Limiting myself to six...

No, not six French fries or six glasses of wine. I'm talking about pictures. Ones taken with the new camera. The limit is not on taking just six, it means just posting just six. Today.

Yesterday we had a bright sunny afternoon. I took the dog out for a walk in the vineyard about 4:00 p.m.

You can click on the pictures to enlarge them on your screen.

A dog's-eye view of a walk in the vineyard

Even in bright sunlight, using the LCD screen on the back of the camera to frame pictures is okay. It had better be, since the camera has no other viewfinder. Only once or twice did I have a hard time seeing what I was taking a picture of because of bright sun on the screen or too many reflections.

Grapes in autumn colors

Callie was bound to notice the grapes sooner or later. I keep stopping to take pictures of the beautiful clusters hanging off the grape vines. I don't want her to eat any. First of all, the grapes belong to somebody else and will be used to make Touraine wines. And secondly, grapes and raisins can make dogs very sick, according to what I've read.

Did I forget to mention that today is Callie's six-month birthday? She was born February 22.

"What are these things he keeps pointing that silver box at?"

I want you to know what a strict limit six pictures is. I spent about 45 minutes out in the vineyard with the dog and in that amount of time I took... this is embarrassing... 120 pictures. About 25 of those are ones I would consider posting on the blog. There are a lot of near-duplicates in the full batch, where I took extra shots from a slightly different angle or with slightly different camera settings. So it's not a bad as it seems. But still...

More autumn colors: a grape leaf

Obviously, the pictures I take with this camera have good color and clarity. And it is so light to carry around compared to the other camera I used to use on my walks in the vineyard.

When I got back to the house, I looked out the kitchen window and saw that Maryvonne across the street had company. They were sitting outside, enjoying the afternoon sun. I snapped this telephoto picture through the window. I don't think they noticed me taking their picture.

Catching the last rays of afternoon sun

I'm more than happy with the TZ3's zoom, and the macro seems to work well too. The TZ3 is the new Panasonic Lumix digital camera I got last week. It has a 10x zoom.

Our vegetable garden isn't doing great. The weather has been too damp and cold for tomatoes and aubergines. It was raining again during the night, and I think the forecast for today is not good. But we planted a pumpkin patch out back, on top of what used to be the compost pile. We had moved the pile to a different location, and wanted to plant something to fill in that spot.

Pumpkins

I think we are going to have a ton of pumpkins this year. That might seem obvious, since each pumpkin will weigh about a ton when it's fully grown. I see lots of pumpkin soup and pumpkin pies in our future.

Okay, that's it for today.

Albundigas and Mexican tortillas

Ever since I got my new camera, it's been raining. Yesterday I poured 11 mm out of the rain gauge, and this morning 20 more millimeters had accumulated in there. So that's 31 mm since Saturday — about 1¼ inches. That's a lot for mid-August.

It's soup weather, with temperatures in the 60s. In winter we'd pay good money for weather this "nice" — it's much colder in January, but looking out the window you wouldn't be able to see much difference. This is August, pour l'amour de Dieu ! Oh yeah, there are leaves on the trees, which there aren't in January, but it's that same leaden gray sky.

Sopa de albóndigas
on a chilly August day in the Loire Valley

So when nature gives you soup weather, what do you do? You make soup. After all, the temperature in the house is just 19ºC (that's 66ºF) and no, we don't have air conditioning. It's actually nice to have a pot of soup bubbling on the stove.

A few days ago, I was looking up something up in the Larousse Gastronomique (I do that all the time) — oh yeah, I was looking up andouillette. I opened the book and the first word that jumped out at me was albundigas. What? It's a word I know better with the spelling albóndigas, as in sopa de albóndigas, Mexican meatball soup. I went to the store the next morning and bought meat to make the meatballs.

Consulting the Larousse Gastronomique

It's strange what you find in the Larousse Gastronomique. It would never have occurred to me to look for albóndigas soup in the classic French cookbook, which was first published in 1938, I believe, and updated in 1967 (that's the edition I have).

The recipe looks pretty good. It says to use 250 grams (about half a pound) of beef, veal, or pork fillet. Sauté some onions and garlic, sprinkle on some flour as a thickener, and then grind the meat and mix it with the cooked onions and garlic. When you grind the meat, also run three green peppers (it says piments verts), some cilantro or marjoram, some thyme, and some breadcrumbs through the meat grinder and mix all that in too. Add an egg and a little broth to moisten the stuffing and put it in a pastry bag.

Squeeze out little dumplings of the meat stuffing, cutting them off with a knife and dropping them into boiling consommé to cook. The Larousse calls them quenelles and says to poach them in the consommé until they are done. Then, at the last minute, peel, seed, and chop three fresh tomatoes, cook them lightly in a pan with butter, and add them to the soup with the meat quenelles. That sounds like a mild but refined French version of albóndigas soup (unless those piments verts are really hot peppers).

Brawley, California — 17 February 2001

I know sopa de albóndigas from the time I spent down in the desert in Southern California, south of Palm Springs, visiting friends. There is a restaurant in the town of Brawley, in the Imperial Valley south of the Salton Sea, called Brownie's Diner. It's only a few dozen miles from the Mexican border, and a lot of the people who live and work in Brawley, El Centro, and the other Imperial Valley towns are Mexicans who work in the fields and local businesses.

Brownie's Diner in Brawley, California — 17 February 2002.
No, I don't know the people in the picture, and we were
not riding motorcycles that day. But a lot of people were.

I remember the albóndigas soup at Brownie's as a light broth with some tomato in it but full of chunks of carrots, onions, and celery along with the delicious meatballs. I can't remember if the meatballs were made with rice or not — that seems to be the classic style — or if they included mint leaves among the herbs that flavored them — that seems to be classic too. Here's a recipe for sopa de albóndigas that is supposed to be the real thing.

Making masa harina tortillas with the tortilla press

So I made albóndigas soup yesterday and Walt made corn tortillas. We have a tortilla press, thanks to our friends Chris and Tony, who hauled it to Paris from San Francisco last April. You know these are good friends when they are willing to carry something so heavy in their bags all the way across a continent and an ocean. Merci, merci, merci. Or should I say grácias, grácias, grácias?

Authentic corn tortillas

For the albóndigas I used about 600 grams of lean beef stew meat and 200 grams of pork lardons — plain (nature), not salted or smoked — which is chunks of pork side meat. I flavored the meatballs with fresh oregano and parsley, some chili powder, a good pinch of cumin, and of course onions and garlic. I didn't put rice in them, but breadcrumbs, and a couple of eggs.

Albóndigas, or Mexican-style meatballs

Making the broth for the soup was an exercise in cleaning out the freezer. I had a pint of plain chicken stock, a pint of water I had cooked swiss chard in, a pint some something labeled "spinach broth," and a pint of liquid I squeezed out of roasted zucchini pulp. I added a can of chopped tomatoes and their juice, and some chili powder, cumin, and hot paprika. That made a big pot of broth to poach the meatballs in.

Broth, tomatoes, vegetables, and meatballs

Walt says what I made resembled couscous broth more than the sopa de albóndigas he remembers. I did put in more tomato than was called for in the recipes, but I had a whole big can and wanted to use all of it. I also put in a squirt of the North African hot red-pepper paste called harissa. The vegetables are carrots, onions, zucchini, green beans, and swiss chard.

Because it resembles couscous broth, today we're going to eat some more of it but with couscous grain instead of tortillas. And we took a couple of North African merguez (lamb) sausages out of the freezer to grill and serve with it.

Gizzards in your salad

Have you ever eaten chicken gizzards? Duck gizzards? Turkey gizzards? Do you know what a gizzard is? Here's what the American Heritage Dictionary says:

giz·zard n. 1. A modified muscular pouch immediately behind the stomach in the alimentary canal of birds, having a thick lining and often containing ingested grit, which aids in the mechanical breakdown of seeds before digestion.

The gizzard is one of the things we include in the term "giblets" in English, along with the heart, liver, and neck. Sometimes we put the giblets in stuffings or in gravies. The Larousse Gastronomique says that something called "giblet-soup" is a highly prized specialty in England. I found a recipe here.

Gésiers confits — pre-cooked chicken gizzards —
being finished off in a sauté pan for use in a salad

In France, one of the luncheon salads you see in a lot of cafés and restaurants is a salade de gésiers — a gizzard salad (gésier being the French word for gizzard, obviously). I just searched for the term in my blog, and see that I wrote about gizzards earlier here. And there are a lot of recipes in French for salade de gésiers listed here.

The makings for a salade de gésiers — the tomatoes,
cucumber, and green beans are from our garden

We had a salade de gésiers for lunch yesterday. You can buy the gizzards — chicken, duck, or turkey, as you like — in little packages at the supermarket in France. They are confits, which mean they've been cooked slow and long in duck fat until they are very tender, and then vacuum-packed in a plastic pouch. You take them out of the packaging and sauté them for a few minutes in a pan and they're ready to eat.

If you don't cook gizzards for a long time at low temperature, they will be chewy, or even rubbery, because the gizzard is a tough muscle. I bought some fresh once and just sautéed them for a few minutes. They were nearly inedible (we ate them anyway, chewing vigorously).

Salade de gésiers de poulet — chicken gizzard salad

To make the gizzard salad, we had lettuce of course, some tomato wedges, a sliced cucumber, a boiled egg, some steamed green beans, and some boiled new potatoes. We dressed all that plus the gizzards with vinaigrette made with Dijon mustard, cider vinegar, and sunflower oil. Some good French bread is required, as is a glass of red wine. This salad is a full meal, not a starter course.

Gizzards do not have a strong taste. Walt said they were like eating bacon, but not as salty or fatty. I think you might have to wait until you come to France to try them, but don't be afraid to order a salade de gésiers for lunch in a French café if you get a chance.

Digital cameras

Warning — geeky digital camera topic...
I've added a new digital camera to my collection. I now have a Kodak that goes back to 2001, a Canon that I got in January 2002, another Canon I bought in 2005, and now a brand new Panasonic. This probably seems a little excessive, but as you know I spend a good amount of my free time taking, processing, and posting pictures. And remember, all my time is free time these days! Such are the joys of unemploym... er, retirement.

The Canon Pro90 IS compared to the Panasonic TZ3 — both

cameras have a 10x zoom and an image stabilization feature.

The new Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3 is a replacement for a monster of an Canon camera that has served me well but now seems much too heavy to haul around much. The 2001-vintage Canon Pro90 IS weighs 24 oz. — 1½ lbs. — whereas the TZ3 weighs just 8 oz. Both cameras have a 10x zoom, and both have an image stabilization feature that makes it possible to take sharp telephoto pictures without having to use a tripod.

There is a great difference in the size of the LCD screens on
the two cameras. The Canon Pro90 has an electronic viewfinder
that I like a lot, while the Panasonic has no viewfinder at all.

As usual, there are a lot of trade-offs. The Canon Pro90 has a lens that extends to 370 mm, while the TZ3 only goes up to
280 mm. That means I won't get the same long shots as before, unless the "extended optical zoom" feature of the new camera works well. I haven't tried it yet. But I won't have to carry around what is the equivalent of a paving stone to take good pictures. And it's not like I'm getting rid of the Canon Pro90. As long as its batteries will continue recharging, I'll have use of it.

The Panasonic camera will probably also replace the other Canon camera I have, which is a Powershot S70 that I bought in November 2005. I've never been happy with the S70, and I think it's because it doesn't have an image stabilization feature. I get far too many blurry pictures when I use it in low-light situations. Its strong point, and it's a very strong one, is its macro feature, which lets me take great close-up shots when the light is good and bright.

The Panasonic TZ3 (silver) is not really any bigger than the Canon
S70 (black), but it has a much longer zoom and image stabilization.

The Canon S70 has an optical viewfinder, but I almost never use it. Instead, I compose my pictures using the LCD screen. That's why I think I can live with the Panasonic camera, which doesn't have any viewfinder at all — as long as the battery doesn't get drained too quickly by the big screen. Only time and using the camera will tell me that story.

The LCD screen on the Canon S70 is much smaller
than the Panasonic TZ3's big screen.

Both the S70 and the TZ3 have good wide-angle capabilities. The lens range is 28 mm at the lower end. The S70 has a 3.6x zoom, taking it up to 100 mm at the higher end, while the TZ3 has its much better 10x/280 mm capabilities. Unless the TZ3's macro feature is pretty lame, I probably won't use the S70 much any more.

What's the price on all this? Well, I paid about $700 for the Pro90 in late 2001, $400 for the S70 in late 2005, and now a little less than $300 for the new Panasonic. These are my splurges. I hardly ever go to restaurants, I don't travel much any more, I don't buy clothes (as anybody who knows me will tell you), and I drive a tiny seven-year-old Peugeot.

One of the things I didn't want to do was buy a digital camera that used a different memory card from my other cameras, which take the big old Compact Flash cards. I have eight or ten of those old cards, in different capacities.

The TZ3 uses the newer, smaller Secure Digital (SD) cards. I thought buying one of those with sufficient capacity would add a lot to the cost of a new camera. But when I went on Amazon to see, I found I could get a 2 GB card like I wanted for ... get this ... $15.00. Even with shipping, the card, which has twice the capacity of any other memory card I have, cost less than $22.00. How could I resist that?

I bought both the new camera and the new card from Amazon in the U.S. and had them shipped to my mother in North Carolina. She then shipped them to me in France (the package took only five days to make it across the Atlantic!). Buying the same two items here, with the low dollar and the high French value-added tax (about 20%) would have cost at least twice as much.

I haven't mentioned my oldest digital camera, which is a 2000-vintage Kodak DC4800 that cost me about $400 back then. Until now, it has been the camera I use in the kitchen to take close-ups of all the food we make. It has a small screen, a 3x optical zoom, and an optical viewfinder. It has been a great camera.

The Kodak is going into retirement.

The problem with the old Kodak is that it is now very creaky. The batteries I have for it won't hold a charge for very long, and I don't really want to buy any new ones now. One advantage of the Kodak camera is that you can run it off a wall outlet, so you don't even need a battery to use it in the kitchen the way I do. But now the socket that the power cord plugs into on the camera itself is loose, making the electrical connection bad. I don't think there's anything I can do about that, so the Kodak is going into retirement.

Oh, I haven't mentioned megapixels. I'm not a megapixel believer, and certainly not a fanatic. For my purposes, 3-megapixel pictures are plenty big, and I have to reduce those in size for my blog anyway. I don't print many pictures, especially not at large sizes, and I guess having mega-megapixel pictures is good for that.

The Kodak takes pictures at 3 megapixels and the Canon Pro90 at 2.5 megapixels. The newer Canon S70 and the Panasonic TZ3 both can take 7-megapixel photos, but I set them to about 3 megapixels for my purposes.

By the way the TZ in the Panasonic TZ3 name stands for "Travel Zoom." The camera is designed to meet the needs of travelers, I guess. I hope it meets mine.

Andouillettes for lunch

One of the few local foods I have a problem with is a kind of sausage called an andouillette. It's such a nice sounding name — pronounced [ahn-dou-YET] — for something that has a strong odor and taste, at least to the American nose and palate.

Andouille is basically a bigger sausage made pretty much the same way as andouillette. Louisiana-style andouille is a different thing entirely however. In Louisiana, andouille is straightforward kind of pork sausage (though one book I have says it is made from "stomach and neck meat"). It can be pretty spicy.

Fluorescent roses in the back yard to dress up this odiferous topic...

In France, andouille and andouillette are made from the pig's intestines. In other words, it's what we might call a chit'lin' (or chitterling) sausage in the U.S. South. The Larousse Gastronomique says: « Les andouillettes sont préparées comme les andouilles, mais avec des boyaux moins gros. » That is, "andouillettes are made the same way andouilles are, but with skinnier bowels." I'm using the word "bowel" because it is a literal translation of the French term boyau. And because it gives you a better idea what we are talking about here.

Why did we decide to eat andouillettes yesterday? Well, it wasn't really a decision. We were invited to lunch by Maryvonne and Bernard, our neighbors across the road. They also invited an old American friend of theirs who is now 84 years old and who hadn't been back to France in five or six years, plus a French friend of his.

A hibiscus flower

Why Maryvonne decided to serve andouillettes to a group of Americans, I'll never know. Even she knew it was a dangerous thing to do — she actually said so as she brought the plate of sausages to the table, their odor filling the room — and she also brought out a plate of lamb chops that those who couldn't eat the sausages could have instead.

Well, I figured that since Maryvonne bought and prepared the andouillettes, I should try them. Her food is always delicious. The andouillettes she had were made in Vouvray with Vouvray wine, which is one of the highest-quality local wines. The older American gentleman didn't didn't turn up his nose at the prospect, and the three French people were enthusiastic about the andouillettes, almost oohing and aahing about how good they smelled and how good they would taste.

Mille-pertuis, a.k.a. St. John's wort

I told Maryvonne that andouillettes are one of the rare French foods I wasn't crazy about, but that I would try them. « Il y a de la moutarde, j'espère, » I added. Some of that strong Dijon mustard, the kind that sets your nostrils on fire and feels like it's going to blow the top of your head off when you put a little too much of it on your steak or sausage, would go a long way toward masking the taste of the pork guts... er, lovely andouillettes.

The andouillette is kind of a cult food in France. If you like it, you are French. If you don't, you are probably not. It's that simple. I guess I am not. There's a club. It's called the A.A.A.A.A. — L'Association amicale des amateurs d'authentiques andouillettes. It holds competitions and gives out awards to the charcutiers who make the best andouillettes in France.

A salmon-colored rose in the neighbors' garden

The city of Troyes, east of Paris, is probably the best-known andouillette-producing place in France, but cities and towns including Arras in the north and Lourdes in the south, along with Cambrai, Paris, Aubagne in Provence, and Fleurie in Beaujolais also brag about the andouillettes they make.

The standard joke about andouillettes goes like this: « Une bonne andouillette, ça sent la merde... mais pas trop ! » — A good andouillette smells like sh*t... but not too much!

Andouillettes and andouilles are sold pre-cooked — poached — and ready for grilling. I assume the ones we ate were poached in white wine, and the ones made in Troyes might be poached in champagne. (Some might say that's a waste of good champagne, but never mind.) By the way, the word « Andouille ! » can be hurled at someone as an insult, usually in the form « Espèce d'andouille ! » It means something like " You bloody fool!"

A pork butcher's shop in Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule,
a wine village in the Auvergne region.
The owner claims to be the "King of the Andouillette."

Afterwards, I asked Walt what he thought of the andouillette he ate. He said he put so much Dijon mustard on it that he couldn't really taste it. He said he thought it contained a hint of cinnamon, and he might be right. And he also pointed out that he didn't have seconds.

Well, I did have seconds. Southerners are polite that way, you know. I didn't enjoy the second piece any more than I had enjoyed the first, either. I slathered on the mustard both times. And when I say a piece of sausage, I mean exactly that. Neither one of us ate anything approaching a whole andouillette.

But even the Larousse Gastronomique is clear on this point. It says, after a paragraph listing the various side dishes — mashed potatoes, apple sauce, sautéed onions, raw red cabbage, celery-root purée, lentils, red beans, etc. — that you might serve with andouillette: « Une seule certitude : l'andouillette exige une bonne moutarde forte. » One thing is certain: andouillette demands a good strong mustard.

Callie lurking behind bunches of wine grapes

I'll tell you how good the andouillette was: on the same platter, Maryvonne also served some of the sausages called boudins noirs — variously known in English as "blood sausage" or "black pudding." Between the two pieces of andouillette, I ate one of those just to cleanse my palate.

By the way, you really learn to appreciate a good red wine when you eat foods like these!

Cochon de lait — suckling pig

A few days ago I wrote about the first time I arrived in France, in December 1969. I was a college student. We flew from New York City to Paris and stayed in the Hôtel Monge in the 5th arrondissement. And the director of our study program, a native Belgian who was a French professor in the U.S., took us as a group to a restaurant where we were presented with a suckling pig, a cochon de lait, as our dinner.

I remember that eating the meat of that suckling pig reminded me of eating pork and pork barbecue in eastern North Carolina, though the cochon de lait was not cooked with a very spicy sauce. The meat was very tender and tasty. I knew at that instant that I was going to love French food and cooking.

Last week, one of our Saint-Aignan supermarkets included a full page in its weekly advertising booklet advertising cochon de lait for sale at special prices. The first three items on the special sale are a small ham (jambonnette,) a shoulder (épaule), and a crown roast (couronne) of suckling pig.

The ham and shoulder will each serve eight people, and the crown roast will serve six. Each comes with a "free" bottle of Bordeaux wine as part of the price, which is approximately 20 euros a kilogram. That would be about $12.00 U.S. a pound.

A little more surprising from an American point of view is the whole piglet (un porcelet — a pig is either a cochon or a porc) that you can get for the same price. It comes with four bottles of Bordeaux. The piglet weighs in at about six kilograms and will serve from 18 to 20 people. You are told to cook it in the oven for 1½ hours at something over 400ºF.

If you are not having dinner for 20, you can get a demi-porcelet — a half-piglet — for the same price per kilogram. It comes, of course, with two bottles of red Bordeaux wine.

My mother says she thinks the pork in France is especially good, and she has credentials — she has lived her whole life in the Carolinas, where people raise a lot of hogs and eat a lot of pork. I believe I read, though, that the French consume more pork per capita than people in any other country. With all the ham, sausages, pâtés, rillettes, and other charcuterie products people eat here, that wouldn't surprise me.

The Larousse Gastronomique food encyclopedia says a porcelet or cochon de lait is a two-month-old pig. The de lait part of the cochon de lait name indicates that the animal has only been fed its mother's milk (it's a suckling pig, and lait means milk). The encyclopedia says the cochon de lait is often served stuffed (with forcemeat), and is usually spit roasted, but can also be braised or poached.

Ratatouille

The big weather front I talked about a couple of days ago has gone through now. It pretty much went by, actually. There was wind and rain in Brittany and Normandy, and close to us on the west and north of the Loire Valley. But the storm mostly missed us here in Saint-Aignan.

It was gray and calm, and fairly warm by our standards (maybe 73ºF), all day yesterday, and we got a little bit of rain starting at about 6:30 p.m. During the day, I talked to Bruno, our grape-grower/winemaker neighbor, and said to him how strange the weather is. "We've never seen a summer like this before," he said. "At least it's not raining today. The grapes don't need any more rain."

The other day when I was out weeding in the garden, I found — miracle of miracles! — two little eggplants that were hanging off the bottom of a plant, hidden in the weeds. The weeds, I'll admit, had grown up pretty high. The eggplants looked ready to eat, so I picked them. They were touching the ground, so I figured they were as likely to start rotting as they were to grow any bigger.

The yellow squash gives ratatouille a nice color.

We already had some yellow summer squash that we had picked over the past few days, and I managed to gather six or eight little red tomatoes too. All I had to add was an onion, a couple of cloves of garlic, some dried thyme and bay leaves, and a few tablespoons of olive oil, and I had everything I needed to make ratatouille.

So the garden is not a total bust. Now that I've done some weeding, the plants have breathing room and might start producing. The weeding is hard work because the mauvaises herbes are so well established.

It's embarrassing how thick and high the weeds got.
But it was just too wet to do much about it for weeks and weeks.

The sun is out this morning and the ground must be softened up after the few millimeters of rain we had yesterday evening. I need to get out and continue my garden work. Maybe I'll be able to pull out some of those deeply rooted weeds that are threatening to suffocate the eggplants and bell peppers.

Steak-frites

The meal most often served in French cafés and restaurants is steak and French fries — steak-frites, as they say. For decades it's been the French version of our American burger and fries, but with the advent of McDonald's and other fast-food chains, I wonder if the burger isn't now catching up. (Hamburgers catch up... ketchup... ha ha ha.)

French steaks are very lean pieces of meat. Some Americans are put off by them, because they are so different from the "marbled" corn-fed beef we are used to eating in the States. Steaks in France do have a different flavor compared to U.S. beef, and I assume that too is because the cattle graze on grass. The steaks you get in French restaurants or cafés are often a lot smaller than American steaks, too.

A French-style steak-frites, served with sauce béarnaise.
The lean French beef is good served with rich buttery sauces.

The word for beef in French is bœuf, which is also the word for the animal we call an ox. In English, we have one word for the name of the animal and a different word for the name of the meat we eat (sheep/mutton, pig/pork, and so on). In French, the language uses the same term for both, so you eat pig, sheep, or ox directly, not indirectly, if you see what I mean.

The different cuts of beef that are grilled as steaks (variously spelled steak, steack, biftek, or bifteck) are bavette (flank steak), entrecôte (ribeye), rumsteck (rumpsteak, according to the dictionary, or round steak, I think), faux-filet (sirloin), and tournedos or filet de bœuf. If you want a thicker steak, you order a pavé de bœuf — literally, a "paving stone" of beef. I think it's often pavé de rumsteak.

All the French cuts of meat are slightly different from the U.S. cuts because the meat itself is different and so are the butchering techniques and conventions. For example, there's a cut called onglet, which the Robert-Collins dictionary doesn't translate but just calls "prime cut of beef" (in italics in the dictionary). I think it might be called hanger steak in America — or is it skirt steak? Or are they the same thing? By the way, filet mignon is a term that in the U.S. applies to beef, but in France means pork, specifically pork tenderloin.

Because the French steaks are so lean, they tend to get very tough if they are cooked much past medium-rare, and in France well-done steaks are considered inedible by many. In response to the question « Quelle cuisson pour le steak ? » (How do you like it done?), the correct answers are bleue (very rare — almost raw, really — just flipped over in the pan and slightly browned on each side) or saignante (which more or less means "bloody" or very rare).

According to the dictionary, saignant as a degree of doneness means « viande rôtie ou grillée, peu cuite et dans laquelle il reste du sang » — meat roasted or grilled but only lightly cooked and in which there remains some blood. Bleu as applied to meat means « Très saignant, à peine grillé » — very rare, barely grilled.

Another acceptable answer to the degree-of-doneness question about steaks is à point, which means "just right" but usually comes out as about medium rare in American terms. In theory it means "medium" but as anywhere, the actual degree of doneness you'll get if you order your steak à point will vary from place to place and time to time. Cooking beef is not exactly a science. Judged by American standards, the French tend to undercook their steaks.

On an Internet travel forum I participate in, an American woman on her first trip to France wrote in and said that after eating at one Paris café, she had realized it was a terrible restaurant because the steak was hardly cooked at all. "It was like eating beef sushi," she said. "I'm used to raw fish, but I like my beef just slightly pink, not raw." I told her that that was how steak is served in France — nearly raw — unless you specify that it be cooked more thoroughly, and that the café is question is not a bad restaurantat all, IMHO. I've eaten there three or four times and enjoyed it. It's all a matter of conventions and expectations.

This was yesterday's lunch. Béarnaise is a hollandaise sauce
that is made using a reduction of vinegar, white wine, shallots,
and tarragon as its base. And lots of butter and egg yolks, bien sûr.

I haven't had a hamburger in a French restaurant in many years, but I remember from time gone by that the hamburger would be made very thick out of very lean meat and served extremely rare. If you were expecting an American-style hamburger, it was surprising or even off-putting to be served such a rare patty of almost purple ground beef.

So if you really like your steak cooked well-done — well, then don't order steak in France. That's what a typical French person would tell you. Cooked well-done, it won't be good, or even edible. It's too tough, and it'll be dry. In French, well-done is bien cuit — well cooked — but you don't even need to know that expression!

More rain moving in

Another big wet-weather system is moving into the northwestern parts of France this morning. I just watched the weather forecast presented by Patrice Drevet on France 2 television's Télématin morning show.

Patrice shows us a front moving off the Atlantic and
over Brittany this morning. It looks wild and wet.
Saint-Aignan is in the hazy band more toward the interior.

Those 70 and 90 numbers are wind speeds. Those are kilometers, and 70 kph = 40 to 45 mph, while 90 kph is about 55 mph. It will be windy and wet in Brittany this morning — but it often is. It's too bad for all the Parisians (and others) who went to Brittany for their August vacations this so-called summer. And tomorrow, August 15, is a national holiday.

Wednesday's forecast is for rain and showers
over two-thirds of the country.

By tomorrow, the main area of rain will have moved through Saint-Aignan and will be sitting over Bordeaux, the Massif Central, Burgundy, and Champagne. But we'll still have showers and 40 mph winds here in the Loire Valley. So we expect a very rainy, windy evening and night, and that should continue into tomorrow morning.

Thursday looks like a blustery, damp day
nearly everywhere in France.

Voilà — that takes care of the greater part of this holiday week. I think Walt is going to try to mow the grass today, before the rain starts. I weeded a big section of the vegetable garden yesterday morning, hoping that by giving the bell pepper and eggplant plants some breathing room, they might start to produce some fruit. But the damp chilly rain coming in won't help them be more productive, that's for sure.

Puffy clouds in the afternoon, 13 August 2007

Yesterday was a nice day, and that made for about three in a row. It seems that's about as many as we can expect this summer. The woman named Jeanine that we had lunch with at the neighbors' house yesterday said she felt sure that September and October are going to be warm and sunny. She based that on the warm and sunny April we had. That's the local wisdom, I guess — warm in April, warm in September.

Of course, some people make fun of such old folk sayings. One parody of such predictions is: Beau temps en novembre, Noël en décembre. With that one, you can't really go wrong.

Early morning clouds, 14 August 2007,
show the change in the weather.

You can see that the weather has changed when you look at the two cloudscapes above. Yesterday's puffy clouds have given way to higher, hazier looking bands of clouds. That's the storm front coming in, pushing the warmer, nicer weather off the the southeast.

Callie in her bat-out-of-hell pose

Callie was kind of wild on her walk this morning. I think it's because I made her wait about an hour longer than she wanted before we went out. I slept in — I didn't get up until 7:30. I tried to take some pictures of her running like a maniac through the vineyard, but my camera wasn't fast enough.

Callie rolling in the tall grass

Just to show me she's still the boss, Callie ran ahead of me, found a puddle in a tractor rut, and dived in, splashing mud and brown water all over. Then she found some tall grass and rolled around in it just to make sure she got as messy as possible. That'll teach me to make her wait an hour longer than she'd like before going out for the morning walk. I had to give her a shower when we got home.

A nice Sunday lunch in the garden

Sunset at La Renaudière, 18 August 2004
Click the picture to enlarge it

This morning I was looking back at pictures I took in 2006, 2005, and 2004 at around this same time of year. A lot of the pictures show loads of luscious red tomatoes on our plants out in the vegetable garden. That is slightly depressing, since our garden looks so sad this year. But I found this colorful picture of a 2004 sunset and decideded to post it today. I didn't start this blog until October 2005, so I have other pictures from earlier times I might decide to post here too.

Today our neighbors Annick and Jean-Michel invited us over to lunch. The other two guests were two women who are both 80 or older (I believe; I know one is 80 because we went to her 80th birthday dinner in July). We were able to sit outside all afternoon, and the weather was very pleasant. We were sitting in the shade of a couple of big trees, and I was comfortable in a short-sleeved shirt. So summer is not a complete bust after all. Yesterday was nice and sunny.

One of the most interesting things about the afternoon (besides Annick's delicious food) was the way the woman named Jeanine, who is a Saint-Aignan native as far as I know, speaks French. She rolls her Rs, as you roll the Rs when you speak Italian or Spanish. Usually the French R is pronounced in the back of the throat, but Jeanine trills her Rs on her tongue. This wasn't the first time I'd heard this way of speaking French around here, but it was the first time I'd had a chance to spend some much time with a person who speaks this way. I think it's a country accent.

Jeanine was very good with Callie. Yes, they invited us AND said we should bring the dog because we would be spending the afternoon outside in the garden. Jeanine, who used to have a border collie herself (it died a couple of years ago at age 15), said it is important to give dogs like Callie a chance to be around groups of people so they can learn how to behave correctly. She was firm with Callie, telling her non, non, non ! when Callie tried to jump up on her lap. Once we started eating, Callie wandered off and explored the yard for a while, then came back and slept quietly under the table.

Both Jeanine and Josette, who are good friends and about the same age, are sharp as a tack, witty, talkative, and energetic. We talked about local characters, mushroom caves, George Sand, dogs, and grape-growing. It was a lot of fun to spend the afternoon with them, as well as to be able to sit outside and enjoy nice weather for a change.

Annick's lunch started with a series of tapas-type small plates (in French, des amuse-gueule or amuse-bouche) served in those Chinese-style soup spoons with a flat bottom. One was a spoonful of guacomole (which is quite exotic here) with a couple of little slices of tomato on top. Another was chopped shrimp salad in a tasty mayonnaise sauce with a little red shrimp on top. A third was a kind of egg salad (I think that's what it was). There might have been a fourth tapas plate, but I can't remember... Then she had little fish and vegetable pâtés (terrines) served on the same plate with an herbed tomato salad as a first course.

The main course was a dish of green beans from the garden, along with a ratatouille-type vegetable mix and a lightly curried sauté of guinea-fowl breast cut into bite-size pieces and cooked with raisins and pine nuts. There was a cheese course following that, and dessert was a vanilla-flavored creme (pudding) served over sliced ripe pears with a crispy crêpe as a garnish.

Jean-Michel gave us champagne as an apéritif and then opened a bottle of 2004 Alsace Riesling, to go with the tapas and first courses. Then he followed with a bottle of the local Gamay to go with the main course and the cheese. The Gamay was made by one of our favorite local producteurs, Jean-Christophe Mandard, who lives and grows his grapes in Mareuil-sur-Cher just three or four miles west of Saint-Aignan.

Sorry, I didn't take my camera with me. Sometimes you have to resist that temptation and just concentrate on enjoying the conversation of the people you're having lunch with. Oh, and the food too.

How is this for edgy?

It is

ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN
to touch the wires even if
they have fallen to the ground
DANGER OF DEATH

This plaque is posted on the concrete utility pole at the end of our road at La Renaudière. The picture itself is a squared circle.

August? Ha!

Okay, Walt built a fire in the wood stove yesterday afternoon. On August 10! We are not exactly having a heat wave. I guess this is a summer for the history books. The non-summer summer.

I read about all of you people on the East Coast sweltering in temperatures approaching or even exceeding 100ºF. Our high temperature yesterday was 17.2ºC — that's 63ºF. We've had only three days so far in August when the temperature reached 75ºF. Those days felt hot because it got up to 80º, and one day it hit 85º. But that just makes all the other days seem that much colder.

One garden success this year has been the artichokes.
There are three of them on this plant.

People are complaining about the weather, but the optimists point out that we often have une belle arrière saison here in Saint-Aignan — that means nice warm weather in September and October, the "back season." I'm afraid the only summer we might have this year will have to be an Indian Summer.

We have also had close to an inch of rain this week. Luckily, artichokes like cool, gray weather — that's why so many of them are grown in Brittany and along the northern California coast. Ours are one of the few bright spots in our garden this summer. If we can figure out how to protect the plants from freezing this winter, we might have a decent crop of artichokes next year.

Yesterday I actually picked half a dozen little red tomatoes out in the garden. They don't look very healthy, but we'll try to eat them today to see if they are any good at all. We are getting zucchinis and cucumbers, and there are a lot of pumpkins out in the pumpkin patch. We are also getting some nice haricots verts from the few plants that survived the damp chilly weather in June and July.

Sushi master at work

Yesterday Walt made some more sushi rolls for lunch. We had a ripe avocado left, and another cucumber from the garden. We had some shrimp in the freezer, and there was sushi rice left over from a couple of days before. And we have plenty of nori sheets — that's the seaweed you wrap the rice rolls in. Walt is becoming an ace at sushi making, which is supposed to be hard to master.

Just as we sat down to lunch, somebody rang the front bell. It was Gisèle stopping by just to say hi before she went to the neighbors' for lunch. We showed her the sushi rolls. I'm not sure she had ever seen them before or knew what they were, but she said she was against the idea of eating raw fish. We told her we made our with cooked shrimp this time.

Some recipe said to put a sheet of plastic wrap between the sushi mat
and the nori sheet, but the plastic just got in the way.
It's better to roll up the susi directly on the mat.

"You bought these, right?" she said. "Vous ne les avez pas faits..." You didn't make them yourselves. Yes we did, we told her. They are rice, cucumber, avocado, and shrimp wrapped in algae sheets. Seaweed? I showed her the nori sheets in their package. She didn't look too enthusiastic. I guess we should have a sushi party for our local friends. I'm sure they would like it if they tried it.

These were the first rolls Walt made. He said he used too much
rice and not enough cucumber, avocado, and shrimp in these.
I thought they were delicious.

Next time, I'm going to buy fish. I'll ask the fish monger at the Saturday market in Saint-Aignan for some sushi-grade salmon or tuna. That's what a fellow blogger (Amy H.'s blog topic about it is here) who lives over on the other side of Tours did. The fish stand in Saint-Aignan has high-quality fish and shellfish, and I'm sure the woman who runs it will sell us good fish that can be eaten uncooked.

Local readers

Yesterday we had lunch with our neighbors. We were invited by Maryvonne and Bernard, who have the house across the street. They live in Blois and spend summers out here in their country house. They had invited us, our neighbors Annick and Jean-Michel (who are my age), Josette (who is an ex-neighbor, really, because she sold us her house and moved to Tours), and Gisèle (a friend who doesn't live in our neighborhood but on the other side of the village).

Three of the people who were at the lunch yesterday are in their mid- to late 70s. One is 80. Three are 60-ish, and one is approaching 50. You can figure out the average for yourself. All of us are but one are retired from the working life.

I noticed yesterday that Annick referred to our neighborhood, which I call a hamlet in French, as a "village." She said a lot of the "villages" around our commune are getting street lighting. That's something we don't really want. We want to see the sky and the stars at night, and not have that soft light obliterated by harsh electric light. I might have to talk to the people at the village hall about light pollution. Annick said the street lighting is not likely to come to our area any time soon, so that's good for now.

Maybe it won't happen in our lifetimes.

Josette told me yesterday that she has discovered this blog. I was surprised. Her daughter Sophie found it when I sent her an e-mail a few days ago. There's a link in my signature. I don't think I had ever "had e-mail" with her before. Josette said she and Sophie spent some time trying to decipher the text, but mostly they looked at the pictures. They could kind of see what it was all about.

I hope I haven't said anything about the neighbors in my blog that they don't like. And I hope they don't feel like I'm violating their privacy or or spying on them or keeping secrets. My motives are honorable, as you know. I'm doing all this en tout bien tout honneur... as they say.

I've added what they call a "page element" in the sidebar column on the right side of the screen to explain to French-speaking readers what this blog is all about. I wrote it for my neighbors and others who don't speak or read much or any English.

Aix connections

In 1969, Richard Nixon became president, I turned twenty (on n'a pas tous les jours vingt ans !), Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, I drew a high number in the draft lottery, and I flew on an airplane for the first time in my short life. The flight I took brought me to France, also for the first time in my short life. If I hadn't drawn a high number in the draft lottery, I might have ended up in Vietnam instead, in a uniform.

Why am I thinking about this? It's partly because a woman from Knoxville, Tennessee, who with her husband and daughter has been spending a lot of time in Provence over the past few years and writing about it, recently took an intensive three-week French language course in Aix and blogged about it here. My first stay in France was spring semester 1970, in Aix.

I followed along as Kaydee from Knoxville blogged about her experiences at the language school and described what it was like to live with a French family for those three weeks. As so often happens, the "French family" turned out not to be a family of the kind she had imagined, but at the end, after a period of adaptation, she judged it to be a good experience. It was fun to read about her adventures and encounters in Aix.

For me to say I came to France for the first time in 1969 is a little bit of an exaggeration. We flew out of JFK airport on December 29 in the evening. I remember it was snowing and windy. We were a group of about 30 students, and I knew only one other participant in the program the day we left. Eleanor and I had taken some classes together and realized we had mutual friends who owned a beach house in my home town. I saw Eleanor in Washington DC last fall for the first time in many years.

We arrived in Paris and the director of the study abroad program put us on a chartered bus for the ride into the city from the airport. We stayed at the Hôtel Monge, on the rue Monge, near the Place Monge, in the 5th arrondissement on the edge of the Latin Quarter. We were three students to a room. The other two guys and I in my room carefully examined the bidet, which was out in the middle of the room and not in a bathroom, and determined that it was some kind of fancy urinal.

The director of the program, a francophone Belgian named Jean Leblon, then took us all to dinner in a restaurant somewhere in the Latin Quarter. He had arranged a group dinner of cochon de lait, suckling pig on a platter, probably to shock us into realizing we were in France but also, I'm sure, because it was a very good and succulent dish. The little pig just sat there with an apple in its mouth, all roasted.

We went back to the airport (Le Bourget, I'm sure) the next morning and flew to Marseille, where another bus met us and took us into Aix. I don't remember how I got to the place where I was going to live while there. Maybe the bus dropped each student off at her or his place. Mine was a row house up on the northern fringes of Aix, and the people who lived there were an older couple whose children had grown up and moved out. They rented a room to me and another to a guy my age from Texas, who was on a different study program. Meals other than breakfast were not included in the deal.

We shared a bathroom. The interesting thing about the bathroom was the little wall-mounted gas water heater, which you had to light with a match every time you needed some hot water. It took me a while to get the hang of it. You had to press and hold a button with one hand while you fumbled with a big box of kitchen matches with the other and tried to strike one. And even after you went through all that, all your got was a trickle of hot — scalding, in fact — water that you had to carefully mix with the cold water so that you didn't get burned or frozen.

That first afternoon, the woman in charge (I don't even remember her name; she was just Madame) showed me the room and carefully explained that before going to bed at night I was to take the bedspread off the bed and carefully fold it up and put in on a shelf in the closet. I understood.

I looked out the window and was amazed to be looking out over a big valley with some hills in the distance. « Quel beau vue ! », I said in my best French. Madame corrected me — the word vue is feminine, so it's Quelle belle vue ! — and I felt like a moron.

After she left me alone in the room to rest for a few hours, I decided to stretch out on the bed and take a nap. When she came to wake me up — we students must have had some kind of orientation event to attend down in Aix late in the day — she was very upset that I hadn't taken the bedspread off the bed before lying down. She thought I hadn't understood a word she said, but I had. I had just taken her very literally, and I wasn't "going to bed" so I didn't bother to take the spread off. I had probably wrinkled it. What a moron!

The walk down to the school (the program had its own classrooms and teachers) took me 45 minutes that day and every morning. I think there might have been a bus but I don't remember ever taking it. The walk down in the morning was easy, but the walk home in the evening was brutal. It was uphill and the hill was steep. I lost 10 or 15 lbs. that semester, despite the good food. Because I didn't get dinner with the "family" and because the last bus up the hill was at something like 6:00 p.m., I had to hoof it home every night.

Every morning I would walk through a big outdoor market on the way down to school and get an apple, I remember. Sometimes I had dinner at the restaurant universitaire but it was so crowded and there was always a crush to get in. I mean a literal crush, where you felt like you might be seriously injured by the crowd's pushing and shoving. We thought it was funny but also didn't like it much. And the resto U was on the south side of Aix, so it made my walk home that much longer — more than an hour.

After a while, a group of us students found a little restaurant we really liked and where we could eat a decent meal for a dollar or so -- five or six French francs at the time. It was called Chez Nénette, if I remember correctly, but I couldn't tell you where it was in Aix. In the old town somewhere. I remember that the food was simple and was as good as or better than any I had ever had before.

Pignon cookies ready for the oven...

The other thing I remember about food in Aix is a little cookie that I found in the boulangeries and pâtisseries there and that I think was just called a pignon. It was a little crescent-shaped cookie studded with pine nuts, which are called pignons de pin — thus the name. I loved them. I've never found them anywhere else in France.

...and fresh out of the oven

And that's how this all started. The other day on the Slow Travel forum Kaydee from Knoxville-by-way-of-Provence posted a question asking people what items they most enjoyed buying in French bakeries besides the usual bread and croissants. People came up with a lot of ideas and suggestions, of course.

They seemed to continue browning even after
I took them out of the oven.

I asked Kaydee if they still made and sold pignons in bakeries in Aix and other towns in Provence. She found some and even took a picture of them for me. They were the ones. That made me look for a recipe, and I found one on the Internet here. It turns out that pignons are very simple cookies — just almond powder, sugar, egg whites, and pine nuts. So I made some yesterday afternoon. The recipes call them croissants aux pignons, but they aren't flaky like the classic croissant; they're just crescent-shaped.

Here's the recipe I found in my Provençal cookbook.

Once I knew the cookies were called croissants aux pignons and not just pignons, I looked them up in a cookbook I have called La Cuisine provençale d'aujourd'hui, by Florence de Andreis. It was published in 1980, so I guess that's what the pignon cookies were already called back then. I probably bought the book when Walt and I were in Provence in 1993. Did you see Walt's pictures of Aix that he published on his blog the other day? Oh, and these too.

Eating the pignons wasn't exactly a Proustian experience for me, because I had been thinking about Aix and my days there for a while already. But the ones I made were easy to do and good to eat. They a little crisp on the outside but chewy on the inside. I'll make them again.