First round results

Nicolas Sarkozy .... 29.6%
Ségolène Royal ..... 25.1%

Bayrou came in under 20% and Le Pen at about 11%. The May 6 run-off election will feature Royal & Sarkozy.

In 1981, Valéry Giscard-d'Estaing outpolled François Mitterrand in the first round, but Mitterrand went on to win the election. Nothing is decided at this point.

If the turnout is as high on May 6 as it was today, the most interesting factor now will be who Bayrou's voters decide to support. If they go for Sarkozy, he wins. If they go for Royal, she wins. Of course, they will surely split, some going toward the left, others toward the right.

Election day, round one

Today is Sunday April 22, and the French people are voting to elect a new president. Two outcomes are possible today, but only one is probable. If one candidate gets more than 50% of the total vote, that candidate wins and becomes president. That's not likely to happen.

It's nearly certain that nobody will get a majority. In that case, the two top vote-getters will face each other in a run-off election two weeks from today, on May 6. Who the top two will be is the question of the day.

Election posters on the rue de Belleville in Paris

Most likely, the run-off election will pit the center-right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy against the mainstream leftist candidate, Ségolène Royal. Some of the last polls taken this past week showed Royal pulling about 25% of the vote, compared to Sarkozy's 28%.

However, as many as a third of the people polled last week said they were still undecided, so other outcomes are cetainly possible today. Two other candidates are seen as positioned to spoil Ségolène Royal's bid to become the first woman elected president of France.

The graffiti on centrist Bayrou's poster says:
"Neither left-wing nor right-wing; THEREFORE RIGHT-WING"

One is a center-right figure who has been in government for nearly 20 years now, François Bayrou. He has been polling third. The other is the far-right spoiler who placed second in the 2002 presidential election, 78-year-old Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Sarkozy, Royal, and Bayrou represent the three mainstream currents that have dominated French politics for the past 50 years:

• Sarkozy is the candidate of current president Jacques Chirac's party. Chirac, president since 1995, represents a heritage that goes back to Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou, who held the French presidency from 1960 until 1974.
• Royal is the candidate of the French Socialist Party, which in its present form was the creation of François Mitterrand, French president from 1981 to 1995.
• Bayrou represents the UDF party, founded by Valéry Giscard-d'Estaing, who was president of France from 1974 until 1981.

One of the many leftist candidates is environmental activist José Bové.

There are twelve candidates in all, and a lot of them represent small leftist groups that together might gather 15% to 20% of the total vote. If Royal loses out to Bayrou or Le Pen, it will be because those other left-wing candidates siphoned off enough of her votes to hold her back.

In France today, there's a certain nervousness over what the reaction in the northern Paris suburbs might be if two right-wing candidates make it into the run-off election, closing out the left. There's no love lost between the young people who live in those suburban housing projects and the leading candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy. Some fear unrest like the riots that paralyzed France for days in the fall of 2005.

By the time you read this, you'll probably already have heard the election results and other news.

We got back from Paris last night after a quick trip to see our friends Chris and Tony, who are spending a week there. We spent Saturday morning with them exploring the working-class neighborhoods along the rue de Belleville in the northeastern part of the city.

"Don't trust words," this big poster says.
Those are not real people up on the scaffolding and roof.

We saw this large piece of street art on the side of a building in Belleville. On the wall of the same building, down at street level, there was the graffiti below. It's hard to translate but the word cons means jerks, idiots, fools, or, figuratively, bastards or assholes — something like that.

This says: "Don't trust jerks and do trust words."

April in Paris

That's where we are going today. So it'll be an April day in Paris. We'll drive up this morning, see friends (Chris and Tony from California are there right now), do some shopping for food and kitchen items we can't get here in Saint-Aignan, have a couple of good meals, and drive back Saturday evening. I'm sure we'll find time to take a nice walk around the Marais, along the Seine, or in some other interesting neighborhood.

We plan to make a stop in the suburbs at Ikea to buy a light fixture we want for our kitchen. Then we'll go to a spice shop in the Marais called Izraël to see if we can find some smoked paprika from Spain and some ground hot chili peppers from Ivory Coast. We'll also go to a big Asian supermarket in Paris to see if we can get a stone mortar and pestle we saw there last year but didn't buy at the time.

One Paris meal this time will be couscous at Le Vent de Sable in the 15th arrondissement (not far from the Eiffel Tower). We had a lunch there last August and it was really good. Another meal will be Thai food in a restaurant in Belleville, in the far northeast corner of Paris. It's a place that Walt read about on a blog and that sounded good.

After we get the new puppy in early May, we won't be free to make one of these "lightning trips" (voyages éclair) to Paris for quite a while. After Callie gets trained and calms down (if she indeed turns out to be a rambunctious puppy), we'll be able to take her with us to Paris, because restaurants and hotels in France have no problem admitting dogs, if they are well behaved. Collette went to restaurants and hotels with us in Paris on many occasions.

The weather in northern France is fantastic right now. It's not hot — around 70ºF, 20ºC — but it's very warm in the sun and the sky is a crystal blue. I'm hoping we'll have this kind of weather for many weeks and even months to come, but you can't ask the impossible.

Back on Sunday...

Rabbit with lardons and white wine

When Easter rolls around and the Anglo-Saxon world starts talking about bunnies, it always reminds me that I haven't cooked a rabbit in a while. The annual springtime rabbit has been a dinnertime treat chez nous for about 20 years now.

In France, Italy, and other countries, by the way, the Easter Bunny doesn't bring eggs and chocolate. The bells do. Bells? Oui, bells, as in church bells. Bells (les cloches) bringing chocolate eggs? It all sounds very strange. Of course, in our culture, why do rabbits bring eggs? Are the chickens too busy?

Rabbit pieces, smoked pork chunks, herbs, and
aromatic vegetables marinating in white wine

The Easter Bells are for real, though. One day this week I was walking through the Intermarché parking lot here in Saint-Aignan and overheard some people, a group comprising three generation at least, standing and talking near the cart rack. An older woman said to a young boy: "So did the bells come by — Les cloches sont-elles passées ? — on Easter morning at your grandmother's house? Did they bring a lot of chocolate?" Evidently, the bells fly in from Rome.

Lardons cut from a slab of smoked pork belly
which has been trimmed of its rind

Back to bunnies. When you buy a farm-raised rabbit at the Saint-Aignan market, you get the whole thing, skinned. You have to clean it and cut it up yourself — or at least I did. I didn't ask the poultry vendor to do it for me, but maybe I could have. Cutting it up includes cutting off the head, which they sell you by tradition to show you that it really is a rabbit (you can tell by the teeth — they are not the teeth of a cat, for example). I discarded the head, though I suppose you could boil it in a pot (optionally, with some chicken pieces) to make stock.

As Walt remarked that day, the market rabbit's head is there but the ears are missing. I don't know why that is. The feet are missing too — I guess people who raise or butcher rabbits have a good supply of lucky rabbits' feet around their houses. On the rabbit I bought last Saturday at the Saint-Aignan market, I should point out, not much else was missing. There was the liver and there were the kidneys; those parts are good to eat. There also were the lungs, which I discarded. I never found the heart or any other vital organs, however.

Cut the rabbit into at least seven pieces: the two shoulders (aka front legs), the two back legs, and the thorax cut into three more or less equal pieces. The two pieces of the back behind the rib cage, called the saddle or râble, are the meatiest pieces on the rabbit.

Now rabbit is a little gamier than chicken. The Larousse Gastronomique cookbook says the meat is very digestible, but rabbit needs some flavoring ingredients to make it really good. One classic method of cooking rabbit is to baste it with Dijon mustard and roast it in the oven. Another is to cook it in ... what else? ... wine. White or red — your choice.

Frying lardons in a little butter or oil
after their marinade

Rabbit cooked in red wine is called a civet — cive means chive or green onion. It's a rabbit cooked with onions in red wine. The chicken equivalent of a civet is coq au vin — rooster or chicken cooked in red wine with onions, mushrooms, and lardons cut from smoked or salt-cured pork belly.

Rabbit pieces and lardons browning in the pan
after being marinated in white wine and aromatics

Rabbit cooked in white wine is called lapin en gibelotte. The chicken equivalent is a fricassée. I'm not sure that there are lardons in most fricassées, but they are essential in a gibelotte. Rabbit, smoked lardons, onions, garlic, carrots, herbs, and white wine — that's the way I like to cook rabbit. I learned the recipe and method nearly 30 years ago from a woman in Paris who was in her 80s at the time. It's a French country classic.

I don't know why we don't have lardons as a readily available ingredient in large parts of the U.S. You can cut your own, of course, if you can get smoked or cured meat, including what is called slab bacon. I never had much luck finding slab bacon in San Francisco, however, though I did once find it in a supermarket up in Fort Bragg, in far northern California, when we were there on a weekend camping trip. I was ecstatic, and I took plenty back home with me to San Francisco that Sunday. After that, I started finding smoked slab bacon in at least one San Francisco supermarket. It was imported from Germany.

In the U.S. South, cooking meats, fish, greens, green beans, or dried beans with cured pork — streak o' lean, pork belly, side meat, fatback, etc. — is a long tradition. When I was growing up, for example, my mother would cook a big baked flounder by laying some bacon strips over the fish and surrounding it with aromatic vegetables like chopped onion, sliced carrots, and celery stalks, along with potatoes or even sweet potatoes. Collard greens, green beans, and pinto beans were all cooked with a chunk of salt pork or smoked fatback.

The use of pork belly or bacon as a flavoring ingredient is one of the things that make me say that old-style Southern cooking and French country-style cooking are strikingly similar in many ways. (Cooking vegetables until they are thoroughly done, considered a horror in California cuisine, is another.)

Rabbit pieces, lardons, and herbs
after their cold white wine bath

One feature of French cooking that I'm not sure you find much in Southern cooking (maybe I'm wrong...) is the marinade. In the case of the rabbit, it's good to slice up some onions, garlic, and carrots, wash some fresh herbs (thyme, parsley, sage, bay leaves, or whatever you like), and put all that in a big dish with the rabbit, the chunks of smoked pork, and some black peppercorns. Pour white wine over it all to cover, and then put it in the refrigerator overnight or for at least three or four hours. Another thing I like to add to a marinade of this kind is a half-dozen whole allspice berries (piment de la Jamaïque in French).

Don't let the order of the pictures in this post confuse you. The steps to follow in cooking a rabbit (or chicken) this way are:

1. Marinate the rabbit and lardons for 8 hours or longer in white wine.
2. Take the rabbit and lardons out of the marinade and brown them in a pot in butter or oil. Save the marinating liquid.
3. Pour the liquid over the browned meats and simmer for a couple of hours.
   

When you're ready to cook, take the rabbit pieces and pork lardons out of the marinade and let them dry a little, or dry them off a little with a paper towel. Now they are ready to sauté. The flavors of the herbs and aromatic vegetables, the white wine, and smokiness of the pork will have already flavored the rabbit.

Herbs, chopped onion and garlic, and
pieces of pork rind ready to go into the pot

You can discard the herbs, onions, and garlic at this point, but when the time came it seemed like a shame to me to just throw all that out. So I put it all in a wire basket that I would be able to put in the pot with the rabbit when I simmered it in the white wine. And don't throw out the white wine you used as the marinade — that's what you cook the rabbit in. It has picked up a lot of flavor too.

Cook it all at the simmer

Another thing you shouldn't throw out is the rind of the smoked pork belly, if you have any. Save it, put it in the marinade if you want to, and at the end cut it up into small pieces and put it in the wire basket (or cheesecloth pouch, or right into the pot) and cook it with the herbs, onions, and everything else in the pot. The pork rind gives the sauce good richness in the form of gelatin.

The cooked rabbit: that's the liver (delicious)
that you see there. The color of the sauce in this picture
is not great but believe me, it was good.

I decided to save the carrots and cook them directly in the wine with the rabbit and pork. Some cooks would throw them out, on the theory that they had already given their flavor up to the marinade. But I wanted to cook and eat them.

Walt made some fresh noodles and we cooked some
nice haricots verts to go with the stewed rabbit.

Once you have the rabbit, pork, carrots, and the aromatics (whether loose or in a ball or pouch) in the pot in which you've browned the meat, pour on the wine that the rabbit marinated in. If it isn't enough to cover everything, add more wine, or add water. Or chicken or vegetable broth. C'est vous qui voyez — it's your call. What I'm describing is more a method than a recipe.

Sunday dinner of rabbit, noodles, and green beans

Whether or not you thicken the sauce is up to you as well. I thickened it slightly with a little potato starch mixed into cold water to make a slurry. You pour that slowly into the simmering sauce until you get the consistency you want. You could do the same thing by making a flour and butter roux and stirring that in slowly. The sauce shouldn't be too thick, though.

Bon appétit !

Ville de Tours: the old city

Tours was heavily bombarded by the Germans as well as by the Allied Forces (Americans, British, Canadians) at different times during the 1940-45 war. The neighborhoods closest to the Loire River were subjected to the worst destruction.

Les Trois Rois is a café in an old building
on the Place Plumereau in old Tours.

A few hundred yards from the riverfront, the old neighborhoods suffered less damage. The same is true of other cities in France — Rouen, in Normandy, for example. The rivers and bridges were strategic targets for both sides in the war.

The area called the Place Plumereau is surrounded by cafés and restaurants, and in warm weather the eating and drinking establishments cover the place (square) with tables where their customers can enjoy sitting outside.

There are a lot of half-timbered houses
on the Place Plumereau and along the adjacent streets.

The neighborhoods around the Place Plumereau were built and lived in by the courtiers of the French king Louis XI in the late 1400s, so a lot of the houses you see there are more than 500 years old.

The Tour Charlemagne in the rue des Halles

South of the Place Plumereau is a street called Rue des Halles and an area that was once a major religious center. It grew up around the site of the tomb of St. Martin, one of the major church figures in French history. In the 5th century, a gigantic basilica was built here.

La Tour de l'Horloge (the clock tower) in the rue des Halles

Five hundred years later, that structure burned down and was replaced by another immense church, built in about 1015 A.D. Only two towers of that edifice survive — the two in these pictures. Nowadays, where great churches once stood, the streets is lined with shops and boutiques selling luxury products.


The Cadogan guide informs me that the tomb of St. Martin of Tours was rediscovered during an archaeological dig here in about 1860. To celebrate, a new basilica was built on the site. As you can see, it's of a completely different style (neo-Byzantine). On aime ou on n'aime pas. Some like it; some don't.

These houses are on the Place du Grand Marché.

O Kalm is a play on words. Au calme, pronounced identically, means "quiet, peaceful, out of the way" in describing, for example, a house or a hotel or some other place. It might also mean eaux calmes, calm waters, which is pronounced the same way. You can read the word Heineken in small letters on the awning, so this is a bar or café.

........

Ville de Tours: restaurant menus

Yesterday I posted a picture of a ceramic rooster dressed in a cowboy get-up. A cousin of mine from North Carolina sent me an e-mail and said she had seen similar ceramic roosters in the U.S., and she thought the one I photographed must have been made by the same company as one she has at home. It's a global world, isn't it? I was glad to hear from her — it had been years.

Asides aside, I wanted to point out that Tours is about a 45-minute drive from Saint-Aignan, or a 45-minute train ride. It's a big city, but not anything like Paris. Compared to the Seine, the Loire River is very wide at Tours, and there are just four bridges — and two of those are autoroute crossings, not old stone bridges like the city's main bridge, le pont Wilson.

French cities are very compact compared to American cities, which sprawl on for miles. That said, Tours has newer, suburban-style shopping zones to the north and to the south, outside of the old town. Sometimes we go over there just to shop in the suburbs, without ever going "downtown" or into the city center.

The streets of Tours late on a Sunday afternoon.

Here are some pictures of menus. I always seem to end up examining menus closely whenever I am walking around in a French city. In France, restaurants are required to post the menu outside on the sidewalk so that potential customers can make an informed decision about their lunch or dinner. The menu also shows you the prices you can expect to pay.

The classic steak-frites

Because menus change frequently, they are often hand-written on a chalkboard, like the one above. It's a pretty simple one: you can choose from (a) steak, or (b) steak! Both steaks are served with home-made French fries (frites maison) and green salad (salade verte). The meat is from cattle raised in France (viandes françaises) . Bon appétit !

The two steaks you can choose from are: a rib-eye (entrecôte) with béarnaise (sauce), which is a mayonnaise-type sauce made using shallots and tarragon cooked in vinegar; or a sort of skirt steak (onglet) served with a sauce made of shallots that are stewed slowly in butter or vegetable oil. Entrecôte béarnaise is shorthand in French; everybody knows that béarnaise is a sauce and not something else like a kind of steak or a way of cooking it. The Béarn is an old province down in the Pyrénées Mountains where the sauce was supposedly invented.

I have to check this place out more closely the next time
I'm in Tours to see what the menu looks like. The name
means "Eat Me" and that doesn't give you a clue.

Green salad is a standard item in France. No, it's not elegant, and I know people who think salads with just lettuce in them are really boring. But a good helping of fresh greens is an important dietary component that balances out a meal, and fresh greens are delicious and refreshing when dressed with a good vinaigrette (which they always are in France). Sometimes you get a mixture of different kinds of greens, but often it's just green leaf lettuce or what we would call Boston lettuce. It's never iceberg.

You won't find American-style salads made of half-a-dozen ingredients (lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, mushrooms, green peppers, croutons, onions, and on an on) with sweet or creamy dressings. That's seen, I think, as too complicated and too rich to be included as just one part of a meal. In France, the standard salad that accompanies a meal is made of lettuce and vinaigrette, and vinaigrette is made of a little Dijon mustard, a little vinegar, and some vegetable oil, all whipped together.

Another very simple menu written directly on the glass doors of a
restaurant in Tours. It features what is called a pièce du boucher —
the "butcher's cut" — which is... guess what? Steak! And it's served with
French fries and a green salad. You can order a sauce of your choice
with the steak, all for €6.90. It's typical lunchtime food. There's also
a seafood au gratin dish (Cassolette Océane) and beef burgundy
(Boeuf bourguignon) if you want something other than beefsteak.

What you do find is cafés and restaurants that serve salades-repas — salads that constitute a whole meal. One such salad is a salade niçoise — greens, steamed green beans, tomato wedges, cold boiled potatoes, olives, and tuna, with vinaigrette. Other lunch or dinner salads can include ham, lardons, hard-boiled eggs, different cheeses like blue or Swiss or goat, artichoke hearts, corn, and so on. But they are dinner salads, and only become part of a meal when smaller versions of them are served as starter courses.

Another good starter featuring vegetables is a salade de crudités [kroo-dee-TAY], which is sliced tomatoes, diced beets, grated carrots, shredded cabbage, diced boiled potatoes, and maybe a sliced hard-boiled egg, served as separate little salads on a plate and dressed with vinaigrette. It's a salad but not a tossed salad.

In France, salade verte, the simple tossed green salad, is usually eaten after the main course, not before. Or with the main course when you're having a simple, quick meal like a steak and fries or a pizza. These days, you don't always get salad as part of a meal in a restaurant.

And by the way, the entrée in a French meal is the starter or appetizer course, not the main course. I don't know how we ever ended up using the word "entree" in America to mean "main course," when it so obviously means the "entry" into the meal, the starter.

Another very confusing difference between French and American usage has to do with the word "menu." In France, what we call the menu is called the carte — that's why you order à la carte when you want to pick and choose your food from different offerings rather than order a set-price meal.

A menu in French is a full meal made up of several courses at a set price. You can't normally do substitutions. Often you get a choice of entrées (the French meaning), a choice of main courses, and a choice of desserts. Sometimes there will be a salad course before dessert, and sometimes there will be a cheese course, either before dessert or in its place.

A much more elaborate menu (in the French meaning)

My interpretation of the last menu pictured is that you can order a combination that costs €9.90 or a combination that costs €11.40. For the lower price you probably can have either a starter + a main dish, or a main dish + a dessert. For the higher price, you get all three courses.

And there are six or seven choices for each course. The name of the restaurant is Le Picrocole. Here's a loose translation of that menu.

• Warm country-style salad
  (probably with lardons or ham, maybe potatoes)
• The chef's special pâté, with prunes in it
  
• Fricassee of duck with garlic and parsley
  (served cold? I wonder...)
• French onion soup (with melted cheese on top)
• Salad with Touraine Galipettes
  (?? — you got me on that one)
• Touraine-style salad with potted pork
  (pork rillettes are a Touraine specialty)
• Eggs baked in a chive-cream sauce
  

• Touraine boiled dinner (probably pork,
  sausages, or chicken with vegetables)
• Stuffed vegetables (a house specialty)
• Skirt steak with stewed shallots
• Chicken leg with olives and lemon
• Fish en papillotte (a foil or paper pouch) with fresh herbs
• Pork cheeks cooked in a cream sauce
• Tripe "the way we make it"

• French toast
• Caramel custard (like a Mexican flan)
• Rice pudding flavored with vanilla
• Pear poached in Earl Grey tea
• Fromage blanc (like yogurt) with apricot puree
  
• Clafoutis with prunes (a kind of pudding cake)
  
• A salad of caramelized oranges

Window shopping in Tours

In French, "window-shopping" is called lèche-vitrines — literally, "window-licking." I'm sure the expression has to do with the fact that the French verb allécher means "to tempt, to attract." Something that is alléchant is appetizing and tempting — it makes your mouth water, as we say. Actually, shop windows are often amazingly tantalizing in France.

This being France, there's nothing surprising about
seeing a window display featuring snails and frogs.
These are literally appetizing, don't you know?

Licking windows was how we entertained ourselves on a Sunday afternoon in the city of Tours, as we were waiting for a friend's early-evening train to arrive from Paris. The weather wasn't very warm, but the light was good and the windows were entertaining.

In Tours, there were a few people out late on a Sunday afternoon.

I'm pretty sure the street in the picture above is the rue des Halles ("Market Street"), which runs from the old marketplace to the city's main shopping street, the rue Nationale. For some reason, chickens seemed to be in style as a shop-window theme when we were there.

Nobody here but us...

Here are some things to know about Tours. It's a city of about 300,000 that is the capital of the ancient province called Touraine, which is known as the garden of France (le jardin de la France). Centuries ago, the French kings traveled here from Paris and built grand residences so that they could come and enjoy the nice summertime weather. It's also wine country.

In Touraine the purest French is spoken, people have always said. The accent is not regional, but national, while Parisians (like New Yorkers) have a distinct accent. By the way, the final -s of Tour is silent. Pronounce it [tour] like the English word.

A country & western rooster wearing a cowboy hat,
a bandana, chaps... and a saddle

The cooking of the Touraine region is not regional either. There are some regional specialties, but not many. Marseille has its bouillabaisse and ratatouille, Castelnaudary and Toulouse their cassoulet, Brittany its crêpes, and Alsace its choucroute, but Touraine just has standard, internationally recognized French cuisine. It's what you eat in the best French restaurants all around the world.

Striped chickens?

The Touraine province is the heart of the Loire Valley, which is French château country. Close to Tours are the famous royal châteaux of Chenonceau, Amboise, Azay-le-Rideau, Villandry, Chinon, Chaumont, and Chambord. But the city is much older than those monuments. Tours dates back to pre-Roman times, and it was a major Roman city in the first centuries of the Christian era. Both the Loire River and the Cher River run through Tours.

Peering into the windows at the porcelaine blanche shop

Tours is one hour from Paris by high-speed train (the TGV) and two to three hours by car on the toll road called the autoroute, depending on traffic. It has been called « un petit Paris » because it is a pretty city, though is was much bombarded in the 1940-45 war and a lot of it is fairly modern by French standards.

The Cadogan guide to the Loire actually uses the terms "glamorous" and "vibrant" to describe Tours. I never thought of it that way until now, but it's true that on a nice sunny afternoon, strolling the main streets, the flower market, and the outdoor food markets can be a very nice way to spend some time.

Here come the puppy posts

I wrote to Mme Vincent, who owns the kennel where we are getting the new puppy, and asked her if she could send a few pictures of Callie at the age of seven weeks. She did, and here they are. I'm sure I'll be posting a lot more pictures of this dog on the blog over the next three or four months. Be warned.

Callie's eyes look blue-green, but I wonder if they won't darken as she grows up.

We'll go get Callie and bring her home on Thursday, May 3, when she'll be 10 weeks old. The kennel is about 2½ hours' drive from Saint-Aignan, down near the village of Montmarault in the Allier département, not far from Vichy and Montluçon. So far we've resisted driving down there for a visit, because it didn't seem like the kennel was set up for visits. And it's a long drive for a short visit.

We know this is Callie, and not one of her
litter mates, because of the distinctive shape of
the white patch on her forehead.

Just yesterday I got an e-mail from my friend Charles-Henry, who was my editor when I worked as a translator/magazine editor in Washington DC nearly 25 years ago. He is a very literate man, and he's taught me more about the French language than anybody else over the years.

Charles-Henry (sometimes I call him by his initials, CHM) pointed out in his e-mail that calli- is a prefix derived from the Greek word for beauty, kallos. La calligraphie, calligraphy, for example, means belle écriture, or beautiful handwriting.

Take the Greek-derived suffix calli-, meaning beauty,
add a final E to make the word feminine as you do
in French, and there you have it: Callie.

Another calli- word in French is callitriche, which is the name of a sub-order of primates that includes the little monkey we call a marmoset. In French, a marmoset is a ouistiti (wee-stee-TEE). The word callitriche means "beautiful fleece," belle toison. In other words, "beautiful coat" in describing an animal.

The suffix -triche meaning hair, fur, or fleece comes from the Greek too and is the root of the word tresses, which is the same in French and in English.

The fact is, by coincidence I happened to post a picture of a marmoset or ouistiti in this topic about the ZooParc de Beauval that I blogged just a few days ago. Here it is again.

This marmoset or ouistiti that I photographed at the
ZooParc de Beauval in Saint-Aignan certainly does have
a beautiful coat. Hence the name callitriche in French.

As for Callie's coat, I don't know if it will ever be as beautiful as that marmoset's is (or as our poor deceased dog Collette's was) but we'll see. And I don't know what color her adult coat will be. I believe I saw a picture of Callie's père, Vince, and noticed that he was this same chocolate brown color when he was a puppy. His coat is much more orange-colored now.

« Callie du Vent des Moissons de la Vallée des Géants »

So there's Callie's full name, I guess, in the caption above. Her male parent is Vince du Vent des Moissons — "Vince of the Harvest Winds." Her female parent is Ruby du Berger de la Vallée des Géants — "Ruby of the Shepherd of the Valley of the Giants." So voilà — "Callie of the Shepherd of the Valley of the Giants and the Harvest Winds." It's a big name for a little dog.

Imagine us calling her after she runs away in the vineyard, chasing a deer or a rabbit. « Viens, Callie du Berger de la Vallée des Géants et du Vent des Moissons ! Viens ! »

Maybe we should say vous to her instead of tu, as a sign of respect. Her bloodline is obviously nobler than either of ours is! « Venez, Mademoiselle Callie du blablabla ! Venez ! »

.....

What we got at the market today

We went to the outdoor market in Saint-Aignan this morning and here's what we bought.

Click the picture to see it in full size

Strawberries: these are locally grown (in the Sologne) and are called gariguettes. They are not the same strawberry variety as the ones you get in California, which are, according to what I've read, the same ones they grow in Spain and export to France and the rest of Europe. The gariguette strawberries are sweeter and juicier — as a general rule, anyway. Strawberry season is just beginning here.

Fraises, pain, et asperges

Asparagus: these are also local and in season. They are asperges blanches, white asparagus. We buy them from a man who sets up a table right next to Mme Doudouille's stand. I think the man who sells the asparagus also grows them, and his prices are good (€6 a kilo right now — that would be $3.50 a pound or so with a euro at $1.35, if you can believe that). The ones he had for sale today were just beautiful.

Jambon de Savoie en tranches

Ham: the slices of ham come from Mme Doudouille (yes, she is still here — it's a long story). They are slices of jambon de Savoie, ham from the Savoy region in the Alps — what is called jambon cru, raw ham, in France. Walt is going to use them with the asparagus...

Navets nouveaux — spring turnips

Turnips: these are baby turnips that one of the farmers brings to town to sell. I don't yet know what I am going to do with them, but they looked good.

Bread: the baguette was delivered, before we went to the market, by Roselyne the bread lady. It's made every morning by the baker in our village.

Le rôti de chez le volailler

Roast: the little rolled roast is a rôti de pintade farci that we bought from the poultry vendor, or volailler, whose stall is right across from Mme Doudouille's charcuterie stall. That's a stuffed guinea-fowl roast. The woman behind the counter said it was stuffed with ground poultry (could be chicken, turkey, or guinea fowl, I guess) and herbs and spices. Volaille means fowl, and the volailler (vuh-ly-AY) is the person who sells poultry.

I'm cooking the roast right now. Here's what it looked like a few minutes after going into the oven.

Rôti de pintade farci — stuffed, rolled guinea-fowl roast

And here's a scan of the paper that the roast was wrapped in. These poultry people are the ones who agreed to pluck a pheasant for me a couple of years ago when our neighbor gave us one he had shot. I like to buy from them because they were so nice about that, and did it for free.

Volailles = fowl, poultry
Lapins 1er choix = "grade A" rabbits
Fromages de chèvre = goat cheeses
Markets: Fri. Montrichard, Sat. St-Aignan

These are also the people from whom I bought a rabbit last weekend. I'm still working on a posting about how I cooked that rabbit.

The morning news

I turned on CNN International this morning. The news is all good, of course. Just kidding.

There was a big earthquake (6.0 or stronger, according to reports) a few minutes ago in Mexico. The epicenter was between Mexico City and Acapulco, CNN said. I'm waiting for more news.

A big April snowstorm is blowing across the U.S. central plains, from Denver and Kansas City northward and eastward. The East Coast will be affected by it tomorrow and Sunday.

California had a dry winter and the Sierra snowpack is only 46% of normal. Water restrictions are likely to be imposed on millions of people. The news is about flow-restricters in shower heads, less frequent toilet flushing, no car washing, and so on. It reminds me of the late '80s and early '90s, when there was a six-year drought. People of course use more water than ever, and there are more and more people using it. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. N'est-ce pas ?

This morning it is raining lightly in Saint-Aignan. We need the moisture at this point. But it means that the grass will have to be mowed again in the next few days. Walt pointed out that one of the irises we transplanted (with Sue's help) last year has a blossom on it. I planted some tomato seeds in pot yesterday afternoon, in anticipation of being able to set them out in the garden in about a month. Temperatures this weekend are supposed to exceed 75ºF (24ºC). We can't complain.

The CNN morning anchorwoman interviewed the mayor of Blois about an hour ago. He's member of "centrist" presidential candidate François Bayrou's party, the UDF (Union pour la Démocratie Française). Bayrou looks unlikely to make it into the second round of voting between the two top first-round vote-getters on May 6.

The CNN questioning of Blois's mayor included this gem, which I paraphrase: France is a beautiful country. Thousands, hundreds of thousands really, of tourist go there every year and love it. What's wrong with the French people? Why aren't they happy?

Well, first of all, who says they aren't? Why should they be any happier than other people? How does happiness manifest itself? Widespread smiling? Giggling? Abandonment of all hope that things might get better? By the way, the number of tourists who visit France annually is said to be 75 million. It is apparently the world's no. 1 tourist destination.

It's like that Jackson Browne comment I quoted a week or two ago. If the place you live in is the voted the best place in the world to live, don't you get a little depressed thinking there's nothing better elsewhere? Maybe this is as good as it gets. The fact is, people in France have to commute, work for a living, please their bosses, deal with politics and politicians, and fret about the weather.

And then there was the Paul Wolfowitz story: he is the current president of the World Bank in Washington. The World Bank is a supposedly international institution whose mission is to fight poverty in the world, but Wolfowitz was nominated by G.W. Bush. The U.S. President's nomination is tantamount to an appointment in this case, and many in the world view the leader of the World Bank as a U.S. political appointee.

Wolfowitz was previously Deputy Defense Secretary at the Pentagon, under Rumsfield, and he was one of the chief architects of the war in Iraq. He's a neo-con, one of those extreme right-wing radicals who thinks the U.S. should impose itself as the world's only superpower and rule the roost.

So how does Paul W. operate within the government? He uses his influence to get his domestic partner (the French news said his maîtresse, or mistress) a high-level job at the U.S. State Department that represented a big promotion and pay increase. He admitted yesterday that he had made a mistake by intervening in the hiring process for a woman he was dating at the time and apologized for it. But he didn't resign his job, of course. These people are not quitters. They think they own the government, in other words, and they can use it as they see fit. [End of rant]

What I was going to blog about this morning was a recipe for cooking a rabbit. When Easter rolls around, and talk in the media turns to the Easter Bunny, it always reminds me that I haven't cooked rabbit in a while. So I bought one at the Saint-Aignan market last week and cooked it on Easter Sunday. I'll save the recipe and pictures for a later post.

Sun and shadow

It's early spring, and while the weather is exceptionally warm, the sun is still fairly low in the sky. The trees are just starting to grow some leaves. The shadows are long and deep.

The tilleul, or linden tree, also called a lime tree,
casts a long shadow right now.

It's the kind of weather that encourages you to put outdoors all the potted plants you brought in last fall to protect them from frost and freeze. You have to be ready to bring them back in, though, because we could still have a good cold snap. Neighbors tell me they remember having a couple of inches of snow on the ground one year in early May.

Putting the potted plants back outdoors

It's also the kind of weather that makes you put the patio and yard furniture back outside. Our living space expands significantly when the warm weather comes back in the spring.

The deck railing also casts a long shadow these days.

I'm taking the day off today. Yesterday I dug up a section of hard rocky ground that weeds had completely taken over. I had to do it with a shovel and pitchfork, because it was a narrow strip bordered with rocks. Using the rototiller wasn't an option.

The fence along the street

Later in the morning, I did use the rototiller to plow up the second garden plot, which was also completely covered in tough, thick-rooted plants and weeds. The tiller is heavy and you have to pull and push hard on it to really dig up the ground, not to mention to turn it around corners. Sometimes I think I'm too old for this kind of work, but then I tell myself I'll be a better person for having done it.

Sun and deep shadows in the side yard

When the grass is well trimmed, the yard on the north side of the house looks like a park. It gets shade from a couple of big fir trees, so it's a good place to sit and read on hot afternoons like the ones we've been having.

Setting up a chaise in the shade of the bay laurel hedge

Another nice spot for reading is in the shade of the hedge on the south side of the yard. That's where I sat and read, listening to the radio, for three or four hours yesterday afternoon after that hard morning of digging and tilling.

A shadow of my former self? No, not really.

We're trying to take advantage of these nice days to get the garden ready for planting. The growing season, when all danger of frost has past, starts on May 15 in Saint-Aignan. By then we will have the new puppy to take care of and train, as well as the garden to put it. May is going to be a hectic month.