An afternoon walk in summertime

Yesterday afternoon it was my turn to walk Callie. It was a breezy summer afternoon, warmer than I expected. I put on a long-sleeved shirt over my tee-shirt but I was too hot almost immediately as we started down the hill on the north side of the house.

This butterfly seemed to wait for me to take its picture.

We walked along between vineyard plots, with the rows running away from us on either side of the so-called road. As we got down to the edge of the woods, I noticed the butterfly. It kept landing on the ground just a few feet ahead of me. I changed my camera to 7-megapixel mode and used the zoom lens to get a good picture. It waited patiently, ignoring the dog. Then it flew away.

Off the left of the road, a barking deer...

As we (the dog and I) entered the woods on a fairly steep tractor path headed downhill, I heard a strange barking on my left. It was a high-pitched cough, not really similar to a dog's bark, but a bark nonetheless. I know friends of mine will laugh when they read this: I think it was a roe deer — a chevreuil in French. They are said to bark, and I believe I heard one barking this time. It's not the first time.

Poppies, known as coquelicots [kuck-lee-coe] in French

Callie went running off into the woods, chasing whatever it was that had barked. I continued down the path, calling her. In a minute, she showed up, panting, with her tongue hanging way out of her mouth. As I said, it was hot. Then I saw the poppies, one of which is pictured above.

The grass "road"along the edge of fallow fields, leading down
to where new houses are being built

We emerged from the woods at the bottom of the hill and followed the grass "road" past some houses. One has a pool. The house is only a year or two old. There was a woman in bathing suit. She glanced at me and Callie and then quickly disappeared indoors. I noticed her car license indicated she was from the Paris area.

New houses near our hamlet

Since we arrived here in 2003, about a dozen new houses have been built within half a mile or so of ours. None is within sight of our place, but when people actually move in the local population will increase significantly. It will be interesting to see how different our neighborhood becomes.

Lourde comme une bouteille de butane...

That title is a line from an old Francis Cabrel song, and it means "as heavy as a bottle of butane" — which is really heavy. Butane gas is what we are using to fuel the gas burners on our new stove (see yesterday's post).

In the song Cabrel talks about getting up in the morning and having his paupières en panne... his eyelids won't work right and they feel as heavy as a bottle of butane. The song is called Sarbacane (1989) and the lyrics are here.

The red thing under the sink is the tank of butane.

I know how heavy a bottle (or tank, in better English) of butane can be. In 1972-73, when I lived in the rainy Normandy city of Rouen, I had a butane space heater in my little apartment. To get a new bottle of butane when one ran out, I had to walk across the old downtown — usually in a fine, cold rain, Rouen being famous as "the chamber pot of Normandy" (Le Pot de chambre de la Normandie) — carrying the empty tank on my shoulder. That wasn't too bad if you liked having wet feet.

But then when I got to the store called a droguerie (don't ask me why), where things like household supplies and cleaning products are sold, I traded in the empty and got a new full tank. Then I had to trudge back across the city, a 30-minute walk, if I remember, with the full, heavy bouteille de butane on my shoulder. I was, what, 24 years old, and I didn't have a car or know anybody who did.

Nowadays, of course, I do have a car, so getting a tank of butane at SuperU or Intermarché or even the little grocery store in our village is easy. We bought two of them, so when the first one is empty we will be able to connect the second one and then go get a refill.

I know you can get propane or butane in the U.S. People use it to fire their gas grills. That's what we did in San Francisco. There we would take in your tank and it would be refilled. Here, you just trade in the empty and get a new one. When you decide turn in your empty for good, you get your ten-euro deposit back.

Steak and French fries, the classic steak-frites,
for lunch yesterday. The steaks, called pavés de rumsteak,
cooked nicely in a heavy metal pan on a hot hot gas burner.

Estimates we've seen say a tank of the size we have should give us between 60 and 100 hours of cooking time. That should last two or three months, I think. We have an electric oven and one electric burner on the stovetop, so we won't use as much gas as we would if it were an all-gas range.

A tank containing 10 kg (22 lbs.) of butane costs €14.95. If that lasts three months, or even two, it won't be expensive, that's for sure.

Our neighborhood doesn't have piped-in gas (called gaz de ville here). We have no choice but to use butane or propane if we want a gas cookstove, and an outdoor propane tank would not be practical. Walt says we have really "gone native" (a British expression, I think) with our little butane tanks. Tant mieux.

Now we're cookin' with gas

The new stove was delivered this afternoon. No dents in the sides this time. Thank you, Darty.

The Brandt KMP 715 W cooker, with both gas and
electric burners and a multi-function electric oven

The head delivery guy — the one who was obviously in charge — did a good-enough job. When I told him that the electrical cord on the old stove was the one that should be attached to the new stove, he stopped what he was doing. Yes, he said yes, that was a better cord, and he used it instead of the patched-together cord he was fabricating and had planned to use. The only reason I knew to tell him which cord to use was that the installation guy last week had told me he was going to use the cord we already had.

Did the "old" ceramic-cooktop stove look more modern?
Bottled gas? Maybe modern isn't all it's cracked up to be.

That first installation specialist was obviously a pro. He knew his job. Today's delivery guy, when he was stumped, had a moment of insecurity and told me: "I'm a student and just doing this job for the summer." Then he had a second thought and added: "But I plan to make a career of delivering and installing kitchen appliances, of course." Ha ha ha.

Anyway, he and his assistant got the old stove out and the new one hooked up. But it took Walt to figure out how the bottle of butane needed to be activated. The installer was trying to figure it out. It turned out there was a button on the gas bottle that needed to be pushed several times to get the gas flowing. When it finally worked, no problem. Whoosh! Let there be fire.

The tea kettle is hiding the electric burner...

The new stove has electronic oven controls, including a time-delayed cooking and stopping, and a timer. The documentation I had read before we bought the stove seemed to say it had no oven timer. We figured we could live without one — there's on on the microwave, after all — but I for one didn't believe a 21st-century cookstove with electronic oven controls would come without a timer. And for once I was right.

Today's lunch: steak-frites. We have to cook a steak on the new, hot gas burner. We'll use our electric deep-fryer, as usual, for the French fries. Report at 11:00.

Then we plan stir-fried dishes and others requiring hot, hot burners for the next few days. Stir-fry of eggplant and chicken, for example. Or pork and cauliflower. And so on. I went to the supermarket today and found prices for fresh produce to be very low. 'Tis the season.

Please don't eat the daisies

There is a big clump of white daisies growing out in the garden, right next to the table and chairs we have out there. Yesterday I sat out there, under an umbrella so I wouldn't get sunburned, and listened to the radio for a couple of hours.

While I listened, I watched several butterflies and a lot of bees feeding in and on the daisies. And I took pictures. Here are some of the ones that came out the best. I took literally 200 pictures in two hours. As usual, you can click the pictures in this post with your mouse to see larger versions.

I especially tried to get good photos of the two or three orange-colored butterflies that I saw. One is just above. But they were the hardest to photograph, because they wouldn't sit still. And when they did, they seemed to sense my presence and turn themselves so that I couldn't see them very well.

They would turn themselves around so that they were either facing me or looking in exactly the opposite direction. They'd keep their wings folded up. All I could see most of the time was a vertical line with six little stick-legs holding it up. But I finally did get a few good pictures.

As I said, there were also a lot of bees out there but I didn't try to take pictures of them specifically. I did get a few though. It's nice to see bees, with all the talk about how their populations are declining.

There was also one brown butterfly. It looked like it could be the same kind as the more colorful one, but it didn't act so shy and uncooperative. Could it be the female of the species? I think I remember that some butterflies have males and females that are differentiated this way.

Clipping the vines

Yesterday on his blog Walt talked about the way the grape-growers keep the vines pruned during the growing season. They use special tractors designed to let them drive up and down the rows, straddling each row of vines.

I was looking through some pictures this morning and came across these two from a morning in June when I was out with the dog. These are the vineyards about a mile south of our house at La Renaudière, near Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher in Touraine.

The top picture gives you a good idea of the tractor and the process. The one just above here shows a side view. Both of these are stills that I extracted from movies. I'd post the movies but I'm not sure how to get the quality I want.

The grapes are very nice right now, by the way. Look at these I took pictures of this morning.

Grapes in the Renaudière vineyards

This dying leaf stood out in contrast to the green all around it.

Color contrasts

There are a lot of grapes on many of the vines. I think this is looking like a good year.

A good harvest in the making

Vegetables at the market

Typical French market display
— June 20, 2008, in Montrichard —

Summer at the market means piles of beautiful vegetables. In fact, in the picture above there are summer vegetables like artichokes, tomatoes, and bell peppers, but also cold-weather vegetables like endives, potatoes, carrots, and leeks. In June, you can get it all.

Tomates cerises en grappes

The cherry tomatoes come from the town of Chinon in Touraine and are almost worth their weight in gold — €21.95 a kilo, and that's nearly $16.00 a pound in U.S. money. I guess they are worth it...

Tomates à cuire

Personally, I'd probably go for the big fat cooking tomatoes in the second picture. They're just €1.00 a kilo. I bet they'd be good raw in a salad too, if they were trimmed up right. The cauliflowers just behind the tomatoes isn't the prettiest I've ever seen, but they are letting them go for just a euro apiece.

Têtes d'ail

You want garlic with those tomatoes?

Pommes de terre

In the picture above, the sign doesn't go with the potatoes. It shows the price of the radishes, pictured below. They are €1.10 a bunch. The classic way to enjoy radishes is with salt, butter, and good bread. As for the potatoes, I think I'd steam or boil them and eat them cold with home-made mayonnaise.

Bottes de radis

Below, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant would make a good ratatouille. These have to have come from gardens or farms farther south, because in June we don't yet have produce like this in the Loire Valley. Here at La Renaudière, where we put in our garden a little late this year, we don't expect any tomatoes or eggplant much before mid-August. Our growing season runs from May 15 to about mid-October.

Tomates, poivrons, et aubergines

Actually, we bought eggplant and tomatoes at the supermarket a few days ago. Today's lunch is going to be a gratin using those, onions, and some yellow squash I just took out of the freezer. With olive oil and mozzarella cheese. Here's a link to a post I did on the subject a couple of years ago.

Seafood at the market in Montrichard

June 20, 2008, at the outdoor food market in Montrichard, just 10 miles south of Amboise and 10 miles west of Saint-Aignan, in the Loire Valley. A beautiful day when all the colors of the food products — vegetables, cheeses, fruits, and fish — were just beautiful.

Le rouget-barbet, a little red mullet, for 19.90€/kg

I lingered in front of the display of a poissonnier, a fishmonger. The people selling fish and shellfish didn't mind if I took pictures. There are two varieties of rouget-barbet that live in French coast waters from the English Channel down to the Mediterranean Sea.

Silvery sardines for 5.90€/kg

There's a good site in French explaining what all the different salt- and freshwater fish are, and showing pictures. Sardines, like rougets, live in the Atlantic from Iceland south to Morocco, and in the Mediterranean. A lot of them are fished in the waters of the Atlantic off western France and northern Spain.

Crépinettes de saumon, chopped-salmon
patties wrapped in caul fat, at 26.90€/kg

With increases in the price of diesel fuel, which powers both fishing boats and refrigerated trucks, fish is getting harder and harder to afford. Prices are sky-high. But French people must eat a lot of it, because the market stalls are abundantly stocked every day. Nowhere in France, actually, are you very far from the ocean.

Tourteaux, or stone crabs, at 7.90€ apiece

Not only is the fuel needed to catch and transport the fish and shellfish expensive, but the fish themselves are in shorter and shorter supply. Many fish (salmon, turbot) and shellfish (oysters, shrimp) are farmed nowadays.

Saumon en tranches, or salmon steaks, at 15.90€/kg

Shrimp are nearly always sold pre-cooked in France. You hardly ever find them raw except in the freezer cabinets at the supermarket. They are nearly always sold with the head on, too. It seems that shrimp are endangered in many places around the world because they are such a popular food. And to think that a century ago, in many places they weren't even considered to be edible.

Pink shrimp are 16.90€ a kilogram.

An American friend of ours is not a big fan of fish or seafood. In a restaurant in France, she decided she was going to try shrimp. But when the plate came to the table, she saw the little shrimps' eyes staring back at her. She hadn't counted on that. She couldn't eat them.

Colinot, or pollock, at 9.50€/kg

Colinot, or colin, is pollock. The name can also be spelled "pollack" and the fish in French is also known as lieu jaune. In England, is is sometimes called coley or coalfish. Fish names are very complicated to figure out. Pollock live in the Atlantic from North Carolina north to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It's a white fish, but is strong-flavored. There's an Alaskan variety that is milder. It's what you get in fast food restaurants, evidently, and is one of the main ingredients in surimi, which is imitation crabmeat.

In English, we sometimes call a poissonnier a "monger." I just looked up that word and it comes from the Greek. It's been used in English at least since the 12th century.

Aerial views of Preuilly-sur-Claise

The Tour de France bicycle race rode through the town of Preuilly-sur-Claise, about an hour south of Saint-Aignan, this past week. Preuilly is where new friends of ours, Susan and Simon, live. Their blog is called Days on the Claise. Simon blogged about the passage du Tour here.

Simon invited us down to see the Tour ride through, but we couldn't go. However, we did watch it on TV and we recorded it. The nice thing about the France2 TV coverage of the Tour de France is all the aerial photography of beautiful French countryside and villages. Preuilly-sur-Claise was no exception.



I made this movie by putting my digital camera on a tripod and aiming it at the TV screen. I played segments of the recording of the Tour we made and voilà — a little editing in Quicktime and there you have it.

P.S. I just watched it after uploading, and the quality is not great. I think I need to look for a different way to post video clips. That'll give me something to do this morning.

Goat cheeses at the Montrichard market

Back on June 20, CHM and I drove over to Montrichard for the Friday morning farmers' market there. We wanted to buy some tarragon plants for our garden in Saint-Aignan and for CHM's garden in Paris.

Woman selling plants at the Montrichard market

We could have waited to go the the Saturday market in Saint-Aignan, but Walt had gone there the previous Saturday and hadn't found any tarragon (aka estragon in French). In Montrichard we succeeded, but the plants were kind of pricy at six euros apiece.

Goat cheeses, some coated in wood ash and others not

Set up right next to the plant lady was the woman who runs the ferme-auberge La Lionnière in our village. A "farm-inn" is a working farm which also operates a B&B and a restaurant. Our neighbors the Boulands do all that and also sell their very good goat cheeses in the local markets.

Mme Bouland of La Lionnière waiting on customers
at the market in Montrichard

You have to try the Loire Valley goat cheeses (fromages de chèvre, or just chèvres) to believe them. They are pure and white under a wrinkly and sometimes ash-covered crust. You eat the crust along with the cheese, for the flavor. You can buy goat cheeses that are young, fresh, and spreadable; others that have been aged to a semi-hard (demi-sec) stage; and still others, more pungent, that are completely dry (sec), hard and crumbly.

Money changing hands over logs of goat cheese

Goat cheeses come in many shapes — logs in the Sainte-Maure de Touraine style, flat disks in the Selles-sur-Cher style, truncated pyramids in the Valençay style, and even little heart shapes in the Neufchâtel-en-Bray style. They are good eaten as they are, along with a glass of red, white, or rosé wine, or with a beer, and some good bread.

Disks, pyramids, and lots of other shapes of goat cheeses

They are also good on toast, run under the broiler and slightly melted, served on top of a pile of salad greens, tomatoes, and other salad ingredients. The salade de chèvre chaud is a standard menu item all over France now.

P.S. My new hard disk is all installed and nearly everything is running again. Changing your operating system and all you files over from one disk to another is always an adventure. It took me more than 10 hours to get it all runing, and that included a trip to the local computer store for a cable I needed. I now have that famous terabyte of disk space — 1000 GB — on my computer, to hold all my photos.

I spoke (or blogged) too soon

No new stove. It was D.O.A. — Damaged On Arrival. The delivery guys had to take it back and order a new one. We will get it next Thursday. Darty delivers in the Saint-Aignan area on only one or two days a week.

And yes, to Anonymous, about the scratched arms and thorn-pricked hands. Our vaccinations are up to date.

Callie on a walk in the woods one day this past week

I'm putting a new hard disk in my desktop computer these days so blogging is more difficult. I'll be back soon... maybe tomorrow.

The last meal...

Onion soup ready to go in the oven for melting and browning

... on the old stove. It was onion soup. I had some beef broth that I made a couple of days ago when I was cooking meat to make a Mexican shredded beef dish with tomatoes and hot peppers. So to make soup I bought 1½ lbs. of onions, sliced them up, and cooked them in butter on low heat for about an hour. Then I poured on the broth and voilà, it was soupe à l'oignon.

Soupe à l'oignon gratinée

Gratinée. That is, with what we call "dead bread" and some grated Emmental cheese. We save stale bread to make crumbs, bread pudding, or, in this case, onion soup with bread and melted cheese on top.

Callie trying to figure out what is going on

It was a good meal to cook with the old stove, one last time. We had to eat, after all. We had spent the morning cutting back blackberry brambles that were threatening to pull down our light-weight fence in the far corner of the back yard. My arms are all scratched up.

Looking from the vineyard into our back yard
— now you can see in because the brambles are gone

Take my word for it, the blackberry brambles were up to the top, and growing over, this fence, which you can hardly see in the picture. I cut a lot of them with limb loppers and pruning shears. Then Walt got the big weed-eater working with the heavy-duty blade, not the string thing, attached, and he ran through a lot of blackberries and other weeds in short order.

Resting on the deck after a hard day
whacking blackberry brambles

Anyway, the stove is pulled out, a microwave meal is planned for lunchtime, and the new stove is supposed to be delivered this afternoon. We have bought bottles of butane, the flexible tubing to connect one bottle to the stove, and we are ready. Tomorrow I will cook something in a frying pan on a gas burner, just to try it out.

Eiffel Tower shadows on the living room wall

The weather was great yesterday. Today is supposed to be sunny and even hot, but rain is coming in tonight. Tomorrow, we will see. It will be showery, I expect. The garden can use the water. Walt has to cut the grass today, in advance of the rain. We love summer, but there's a lot of work that has to be done while the weather is good.

The Loir Valley vineyards

I've been reading a book called Les Vins de Loire, written by various authors and published in 1979 by Editions Montalba. I think it's a book I bought in San Francisco at the European Booksellers store on Lark Street around the time we decided to move to the Loire Valley.

The Loir Valley from Vendôme to Château-du-Loir
Click the image to see it at full size

To understand the area, you have to know that there are two rivers in this part of France that have the same name, except that one has a final E and is feminine — that would be La Loire, which is the longest river in France. The other river, without the final E and in the masculine, is Le Loir, which runs parallel the the bigger Loire for many miles, and 25 or 30 miles north of it. The whole area is called the Loire Valley or the Val de Loire and includes the Loir and Cher Valleys as well.

Detail of the tower at Trinity Abbey in Vendôme

Vendôme is on Le Loir, 25 or 30 miles north of Blois and Amboise, which are on La Loire. Le Loir is also a grape-growing area. Here's how it is presented in the book I've recently been reading:

Is there a vineyard in France that is as little known as the one planted in the valley of the Loir River? Few wine-lovers could name its three main growing areas — those being, from east to west, Coteaux du Vendômois, Jasnières, and Coteaux du Loir.

A fresco in the abbey church at Vendôme

A similar lack of awareness seems to have rubbed off on historians too, because on the subject their texts are absolutely silent. Their attitude would be understandable if we were talking about wines "that used to be" or frankly poor vintages, but such is not the case — there are gourmets who rank Jasnières among the great French white wines.

That reputation will have to serve as the starting point for this discussion, since the historians and wine critics say so little. We ought to be able to follow the history of the Loir wines the way we can follow the course of the riverbed.

Vendôme

To begin with, all you have to do is believe your eyes. Between the towns of Vendôme and Château du Loir [a distance of some 60 km or 35 mi. — KB], at several points the valley comes to resemble a narrow canyon. For shepherds of the Bronze age it no doubt served as a fording point, allowing trade between the Paris region and Brittany. For those seeking the good life, cave dwellings in the Trôo region, just west of Vendôme, were just what the doctor ordered. Grottoes carved into the limestone hillsides caught the first early-morning rays of sunlight, because they face south.

Stained glass in Vendôme

Those prehistoric shepherding families were probably struck by the same impression the traveler gets today when, emerging southward from rainy old Normandy, they discover a Provence-like valley... It seems likely that people here planted vineyards very early, and the vines attracted the attention of the Romans centuries later. The surrounding countryside remained sparsely populated for many generations, with the attractive Loir River valley being the exception...

Joan of Arc catching a ray of sunlight
in Trinity Abbey in Vendôme

The smaller Loir Valley is a beautiful green area. In many ways it is similar to the Cher Valley, where Saint-Aignan is located. We are 25 miles or so south of the big Loire River, while it is the same distance north. Both are viticultural areas.

I don't think you can compare either valley to Provence, however. Author's hyperbole, I guess.