Ten wintertime pictures

(You can click on the pictures to see larger versions.)

In December 2005, we had very cold weather. It snowed a couple of times at the very end of the month. This picture, taken from the kitchen window, shows our neighbors' house and yard.

From the front deck, this is another shot of the neighbors' property. They have two lots totaling about 2½ acres. This is their country house, and they spend summers here. Their main residence in in Blois, 25 miles north of us. They bought the country house in 1970 and it was basically a ruin at that point. It's not very big but has a big kitchen, a recently remodeled master bedroom suite, and a dormitory with about a dozen single beds upstairs where the grandchildren sleep.

This is the view out of our bathroom window. It's our back yard and the other neighbors' houses. This is about as much snow as we have gotten here in three years. It's really just a dusting, as you can see -- a late friend who lived in Buffalo said it looked as if somebody had sprinkled talcum powder over the whole yard.

Since January 1, we have had temperatures above freezing and no snow. We had some rain, but not enough -- we are in a drought. Our total rainfall in 2005 was about 17.5 inches, compared to the annual average of 26 inches or more. Above is a view from the bedroom window, taken with a telephoto lens. You can see the vineyards and a man working on pruning the vines and burning the clippings in a custom-made apparatus -- a kind of split-open oil drum on wheels -- used for that purpose. In North Carolina, people use such split-open barrels as barbecue grills, on which they roast whole pigs. People stand around the grill and pinch off piece of meat to eat with their fingers -- hence the name for the event, "pig-pickings." Here they use the same kinds of things for burning grape-vine clippings.

Above is a recent sunrise. There was heavy fog, and the sun came up as a glowing disk on the horizon, visible through the bare tree limbs. It looks more like the moon rising, doesn't it?

Sunrise and sunset are special times of day here. It's always a treat to open the shutters on the kitchen window, which faces east, at about 8:00 a.m. on a winter morning and see what the day looks like. One of the things I love about living here is that clanging and clattering noise of opening shutters in the morning. Why don't we have shutters on our windows in America?

And this was a sunset last week. The sunsets are the best. This is the view from the bedroom window, boosted by a telephoto lens. The colors are authentic.

Here's another sunrise. I was out walking the dog in the vineyards behind our house. We are lucky to be the last house on the road, which turns into a gravel tractor path just at the end of our yard. It's like having a back yard that covers 15 or 20 acres.

That same morning, there was a heavy frost and the air was clear and still. The sun was just coming up over the horizon. The oak trees along the paved road don't lose their leaves in the fall the way other trees do. The rust-colored leaves just hang there all winter. I guess the new growth of leaves pushes the old ones off in the spring. This particular December morning, the sunlight was striking them just right, so that the contrast between the leaves and the frosty grass was spectacular.

This is another sunset shot. The sun is going down off the left side of the picture. The sky is clear, with just a layer of clouds off to the north, over the vineyards. That way is Brittany and Normandy, 100 miles distant.

These are the woods closest to our house. The little deer called roe deer (chevreuils in French) live in these wooded areas. They are about the size of a big dog, and we see them all the time around here.

Oops. Picture number eleven. So much for the accuracy of titles (see above, the title). Saturday 1/14 was an especially nice day. Collette and I went out for a walk in the vineyard and we ran into the guy who prunes the vines and who has a dog named Max. Max and Collette have recently started to be friendly, after months or even a year or two of avoiding each other. And on Saturday I noticed for the first time that Max is a female -- her name must be Maxine. I had always thought that Max was Maxime and a male. The two dogs get along fine. Collette just turned 14, and Max is a lot younger.

House for sale in Mesland

Our friends who live in Mesland have decided to put their house on the market. Well, it's two houses, actually. They operate one of them as a vacation rental (a gîte rural).

Mesland, with its church and community vegetable gardens, a five-minute walk

Mesland is a wine village on the north side of the Loire, just across the river from the famous château de Chaumont-sur-Loire. Mesland and its Touraine-Mesland red and white wines are well known in France. The village is located (map) just three miles west of the bigger town of Onzain, which has a supermarket and a range of shops and businesses, and only 10 miles or so from the city of Blois (pop. 75,000). It's about a 20-minute drive up the river from Amboise, and not more than an hour by car from either Tours or Orléans. The area is about two hours southwest of Paris by train or autoroute.

The main house is an old stone maison de vigneron, completely updated

This is the house my friends operate as a gîte rural (Gîtes de France)

My friends are selling for work reasons. He runs a real estate office in a town a good distance from Mesland, and to get to work he drives about an hour each way on little winding roads. He works long hours at least six days a week, with the long commute in addition. He has found a property that is much closer to his office, and that also has two houses on it, one of which his wife plans to operate as a vacation rental. She runs the gîte and also a catering business, while he operates the real estate business.

Main house on the left, rental house on the right

Here's the message my friend sent me announcing the sale: Nous vendons effectivement notre maison. Cela comprend une maison principale (cuisine ouverte sur salle à manger), 3 chambres de plain pied, salle d'eau, salle de bains, mezzanine, grand salon. En plus, une maison exploitée en gîte (Gîtes de France) comprenant cuisine/salle à manger, 2 chambres et salon à l'étage. Nombreuses dépendances (grange, garage, écurie, box) sur 1 ha de terrain (dont 8500 m² de prairie).

Translation: Yes, we are going to sell our house. That includes a main house with a living room/kitchen "great room," three bedrooms, bathroom and WC on the ground floor; a mezzanine; and a large family room upstairs. In addition, there's another house on the property that we operate as a gîte (through the Gîtes de France organization) and that has a large kitchen/dining room on the ground floor with, upstairs, two bedrooms, a sitting room, and bathroom. There are numerous outbuildings (barn, garage, stables) on 2½ acres (1 hectare) of land, much of which is meadowland.

The living/dining room in the main house

Details in the upstairs family room in the main house

I can add that the main house is an old stone house (a maison de vigneron, or winemaker's house) that my friends have spent the last few years updating. Everything is new inside, including the kitchen and bathrooms. You can easily walk into the village, where there is a post office and a café-tabac. There's a nice front yard. The rental house is right next door but is completely private. Friends of our stayed there for a week in 2003. Nearby is a well-known hotel-restaurant called Le Domaine des Hauts-de-Loire.

The large kitchen/dining room in the rental house

The upstairs sitting room in the rental house

Note that I have no financial interest in this property. I post all this just as information and because I think it's interesting to read about and see the houses. I can put any interested parties in touch with the owner. The asking price is €350,000. That's about $425,000 US at current rates. Here's the real estate site.

Je m'occupe de mes oignons

That's a French expression -- "occupe-toi de tes oignons" means "mind your own business," and "ce n'est pas mes oignons" means "that's none of my business."

I made the potato-and-
onion gratin dish but it didn't work out exactly as planned. The liquid didn't all evaporate as I thought it would, even after 90 minutes in the oven. (The picture here was taken before I put on the top layer of potatoes.)

I had some lardons so I cooked them in a frying pan and put them in with the onions on top of the bottom layer of potatoes. I also put in some thyme along with the bay leaves, plus plenty of black pepper, and I used chicken broth. I had not quite two pounds of potatoes (800 grams) and I used about 5 little onions.

When I thought it was done, there was still a lot of broth in the dish. I sucked it out with a turkey baster and added the broth to the leftover onion soup from the day before. Nothing was wasted, and the potato-onion dish was excellent.

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Yesterday afternoon I took at drive out into the country south of town. The sun had come out and I felt like taking some pictures of something besides food.

Just a couple of miles from our house, on the southwest edge of Saint-Aignan, there's a farm compound that I think is very picturesque. I wonder if the vineyards you can see in the picture belong to this family.

On the road that leads up to the farm, there is a little collection of newer houses. Somebody has built an unusal place, for here -- a house constructed entirely of wood. Here's the little "neighborhood."

Farther out in the country, maybe eight miles south, there's a château called Lestang. I don't know anything about it, except that all the roads leading into the property are posted with Propriété Privée signs. From the main road you get this view.

I haven't found out much about it by googling. Maybe I'll have to go to the town hall in the nearby village and see what information they have. Here's a closeup.

A few miles further south, I came upon the ruins of an old farm. The buildings are all covered in ivy and other climbing plants, and the tile roofs are starting to fall in.

There are 4 or 5 structures on the site. The main house appears to be in the best shape, but even its doors and windows are standing open, and it is obviously abandoned. This must be the old barn.

Just down the road from the ruins, the fields were full of crows (or ravens) feeding. When I approached, they all flew off, and some of them landed in this tree. The image seemed to fit the mood set by the tumble-down farmstead.

Across the way, I could see a more prosperous-looking farm in the distance. The landscape is gently rolling hills, with fields and small wooded areas.


And then I saw this house off in the distance. A lot of these pictures were taken using a telephoto lens.

Soupe à l'oignon gratinée

Last week we went out to do some errands in Saint-Aignan. We stopped chez Ed to pick up a few grocery items. In the produce section, Ed had five-kilogram bags of onions for 0.85 € — 85 cents. That was too good to pass up — twelve pounds of onions for about a dollar U.S. So we've had to think up creative ways to cook onions, or to cook with onions. Last Friday, we made onion and potato pizzas, with lardons and gruyère cheese. Those were a success. We also figured we could cook the onions and freeze them for later use. This is the kind of stuff you find really exciting when you don't work for a living.


Today we made soupe à l'oignon. That was a success too. Since Collette's illness back in November, we've been feeding her cuisses de dinde — turkey legs — that we buy chez Ed or elsewhere and that I usually poach in water and then cut up into small chunks for the dog's breakfast. The side benefit of that poaching process is broth — good turkey broth that we can make into soups, cook rice in, or use to make sauces. Yesterday I cooked another cuisse de dinde for Collette, so there was a liter of fresh broth in the refrigerator.


Onion soup is pretty easy. You thinly slice a pound and a half of onions (that's 750 grams). You sauté them quickly in some butter and oil, and then you turn down the heat, add a good pinch of salt and a teaspoon of sugar, and let them stew in their own juices for 45 minutes or even an hour at a very low temperature, until the onions are caramelized, golden, and soft. At that point you stir a tablespoon of flour into the onions and let that cook for a couple of minutes.


Then you pour in 2 liters (that's 2 quarts) of water or, in my case, turkey broth, and you let the soup cook for 30 minutes or so. You can use vegetable broth, chicken broth, or beef broth if you want. Put in a bay leaf, some black pepper, and a pinch of dried thyme to flavor it well, and add a good glug (say half a cup) of dry white wine. Once it reaches the boiling point, turn down the heat and let it just simmer. When it's cooked, taste it and see if it needs more salt.

Voilà. Soupe à l'oignon. You can strain out the onions and eat it that way if you want. Or eat it with the onions floating in the soup.

What makes it really good, though, is the gratinée part. To do that, pour the soup into individual oven-proof bowls or into one big oven-proof dish. Take thick slices of dry (not to say stale) French bread and float them on the surface of the soup. Put a good layer of grated Swiss cheese (a.k.a. gruyère or comté or emmenthal) — or other cheese if you like — on top of the bread slices, which should pretty much cover the surface of the soup. Put the bowls of soup into a hot oven for 15 minutes or more, until the soup is bubbling and the cheese is melted and starting to browned. Don't burn it!




Take it out of the oven and let it cool for a few minutes before you try to eat it. You'll burn the roof of your mouth if you aren't careful. C'est délicieux. Especially on a cold winter day.

So let's see. Onion pizza used up a pound of onions. Today's soupe à l'oignon used close to two pounds. We have nine pounds to go. Any other ideas? Onion omelets, somebody said. Pissaladière (that's an onion tarte with black olives that they make in Provence and in Nice). Deep-fried onion rings? Sauce soubise? Help me out here.

The fish counter chez Leclerc

Here's the picture of the fish counter at the Leclerc supercenter store in La Ville aux Dames, outside Tours. Actually, I didn't take it. I was there with my friend Cheryl, and she had her camera. I remember the people behind the counter laughing with us about taking such a picture. They thought we were funny. It was in June 2001.

The reason we wanted to take the picture was because there was an amazing wall of water -- water cascading down a glass panel -- between the display of fresh fish and the room where the employees worked to prepare fish for the display.

Today's sunset

I guess I should talk about something other than food. "Meaty blog" and all that. Did I mention that I moved to France for the food, in large part?

Here's a nice panoramic shot of a farmhouse in the country near a village a few miles south of ours. This is what is called a longère here in Touraine -- a longhouse. When it was built in the 19th century, the people who lived in it occupied only a couple of rooms (living room/kitchen and bedroom). The rest of the building was used for storage and as stables for livestock.

Click on the picture to see a larger view

And here's a typical landscape taken in the area south of Saint-Aignan, which is farm country as opposed to wine country.

11:00 a.m., January 3, 2006

Did I mention that I love it here because I think the countryside is so beautiful? Not to mention the sky...

What about this view? I took it out behind our house this afternoon.

Sunset, 5:15 p.m., January 4, 2006

The sunsets here near Saint-Aignan are often really spectacular. Here's a wider-angle view of today's.


The temperature is about 3ºC (37ºF) and it rained this morning and was foggy most of the day. Around 3:00 p.m. the sun came out. Tomorrow it's supposed to snow, and the low in the morning as predicted by MétéoFrance will be -4ºC (25ºF). The sun rises at about 8:15 a.m. and sets at about 5:30 p.m. right now.

Place publique ou espace privé ?

[English version follows.]

Si j'habitais encore en Californie au lieu d'habiter en France, et si là-bas je ne travaillais pas, est-ce que je prendrais le temps d'aller faire des photos d'étalages de charcuterie ou de fruits et légumes dans des supermarchés comme les "Safeway" ou "Andronico's" ? C'est peu probable. En fait, quand j'habitais là-bas, je ne l'ai jamais fait. Mais pourquoi est-ce comme ça ?

Chez Doudouille au marché de Saint-Aignan

Je crois que c'est parce que dès qu'on entre dans un supermarché on n'est pas vraiment dans un endroit public. Le supermarché appartient à quelqu'un -- il y a un propriétaire. Quand on passe la porte, on est chez lui -- et ça change tout. Dans un marché en France, par contre, vous êtes en plein air, vous êtes sur la place publique. La rue appartient à tout le monde. Vous pouvez photographier ce que vous voulez, surtout si vous avez la gentillesse de demander la permission.

Bouchées aux noix de St-Jacques (scallop-fill puff-pastry shells)

Les étalages des marchands de produits alimentaires dans les marchés en plein air aussi ont des propriétaires. Mais ces gens- là sont présents et visibles -- ils sont là devant vous. Vous les connaissez. Vous pouvez leur demander si les photos les gênent. Ils disent toujours "non, allez-y" -- c'est mon expérience. Le patron du supermarché, lui, on ne le connaît pas, on ne le voit pas. On ne sort pas son appareil photo chez un particulier sans lui demander son autorisation -- mais dans un supermarché on ne sait pas à qui s'adresser.

Rillons, rillettes, terrines, tartes aux champignons (saindoux is lard)

Bon, tout ça pour dire que j'aime faire des photos au marché de Saint- Aignan le samedi matin. Je n'en fais pas souvent -- je n'ai pas le temps, parce que j'ai mes emplettes à faire. En fait, la première fois que j'ai sorti mon appareil numérique devant un étal au marché, la personne qui s'en occupait m'a demandé si j'etais venu faire du tourisme ce jour-là. Elle me connaissait comme client et n'avait pas pensé que je pouvais aussi me comporter en touriste. On a bien ri ce jour-là.

Saucisses fumées, saucisses de Strasbourg,
saucisses de Francfort, choucroute

Les étalages les plus intéressants du marché sont ceux des charcutiers. Chez le boucher, il y a de la viande crue, coupée en morceaux. Et sur les étalages de fruits et légumes il y a beaucoup de belles primeurs, de couleur agréable et d'une extrême fraîcheur. Mais chez le charcutier il y a une gamme de produits qu'on ne trouve pas ailleurs : pâtés et terrines, rillettes et rillons, lard fumé et bacon, saucissons et saucisses, boudins noirs et boudins blancs, morceaux de porc frais ou demi-sel ou fumé, jambon blancs ou braisés ou crus, bouchées à la reine ou tourtes lorraines, choucroute, salades et pizzas -- tout est beau, bien présenté et appétissant.

Boudin noir, porc frais, boudins blancs, jambons, lard maigre fumé

Mon charcutier -- ma charcutière, en fait -- s'appelle Doudouille. Joli nom, non ? Mme Doudouille, comme nous l'appelons entre nous, tient son éventaire le samedi matin au marché de Saint-Aignan. Son mari, M. Doudouille donc, est de service au marché d'Amboise le vendredi matin. Les produits qu'ils vendent sont toujours appétissants et de la plus grande qualité. Nous sommes vraiment gâtés de les avoir si près de chez nous et nous allons presque toutes les semaines acheter quelque chose de bon à manger chez eux.

Alors, quant aux photos, est-ce que ce serait simplement parce que les étalages sont plus beaux en France ?

Terrines, rillettes, saucissons à l'ail, fromage de tête, etc.

Public Place or Private Splace?

If I still lived in California instead of France, and if I weren't working, would I take the time to go photograph delicatessen and produce displays in supermarkets like Safeway or Andronico's? Probably not. In fact, when I did live there, I never took pictures like that. Wonder why?

Saucissons secs et jambon

I guess it's because as soon as you walk into a supermarket you are really no longer in a public place. The supermarket belongs to a person -- it has an owner. When you go through the doors, you are in his place, and that changes everything. At a market in France, on the other hand, you are outdoors, you're in a truly public space. The street belongs to everybody. You can take pictures of anything you want, especially if you make the effort to ask if it's OK.

Bacon, terrines, pâtés, pizzas, quiches, boudins

The merchant's displays of food products in the outdoor markets have owners too of course. But the owners are there, right in front of you. You know them. You can ask them whether they mind if you take some pictures. They always say "no, I don't mind" -- at least that's been my experience. The owner of the supermarket is a person you don't know, you don't see. You can't just take out your camera and start shooting pictures when you are in somebody's place of business without asking for permission -- but in a supermarket you don't know who to ask.

OK, so that's just a long way of saying that I enjoy taking pictures in the market in Saint-Aignan on Saturday morning. I don't take pictures very often -- I don't have time because I'm too busy shopping. In fact, the first time I pulled out my camera in front of one of the market displays, the merchant running the stand asked me if I was playing the part of a tourist that day. She knew me as a customer and hadn't thought I could also be a tourist. We laughed about that.

The most interesting displays at the market are the charcutier's, or pork butcher's. At the other butcher's, there are nice cuts of raw meat. On the produce stands the fruits and vegetables are beautiful, colorful, and perfectly fresh-looking. But at the charcutier's there is a range of products like nowhere else: pâtés and terrines, braised pork ribs and potted meats, smoked pork belly and Canadian-style bacon, sausages and salamis, black pudding and white sausages, fresh pork and salted and smoked, boiled hams and braised and cured, pastries filled with sauced meats or seafoods, Lorraine-style tourtes, sauerkraut, salads, pizzas -- all beautiful, displayed just so, and appetizing.

Morceaux de porc demi-sel

My charcutier -- charcutière, in fact -- is called Doudouille. It's a funny name. "Madame Doudouille," as Walt and I call her when nobody's listening, is on duty at the market stall on Saturday mornings in Saint-Aignan. Her husband -- "Monsieur Doudouille" of course -- makes his appearances at the Amboise market on Fridays. The products they make and sell always look delicous and are obviously of good quality. We are really lucky to have them so close to where we live and we go buy something good from them nearly every week.

So, about those photos -- could it be that the food displays in France are just nicer to look at?