The dark days are near

That sounds ominous, doesn't it? At this time of year, the sun is already very low in the southern sky. And it rises later and later. At 8:00, the hour when we have gotten used to going out with the dog, it's still dark. The sun rises in the southeast now, not summer's northeast, and not before 8:30 a.m.

Saturday morning's sunrise, about 8:30 a.m.

The morning light is dim until after nine o'clock. At least it hasn't been too cold yet. There was a light frost up top, far out in the vineyard, Saturday morning. I didn't go out yesterday morning, but it was even colder Sunday than Saturday. Walt was looking at weather records for the region and saw that 10 years ago it was already in the lower 20s F in late October.

Fall in the vineyard

I noticed today that Monsieur Guerrier has now harvested a whole plot of white grapes that were still on the vine Saturday morning. My guess is that they'll be used to make a late-harvest, sweet wine. That's what's called a demi-sec or a moelleux wine here. They are only made in good years, when the fall weather stays fairly dry late well into October.

Unharvested grapes left on a parcel
of untended vines this year

In two months, it will officially be winter and the shortest days of the year will be upon us. Already yesterday, the temperature in the house was at about 60ºF (16ºC) even after the sun was well up in the sky. Walt built a fire in the wood stove. The sun is just not hot enough now to warm us up in the afternoon.

Looking out over the top of the vineyard

Besides, we are having trouble with our central heating system. The boiler fires up normally, but the pump, which sends hot water or steam to the radiators all over the house, isn't working. This happened before, two or three years ago, and we had a repair done then. I just called the company that does boiler maintenance, and they are sending a man out this afternoon.

Long shadows on Saturday at 6:00 p.m. in the back yard

Today I'm cooking a wintertime dish: Gratin d'endives au jambon. That's Belgian endives and ham cooked in a cheese sauce in the oven. I just searched the blog and realized that I've never posted the recipe before. I'll go make it now and take some pictures.

Then there's more yard work to do. It's supposed to rain tonight and maybe tomorrow, so today is a day to finish up some jobs out there.

A shortage of fresh tofu

Our friend Tom in Illinois left a comment on a topic I posted a few days ago in which I invited readers to send me cookbooks, saying: "I'd send you The Book of Tofu from my collection, but I'm not sure you and Walt would be up to it."

Well, we probably wouldn't be up to it, but not for the reasons anybody might think. Actually, we love tofu and we would eat it often, if we could just buy it here in Saint-Aignan. We used to buy and cook with fresh tofu all the time in San Francsico. And one of our favorite Chinese take-away items from a restaurant in our neighborhood there was called Family-Style Tofu. I miss that. We would have it about once a week.

Tofu in a can from Taiwan, via Tang Frères in Paris

You see, they don't sell fresh tofu in the supermarkets here in Saint-Aignan and Noyers-sur-Cher. Now I admit I've never asked the customer-service people at the grocery stores if they could order it, but I'm sure I would be met with blank stares if I did. I'd probably have to explain what tofu is — it's called pâte de soja in French, or soy paste. That's another way of saying (soy)bean curd, I guess.

When we were in Blois a few days ago and went shopping at the Asian-products market called Paris Store, we did see fresh tofu. We didn't buy any because we hadn't planned anything using it and it tends to go moldy pretty fast, but now we know we can go back there an buy some fresh bean curd when we want it. It's a 45-minute drive from Saint-Aignan at minimum, though, so we aren't like to go every week. That would be fuel-foolish.

Our substitute for fresh bean curd up to now has been "Tow-Fu" in a can. I'm not kidding. You can see the pictures in this post. It's the tofu equivalent of canned green beans — not nearly as good as fresh, but better than no tofu at all. The main problem with tofu-in-a-can is it's tough texture, not the taste. Of course, tofu doesn't have any taste to speak of. But it needs to have a silkier texture than the canned stuff.

Here's the other side of the tin, showing
that it's Made in Taiwan.

Up to now, we have bought tofu-in-a-can at the big Tang Frères supermarket in the 13th arrondissement when we go to Paris. We only go a couple of times a year, and each time we bring back half a dozen tins. We've also brought back fresh tofu from Paris. Once we brought back too much and some of it went bad before we could eat it all. That was a waste.

Anyway, the trip to Paris is just too expensive for us to go more often, and too complicated with the dog. And it's far too long a drive if you try to drive up there and back the same day. Been there, done that, and have sworn off doing it again.

Maybe we could make our own tofu. I have a recipe. I'll post it here. It comes from a book called Chinese Cookery by Rose Cheng and Michele Morris, published by HPBooks in 1981.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Problem is, I don't know where I would get soybeans. Or gypsum. I could use white vinegar — that's easy to get here, but I mostly use it as a cleaning product. And we don't have any shortage of water. Do you think I could use French white beans or some other variety of dried beans to make curd?

It would be very hard to live as a vegetarian in France. I know from reading around on Internet forums that people who follow vegetarian diets have trouble finding restaurant food they can eat when they travel here. French people mostly believe you can't get balanced nutrition without eating meat and meat products. They tend to feel sorry for vegetarians, as if they had some kind of disability. Why else wouldn't you eat meat, unless your digestive system is just not up to digesting them?

Many salads in French restaurants have more meat than greens in them. Okay, that's probably an exaggeration, but it's the impression you get when you first order such a salad in a Paris restaurant. Three lettuce leaves and half a pound of lardons...

And here are the ingredients: soy, water, salt.
No problem with that.

Besides, if you are really strict about your vegetarianism, you have to give up nearly all French cheeses. They are made with animal rennet. And soups, at least in restaurants, because they are often made with chicken or beef stock. No more soupe à l'oignon gratinée — the soup is based on beef stock and then there's that cheese melted on top.

I just need to decide whether I'd rather live in France without tofu or in America with tofu. That's going to be a hard one...

Diets with no meat. Diets with no carbohydrates. I don't know if I would feel more deprived if I didn't eat meat or if I didn't eat potatoes, beans, or bread. I think I'll just continue eating a little bit of everything. At my age, if that kills me... well, I've lived a good life.

Gentle landscapes

How do you capture the soft, gentle landscapes of the Loire Valley — the Cher Valley, actually, around Saint-Aignan — in photos? It's like taking pictures of... nothing. But it's not nothing. It's an atmosphere, « un feeling », as we say in 21st-century French.

Fields and trees in the Cher Valley near Saint-Aignan

It's now autumn, so colors can be part of the interest of landscape photos. The Loire Valley colors are not the kind that knock your eyes out, though — with the exeption of the grape leaves. Even in winter, the local countryside is beautiful, as Walt noticed and pointed out when we first arrived here. "It's pretty country in winter," he said, "so you know it's going to be really nice in spring, summer, and fall."

In Touraine, the woods are not dark
and threatening, but quiet and inviting.

I've been looking at Waverly Root's book The Food of France. Root, who died in 1982, was the Paris correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and then for the Washington Post. He had a food and restaurant column in the International Herald Tribune that I used to read when I lived in Paris in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Even in fall and winter, big parts of
the Touraine landscape stay bright green.

Root writes that the Touraine, which is at the heart of what we call the Loire Valley and is centered on the city of Tours, is also the heartland of France. It is in Touraine that the French language developed and where, they say, "the best French" is spoken. People in Touraine aren't considered to have a regional accent the way people in Paris, Provence, Alsace, and the French Southwest do.

The tender, smiling Touraine countryside

Touraine also don't have a regional cuisine. Touraine food is purely French, and Touraine is the garden of France. It's a soft, gentle style of cooking that shuns strong flavors and depends on fresh produce. The only stinky cheeses in the Loire Valley are goat cheeses, and they are often eaten when they are fresh and mild. Garlic and onions have only a muted presence.

French food and the French language are obviously two of France's glories, and they help define what France is. Root writes that "when one considers the extent of the debt that France owes to the Touraine, it seems almost accidental that the land of France is not called Touraine" and "that the capital of France is not Tours."

Dogs enjoy sniffing around in the local woods.
Saint-Aignan is on the far southeastern edge of Touraine.

He goes on to point out that France encompasses the sharp bare rocks of the Alps, the mountains that meet the sea "in a clash of hot colors" along the Mediterranean coast, the great chalk cliffs along the English Channel, and the rocky headlands of Brittany, pounded by heavy waves. But none of those are what you think of when you use the words "the French countryside."

Instead, you envision green fields, poplars lining long roads, agricultural country, "smiling and tender." The Touraine "is the epitome of this landscape," Root says.

Soft and gentle even describes back yards around Saint-Aignan.

The tarps cover leaves and wood that we will burn in November.

I like that expression. "Tender and smiling." I wrote "soft and gentle." But Root's language is better. Tender and smiling are adjectives you could apply to the language, and food, and the landscapes of the Loire and Cher Valleys from Saumur to Tours to Saint-Aignan.

Autumn and a trip to Blois

I don't think I'd ever noticed before this year how clear it is from the color of fall leaves where different grape varieties are planted in the vineyard. I was aware of the different colors in past autumns, but I guess I wasn't paying much attention to the patterns.

This is a parcel of vines just behind our house. The red grapes — probably Gamay or Cab. Franc — are the ones with the red-orange leaves.

The grapevines with yellow leaves are, I'm pretty sure, the variety called Pineau d'Aunis, from which nice, peppery rosé wines are made. I think a lot of the white grape varieties have leaves that turn bright yellow in autumn.

The weather has turned chilly again. We had rain off and on yesterday, after getting about a half-inch (12 mm) in the rain gauge overnight.

We drove up to Blois yesterday to run some errands. We had four good successes, one strikeout, and two postponements. I'll emphasize the successes.

We went to the Préfecture de Police to see about 10-year residency cards, but the lines were just too long and we didn't want to wait. There's no hurry; our current cards are good until September 2009. We'll go back another time, or just call them and ask them to send the applications and other information to us by mail.

Here are a few pictures of our house,
taken from over in the neighbors' yard.
Notice our red maple trees.

While at the Préfecture, we got our driver's licenses sorted out. There was no problem, really, but we wanted to get a code that will let us check the status of our licenses on a French government web site. To do that, you have to go to the Préfecture, or send a letter, to get the password.

Now we can check to see if we have lost any points on our licenses. Walt's permis de conduire, being three years old now, is no longer considered provisional and the Préfecture confirmed that he now has the full complement of 12 points. He only had 6 for the first three years. And mine also has 12 points on it. I wasn't sure it did, since I got flashed by a speed camera for speeding (going 50 in a 40 zone) about 3½ years ago. If any points were deducted for that infraction, they have been restored now.

The house is called Les Bouleaux, a name it was given
by its owners before the streets in the village were numbered.

We also went to the Electricité de France office to get our electric bills straightened out. No, it wasn't about money. It had to do with the names that appear on our bill. When the account was opened in April 2003, Walt and I were still in the U.S. The woman we bought the house from had the tranfer of owners set up, and she told EDF to put the name of our corporation on all the paperwork.

Why does it matter? It's because every time you do anything administrative here — residency cards and health insurance renewals — you are asked to provide proof of your residence, which is called a justificatif de domicile. The electric bill is what they prefer to see. And ours didn't display our names prominently. There were there, in small print at the bottom of the bill, but both, yes both, of our names were spelled incorrectly.

Our window-box petunias are still in full bloom —
but the weather is getting colder and colder now.

The man at the EDF office in Blois (that's the closest one) looked at our papers and fixed us up in a jiffy. The next bill will have our names at the top, and he even gave us some certificates showing that we have had electric service at our current address since April 2003. We won't have any more trouble on that count.

After that success, we drove up into North Blois and located a store that sells Asian food products. It opened earlier this year, and we hadn't found it yet. It's in a strip mall, right next door to the American Car Wash. That's the name, in English.

The Asian grocery store is called Paris Store, and it's part of a chain headquartered in Paris. We've been to a Paris Store in the 13th arrondissement in Paris to buy noodles, sauces, rice, and other products we have a hard time finding in Saint-Aignan. Now — and I guess I never thought I'd say this — we won't have to go to Paris so often. The Paris Store in Blois is clean, spacious, and very well stocked with pretty much everything we need. And it's only an hour from here.

So it was a good day. Actually, the best part was that we discovered a new Blois neighborhood when we went there for lunch at a restaurant. It was noontime and all the schools were getting out for lunchtime. There were literally hundreds of young people, lycéens, on the streets and sidewalks and at the sidewalk cafés up and down the street. I told Walt that I suddenly felt like I was in the France I remember from student days in Aix-en-Provence, Rouen, Grenoble, Paris, and Metz all those years ago, not only because of all the students but because of the French urban look of the streets of Blois.

We had no idea such a neighborhood, with several obviously big lycées, existed. There are also quite a few interesting-looking restaurants around there. We also drove around other parts of the town after lunch and spotted several other restaurants we'd like to try on future trips. We were back at home in Saint-Aignan by mid-afternoon.

Potatoes: here's what happened...

Yesterday morning, I picked up Joël Robuchon's book full of potato recipes and looked at the cover. The picture is of potato chips, I think, but it just made me think of thinly sliced potatoes, ones you might use to make a gratin dauphinois cooked with milk, cream, and cheese. I've posted a recipe for that dish before — exactly a year ago, as it happens.

These were the little red potatoes.

Then I looked at the bag that my potatoes were in. What does the label show? A gratin plus ou moins dauphinois. Things were becoming clear. And then I remembered a recipe from a book I recently got in the mail.

Peeled, thinly sliced potatoes

Now I have to say this blogging thing is working out nicely. Just in the past couple of months, two people I've met and who read the blog have sent me cookbooks! I encourage all of you to do the same (just joking). BettyAnn, a frequent commenter and May visitor, sent me a Loire Valley cookbook. Out of that book, I made a pork roast with baked apples when Peter and Jill Hertzmann were here in September. It was a success. I also made rillons — cubes of pork breast cooked in duck or pork fat — which we enjoyed with visitors Carolyn and her husband a few weeks ago.

And then last week I got another cookbook in the mail. Thank you, Ladybird (Martine). It's a book of recipes from the Alsace, a region I've never visited but a cuisine I like very much (especially sauerkraut, choucroute garnie, for which the season is approaching). And in the Alsace cookbook that Martine sent, I had seen a recipe for something called Pommes de terre fumées. "Smoked potatoes" — it's an eye-catching title.

In fact, it is a potato gratin with onions and smoked pork lardons, or bacon. I happened to have some lardons in the fridge. So I decided to make pommes de terre fumées for lunch yesterday, to accompany the boudins blancs. Again, it was a success — even if I do say so myself.

A layer of potatoes, a layer of pre-cooked lardons and onions

Here's a translation of the potato recipe.

Smoked potatoes

200 g (6 oz.) butter

2 kg (approx. 2 lbs.) potatoes

3 onions

150 g (5 oz.) smoked bacon

salt & pepper

Generously butter a cast iron pot.

Peel, wash, and cut the potatoes into thin disks.

Lay down a layer of potatoes, then a layer of sliced onions. Salt and pepper the onions.

Blanch the smoked bacon (if you think it is too smoky- or salty-tasting) and put down a layer of bacon over the onions. Cover the dish with the rest of the sliced potatoes. Sprinkle salt and pepper over all, and then dot the top generously with butter.

The top layer of potatoes dotted with butter

Close the pot and cook it in a very hot oven, 220ºC (425ºF) for 1 hour and 20 minutes.

I didn't blanch the bacon because the lardons I buy are smoky but not excessively so — sometimes French smoked pork belly is extremely smoky and salty and the flavor needs toning down. And I chopped the onion and cooked it along with the lardons in a skillet before I put it as a layer between the two layers of potatoes. You could do the same with bacon, and it think you do need to lightly cook the bacon before you put it in the cooking dish. It doesn't hurt to pre-cook the onions also.

Here are the potatoes as they came out of the oven.

Because I like these flavorings, I also added a dash of allspice, a couple of bay leaves, and a little pinch of dried thyme to each dish — I used shallow baking dishes so I ended up with two pans of potatoes. I guess I could have used a deeper earthenware dish.

And here are the boudins blancs.
Any sausages would be good with the smoked potatoes.

It was good. These boudins were basically turkey sausages. Chicken or duck sausages would be excellent with the potatoes. As would fresh pork saucisses de Toulouse, or smoked saucisses de Montbéliard. Or a grilled chicken breast. For example. And with the meat and potatoes, have a nice tossed salad.

Neighbors, yard work, and lunch

Yesterday morning we were working out in the back yard — me cutting up branches we pruned out of some hazelnut and apple trees to turn them into kindling, and Walt shoveling out the compost bin — when Callie started barking at someone or something up at the front gate.

Hazelnuts grow on bushes that can become small trees.
We are pruning these back severely. There are 14 of them!

I went to see what the commotion was about. It was our neighbor, J-M, who with his wife A., the village mayor, will be leaving for California this afternoon. He had come over to ask us for a favor. He wanted to know if he could leave a little suitcase full of some of their most precious valuables with us while they are away. They have someone taking care of their house while they travel, but they said they'd prefer to leave valuable items like car keys, a camera, and I don't even know what all else, with us.

That felt nice, to have them express that kind of confidence in our trustworthiness. We couldn't really say we are good friends of theirs — just acquaintances, really, and neighbors — village residents. We of course accepted their proposal and J-M brought over a small bag later in the day. We put it away for safekeeping.

This is the back section of the hedge we've been working on.
Walt does the pruning, up on a ladder with electric shears.

A., the mayor, is somebody who could be extremely helpful to us as we negotiate the French bureaucracy to try to get 10-year residency cards, or even French citizenship, now that we have been living here for more than five years. I think she will be willing to vouch for us and to make some calls to functionaries in Blois if necessary.

We have a lot more work to do out back. The hedge-trimming isn't finished. There are birch and hazelnut branches that need to be cut into smaller pieces. We're getting together a good pile of leaves and trigs to burn as soon as we are ready and the weather allows.

Boudins blancs

Today for lunch, it'll be boudin blanc — a sausage made from veal, pork, or poultry with milk and eggs — and potatoes, with green salad. I got the boudins, these made with turkey and pork, at SuperU a few days ago. These sausages have a smooth texture a little like the inside of a franfurter, but white.

I hope these are good, despite their supermarket origins.
You can read the ingredients by clicking the picture to enlarge it.

For the potatoes, my first idea was just to sauté them. I have a bag of little red potatoes that I need to cook. French potatoes are so good.

Over the next hour or so I'm going to read through Joël Robuchon's book called Le Meilleur et le plus simple de la pomme de terre ("The Best and Simplest Potato Recipes") (1994) to look for other ideas. We'll see what I come up with. It has to be something that I can do fairly quickly toward lunchtime after working in the yard.

I'll let you know what I come up with.

Coupures...

I awoke with a start at 7:00 this morning and stumbled into the kitchen to make some tea and wash up a few stray dishes. Walt made a banana pie late yesterday afternoon so the food processor, a whisk, and a couple of mixing bowls were sitting in the sink.

I was still messing around in the kitchen, listening to France Inter radio, when I heard an announcer say: Il est 7h26. That's when I remembered that our electricity is supposed to be cut off at 8:00 this morning, for about three hours.

They are "undergrounding" the wires down in the village center. That must be the reason for the cut this morning. I wish they would put the lines in our hamlet underground, but that's not in the plans, as far as I know.

I could ask the mayor about it, but she and her husband are leaving tomorrow for a couple of weeks in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. Walt talked to her briefly yesterday when he was out on the road trimming the hedge.

All the thinking about electricity made me think about the gas cookstove we bought three months ago. Yes, it's been three months. And we are still using the first tank of butane that we hooked up to it.

That's pretty good economy, I think, when you consider that the tank cost just 15 euros. Better cooking than we had before, with that unregretted vitro-céramique cooktop, and for just five euros a month.

The stove is great. I still use the electric plaque on top to cook long-simmered dishes, but for most everything else we use the gas burners. The oven is also electric. I don't think we've seen a significant drop in our electric bills since we got the stove, because we do use the oven a lot.

The only problem we've had with the Brandt cuisinière mixte — electricity and gas — has to do with — don't expect to be surprised — the electronics. Twice over the past three months the stove's computerized controls have gone haywire. The timer function malfunctioned once, and then again, when we pressed the button. The time displayed kept going up, up, up until we finally started punching buttons to try to get it to stop. It wouldn't.

And the worst thing was that when we turned on the oven during one of these episodes the temperature would immediately go up to the highest setting and there was no way to bring it back down. You can't really cook most dishes at 500ºF.

The solution was to go downstairs and flip the breaker for the stove circuit on our electric panel. Luckily it is marked. Wait three or four minutes, and then turn it back on. The stove came back on, we reset the hours and minutes on the display, and everything started working again. It hasn't malfunctioned since early September, if I remember correctly.

It will still be nearly dark at 8:00. If they really do turn off the current at that hour, we will literally be plunged into darkness inside the house. Maybe I should have stayed in bed this morning. On second thought, it's my turn to go on a walk with Callie. I guess I'll go get dressed.

The weather here is warm and sunny. We sat out on the terrace until about 8:00 p.m. yesterday, in tee-shirts. Nice for mid-October.

Included here are a few more colorful grapevine leaves. Remember that you can click the pictures with the mouse to see them full-size. Then click the Back button to return to the page with text on it.

P.S. Mais on a l'air de quoi,
là ? I went out for the morning walk with Callie and when I got back home at 8:40 or so, I could see lights on in the house. As I walked in, Walt said he had pulled out the letter from Electricité de France to read it again. The 8:00 to 11:00 a.m. power cut is scheduled for mardi, 28 octobre, not today! Oh well, something to look forward to. We will have forgotten all about it by then and we'll be taken by surprise.

Golden days

View across the autumn-colored vineyard toward our hamlet

Today — like most days, you might be thinking — it's mostly about pictures. We had a beautiful Sunday and even got a lot of work done. But the most remarkable thing about the day, along with the summery weather, was the display of colors in the vineyard.

On the morning walk, it was pretty dark. I had to
use the flash to take pictures like this one.

In the morning, I picked our last eggplants (about 8 of them, some pretty small) and bell peppers (about a dozen, again some pretty small). Then I pulled out the plants. Except for green beans, which are still producing, and the collard patch, which is just starting up, that's it for the 2008 vegetable garden. It was not a roaring success.

Walking down a row of vines Sunday afternoon

Because I was out of commission on Saturday (thanks to pollen allergies), our walk schedule got thrown off. I ended up doing the morning and the afternoon walks with Callie yesterday. That turned out to be OK with me, because the aforementioned autumn colors were so stunning.

Our house and yard: you can see the hedge Walt trimmed
Sunday (center left on photo) and the red maples out front.

In the afternoon, Walt finished trimming a good section of hedge. It was one that hadn't been done a year ago, so it was a little overgrown. I also finished a small section with my shears, and I raked up the leaves I had chopped off. Then I got out a big pair of limb loppers and started hacking away at our overgrown hazelnut bushes. There are 15 of them, and I only pruned back 2 or them. So there's a lot more work to be done there.

The Renaudière vineyards in October 2008

Soon we will be able to have our big fire outdoors and burn up some leaves, branches, and scrap wood. Then it will officially be fall — though, as you can see, nature didn't wait for us. It went ahead and changed seasons.

Sunset, 12 October 2008, at La Renaudière

Today is supposed to be another gorgeous day, with temperature about 75ºF. We have our work cut out for us, me with the rototiller and W. with his hedge clippers. That and a nice lunch will make for another good day at Saint-Aignan.

Cutting up the cut-down tree

I had a really bad allergy attack yesterday. There is a big high-pressure system sitting over Eastern Europe, bringing France a southeasterly airflow. That means a lot of pollen from Provence, Italy, and Greece, I guess. Cypress pollen is what I'm most allergic to, unless there's some kind of pollen here that we didn't have in California and that I haven't been tested for. Whatever it was on Saturday, it made me miserable all day long.

On Thursday, we tackled the job of cutting up the top of the birch tree that we had chopped off a couple of days earlier. In this first picture, we hadn't yet started. It was early in the morning and kind of cloudy, so there were no shadows.

Walt cut up the two large pieces of tree-trunk with the chain saw while I worked on smaller branches with the secatur. I ended up with this wheelbarrow load of twigs and sticks, which will make good kindling.

By the time we had finished, the sun was out and there were distinct shadows. Walt had finished cutting up the main trunks. You can see what is still left to do — smaller branches and twigs.

And this is all we got for a couple of hours of labor. Oh well. It will make a nice fire or two next winter or the winter after, after the wood has had time to dry out.

P.S. The sneezing and crying and nose-blowing seem to be finished now, for the time being. I think these 24-hour allergy attacks are so strange. When I lived in California, the attacks would last for days or weeks at a time, but usually in the spring. Here, I have 24-hour bouts several times a year — fall, winter, and spring. The main thing is, I feel better today. I'll be able to do some more work outdoors.