding and one stabbing and cutting, we managed it. We'll probably save the seeds and plant them next year, or at least some of them. I've read that they are also good roasted and toasted like pumpkin seeds.

We roasted the squash cut-side-down on parchment paper in a 190ºC / 375ºF oven for about an hour. Maybe that was a little bit too long, because the flesh of the squash was not as spaghetti-like as I thought it would be. However, it had a pleasing texture and was delicious seasoned with olive oil in which I had lightly cooked some fennel seeds, hot red pepper flakes, and a clove of garlic. We ate half the squash, and saved half to have later this week.

Paris walls and illusions

It's really cold this morning — 3ºC (the 30s F). These colds we've got are ticking along. Walt just told me that the weather is supposed to warm up again this coming week, but it's also supposed to rain for three days.

I'm still enjoying looking back at photos I took in July in Paris, and dreaming about the nice hot weather we had then. The sun was magnificent, and skies were blue. We really needed that two-month break in the weather.

What's behind these shuttered windows at the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan?

I'm posting two photos of walls in Paris. The first is one wall or "wing" of the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan in the Marais. The building is named after our town of Saint-Aignan because not many years after it was built in the 1600s, it was bought by the Duc de Beauvilliers. His main residence was the Château de Saint-Aignan, just down the road from our house, and he had this pied-à-terre in Paris.

An architectural "veneer" stuck onto an old wall.

When you look into the courtyard, you have the impression that you are seeing a building with three sections — a main section at the back, plus left and right wings. In fact, the building has only one wing off the main section. On the left, windows and shutters were built up against an old wall that had enclosed the city of Paris in an earlier era. There's nothing but an old wall behind the windows. It's an illusion. You can tell when you notice the more modern buildings sticking up into the air above the courtyard.

Finally, here's a photo of a massive wall near the Place de la République. I think if the wall were blank it would be oppressive. Somebody else must have thought so too, because it has been painted. I wonder what it's like to live in one of the apartments in the building on the right. How much of the paining can people on those balconies really see?