Walt came home from the market in Selles-sur-Cher yesterday morning with a kilogram of fresh — never frozen — raw shrimp. This is a first for us in France, where shrimp are almost always sold cooked. You can sometimes buy raw ones frozen at the supermarket, but they cost a fortune.
The only real solution is to buy frozen raw shrimp in the Asian grocery stores in Blois, or Tours, but that requires a two-hour drive from Saint-Aignan and back. I like to clean the raw shrimp (called crevettes or gambas in France) myself by removing the shrimps' head, shell, and the digestive tract. That's what we did in North Carolina when I was growing up. I don't throw the heads or shells away, but I boil them in water to make a shrimp broth to use in soups and sauces.
Yesterday for lunch I made a stir-fry (called «
un wok » in French) using shrimp, onions, garlic, ginger root, broccoli, mushrooms, bell peppers, and Asian sauces including soy, yakitori, oyster, and Thai fish sauce. We enjoyed it with steamed rice and some potstickers. Another idea for cooking with shrimp and shrimp broth is
risotto.
...when Tasha and I were going out for a walk. Above, the back yard itself, freshly mowed again.
Above left, a few mole hills and one mole mountain. Above right, the fig tree we planted 12 or 15 years ago. Maybe we'll get a good crop of figs this year.
Above left, what our compost pile looks like right now. It's been taken over by weeks, including a thorny blackberry bramble. Above right, a spider, I assume, has built a nest in tall grass. Or is it a trap for the spider's prey?
Above are two photos of our neighbors' huge yard. They live in Blois (25 miles north) and only come down here a few times a year — less than once a month. Usually, they don't stay for more than a week each time, and often less. We have the keys to their house and we are free to walk our dog around their property when they're not here. They trust us to keep an eye on their place for them.
The neighbors have six acres of land, if I'm not mistaken. Most of it is woods. Less than a third of it has to be mowed. Our yard, in comparison, is fairly small at only about half an acre. Living here is like living next door to a big private park. The woman who owns the house is nearly 90 years old and she has five children. It will be interesting to see what they do with the house after she passes away. And what they do with the house their mother lives in up in Blois.
Walt has headed over to the big market at Selles-sur-Cher (10 miles east of us) to get some seedlings to plant in our window boxes and, we hope, some fresh shrimp. That's a rare commodity around here. If he can get them, I'll trim and clean them for the freezer (minus the ones we might eat for lunch today.)
