Mid-summer status report, plans

Yesterday the high temperature was 67ºF. The day before, it had been 87ºF. We kept the house closed up all day yesterday — not to keep the hot air out, but to keep the warm air in. Such is life in Saint-Aignan in July.

The temperature when I got up this morning was 11ºC — just 52ºF! The house is quickly cooling down.

Apricots I picked a couple of days ago
out on the edge of the vineyard

Not only was it cooler yesterday, but rain poured down in squalls off and on all day. That was good — we needed the rain, and the garden will be the better for it. Walt stuck a stake in the ground next to the corn stalk that blew over in Thursday night's wind and tied it up. Maybe it will survive.

Grape leaves and grapes

Most of the 10 or so corn (maize) plants we planted in the garden now sport tassels, which means we might end up getting a few ears of sweet corn in a while. Sweet corn is something we can't buy at the markets or supermarkets here in Saint-Aignan. And it's something we would enjoy eating.

Tomatoes continue to ripen. This cooler weather will slow them down, but hey, it's not even July 20 yet. We have August and September to look forward to.

It has been very busy here for more than a month now. CHM came to visit around June 10. We did quite a bit of sight-seeing together. Soon after he returned to Paris, friends of a good friend in California came to visit for 24 hours and we drove all around the region with them to see some of the major landmarks.

Every time we have visitors, we feel obligated to get out the vacuum cleaner and the feather duster to make the house presentable. In other words, we do housework we might not do otherwise. Having visitors motivates us to do "spring cleaning."

A day or two later — a week ago — a old friend and a new friend from Normandy arrived. We had three evening meals here at the house, and we spent one evening in Saint-Aignan eating pizza at a sidewalk café and one day driving over to Amboise, Vouvray, and Château-Renault. Before they arrived, the house needed cleaning again, especially the bathroom and kitchen. Meals had to be planned and prepared. Busy, busy, busy. But it was fun.

Now we have to get going on some summertime home- improvement and maintenance projects. There are drains to be snaked out, exterior walls to be cleaned with bleach and acid, and deck edges and bottoms to be scraped, sanded, and maybe repainted. There is firewood for the winter to be cut, and there's a very long, wide, and high hedge due for its annual trimming. There are ronces — wild blackberry brambles — to be cut back, before they take over the whole property. There's a half-dead apple tree that needs to be cut down and then cut up for firewood.

Best of all, though, it looks like there will be many tomatoes and zucchini, and probably some eggplants, bell peppers, beans, and ears of corn to be harvested. These are our rewards. There are so many apples that I'm sure I will be making a couple of big batches of apple jelly and several batches of applesauce too. I'm not even mentioning the pears and plums we are likely to have, and that will need to be dealt with if we are to benefit from them.

Apples are definitely ripening.

Let's hope the weather goes back to being warm and fairly dry. And that such weather might continue into October.

Another summer is speeding by. It's already been nearly a month since the solstice — the longest day of the year. We can now feel the hours of daylight diminishing. However, 2009 is turning out to be a very good year.

Artichokes and corn

The artichoke flower is continuing to open up. I took pictures of it yesterday and noticed that a lot of bees were "working" on it.

The artichoke flower buzzing with bees

Then I decided to take a movie:

Walt mentioned last night's brief blast of strong wind on his blog. It blew over one of our stalks of corn. But only one. And it didn't blow down any of the sunflowers.

One cornstalk victim of the wind

One tomato blew over too. Since we have 37 tomato plants growing out there, one less, if it doesn't survive, won't matter too much.

The Aubert winery in Vouvray

My Loire Valley experience started in Vouvray, a wine village just 5 mi. (8 or 9 km) east of the center of Tours on the north bank of the Loire River. If we hadn't decided, almost on the spur of the moment, to spend a vacation week in a gîte rural in Vouvray in October 2000, we would never be living in Saint-Aignan right now. Vouvray is a 45-minute drive from our house.

Vouvray still wines run the gamut from very dry to very sweet (called moelleux, or "mellow", in French), depending on the vintage (i.e., the year) and the vinification method used. Vouvray is also known for good effervescent wines, some made by a old local method that produces fewer bubbles (the wines are pétillants, or semi-sparkling), and others made by the so-called Methode Traditionelle to produce Champagne-style wines (fully sparkling).

Barrels of Vouvray white wines in the Aubert wine cave

The one thing that all Vouvray wines — dry or sweet, still or sparkling — have in common is that they are made exclusively with the juice of a single grape variety, which is the Chenin Blanc. No other grape is authorized by the A.O.C. authority that defines the criteria for Vouvray wine-making and labeling.

Looking back into the Aubert cave, you see walls lined
with racks holding hundreds of bottles of white wine.

The still "sweet" wines of Vouvray — either demi-sec (less-sweet wines to drink as an apéritif or with dinner) or moelleux (very mellow dessert wines) — can age for quite a few years in the bottle. The sparking wines — both styles — are competing with Champagne these days, because Champagne wines have become so expensive. Champagne is made with entirely different grapes, not with Chenin Blanc.

A view from the cellar looking out toward the sales room and daylight.
That's Walt paying for our 12 bottles of Aubert's Vouvray wine.

For people like me, Vouvray is a better choice than most Champagne. The standard Champagne is made from what is called an "assemblage" — a technical term for what we might call a "blend" — of the juices of three grape varieties, which are Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier. In my case, I find that assemblage sparkling wines like Champagne tend to give me a headache, ruining the pleasure of drinking them.

All those bottles...

Vouvray sparkling wines, made from juice from a single grape, the Chenin Blanc — which is also known locally as Pineau de la Loire — don't have that same negative effect on me. That said, it is also possible to get Champagnes that are made with a single grape variety, the Chardonnay. To me, the Champagnes called « pur chardonnay » are easier on the brain, like the Vouvrays. They are also very easy on the palate.

This is barrel no. 82 — that's not the vintage. I didn't ask
how you decipher the codes on the front of the barrel.

The winery we like to go to for our Vouvray wines is called Jean-Claude et Didier Aubert Viticulteurs and is located in the Vallée Coquette on the western side of the village of Vouvray. The pictures in this topic are ones I took in the Aubert wine "cave" yesterday. In the past, I've posted other pictures of the Aubert winery (see December 2005), from the outside.

Wines are sold in 6-bottle cases in the Loire Valley.
These are stacked up in the front at Aubert's cave.

Prices chez Aubert are very reasonable. Yesterday we bought 6 bottles of Méthode Traditionnelle Brut (the dry sparkling) for 30 euros (at current rates, about $42.00) and 6 bottles of 2008 Demi-Sec (the semi-sweet wine that is good with apéritif foods or dinner) for the same price. Five euros a bottle ($7.00) is inexpensive, given the quality of the wines. We've tried Vouvrays from other producers that sell at significantly higher prices, but we haven't found them to be consistently better than Aubert's wines.

In the past, I've also posted more general topics about Vouvray and neighboring Montlouis and the wines made in both villages, for example in November 2008 and December 2008. Vouvray is a picturesque but not a drop-dead beautiful village. The wines, though, can be stunning.

Pizza in a café on Bastille Day

Busy day today. Our Normandy friends are still here. This morning we're heading over to Vouvray to buy some wine over there (Chenin Blanc wines, sweet or dry, still or sparkling — some of the best white wines made in France). Vouvray is a good 45-minute drive northwest from Saint-Aignan.

Then we're going to lunch in a restaurant in Montlouis, the village on the other side of the Loire River from Vouvray. We've never tried this restaurant, Les Terrasses, before. It isn't in the guidebooks, and I can't find any customer reviews on the Internet. The only way to find out if it's good is to throw caution to the wind and go try it. Since we all have much experience with little French restaurants, I'm sure we'll find something good on the menu.

Looks like there'll be a lot of wild blackberries this year.

Last night we went down to Saint-Aignan at dinnertime. The two visitors from Normandy wanted to eat dinner, but Walt and I didn't. We went to a café and ordered glasses of white wine — a Sauvignon Blanc from the Quincy wine area, 50 km east of Saint-Aignan. We asked if the café was serving sandwiches or salads, but it wasn't.

These delicate little mushrooms are blooming
all around the vineyard right now.

What if we went and got something from a bakery or other shop and brought it to the table here to eat it? Would that be okay? Certainly, said the young woman who was waiting on us, and who turned out to be, with her Norman (!) husband, the owner of the place. Two of us walked around the corner to the pizzeria on the market square in Saint-Aignan and ordered a pizza.

This artichoke is about to turn into a flower
and is looking positively solar.

I know the people who run the pizzeria — my friend was impressed that I and the woman who runs it did French cheek-kisses in greeting — and I think that helped us get a pizza really fast. They gave us one that was just coming out of the oven. Some other customer would have to wait. Within five minutes, we were back at the café.

The grapes are plumping up nicely.

The café owner brought us a knife, we ordered second glasses of the Quincy wine, and we carved up the pizza and ate it with our fingers. The café was full of people, mostly young men, it seemed, and it was buzzing with activity. It was Bastille Day, and fireworks were scheduled in Saint-Aignan at midnight. The two café owners were also in the process closing the place up, putting chairs up on the table inside so they could mop the floor, and gradually taking away the outside chairs and tables too. We stayed about an hour, and we were about the last people to leave.

So many fruit trees, including several pear trees
nearby, are just loaded down with fruit.

During our improvised meal, the Norman owner, probably about 40 years old, came over and talked to our Normandy friends. He grew up in Le Havre, and the father of one of our friends was also born in Le Havre. They had a good time talking about Normandy, and I could hear their Normandy accents kick in.

It was all a lot of fun and Walt took a lot of pictures. I think he'll be posting them over the next few days and weeks. I forgot my camera. We got home at about 9:30. Okay, it's time for us to hit the road for another whirlwind day.

Wines and food over Bastille Day weekend

Today is Bastille Day, which is « le 14 juillet » in French. Last night we went to see the fireworks display down by the Cher River in our village. Our friends from Normandy went with us, and after the display we ran into our neighbor the mayor, and her husband. It was nice to get to introduce everybody.

You heat the puff-pastry square up in a warm oven and then
cut it into bite-size pieces to eat with your apéritif wine.

Before going out to see the fireworks, we had our Bastille Day dinner at the house. It wasn't anything extraordinary, but it was all pretty good (if I do say so myself). As an apéritif, we opened a bottle of sparkling Touraine wine with some galettes de pommes de terre, a local specialty. The galettes are a puff-pastry square made with wheat flour, butter, and pureed potatoes, and they are often served with before-dinner drinks here in Saint-Aignan.

The wine co-op in Saint-Romain-sur-Cher

For dinner, we had a tomato, basil, and mozzarella salad with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. These were the first ripe tomatoes from this year's garden, and the basil plants are ones Walt grew from seed. As a main course, we had a steak with a shallot and white wine sauce (very light), some green beans from the freezer (last year's crop), and some French fries. We had a cheese board and then a dessert of plum tart.

With all that, we've been drinking wines from two local « caves coopératives » — wine co-ops — over this long weekend. One co-op is the one I really like up in Saint-Romain-sur-Cher, just about 5 miles north of Saint-Aignan on the road to Blois. The name of the co-op is Les Vignerons des Coteaux Romanais.

Here's the 2007 Côt and a close-up of the label.

The wine that was the biggest hit was a 2007 Côt. Côt is a local red-wine grape. It's the same grape used to make the dark wines of Cahors in southwestern France, but down there the grape is called L'Auxerrois. The same grape is called Malbec is many parts of the world. A lot of Malbec wines are made in Argentina.

Two cases of the 2007 Côt ready for the trip back to Normandy

Our friends from Normandy were so impressed with the 2007 Côt wine that we all drove up to Saint-Romain yesterday morning. Each of them bought a case of the wine to take back home (Normandy is not a wine-producing area). The case price is 12 x 3.60 euros, or 43.20€. Not bad for a nice red that will keep for several years in the cellar.

While we were at the Saint-Romain co-op, I had my two 10-liter jugs filled with the local white Chardonnay. I bottle it myself. Twenty liters costs 26 euros, and that's the equivalent of 26 bottles. I prefer that Chardonnay to the local Sauvignon Blanc wines.

These are the other two Saint-Romain red wines
that we sampled over the weekend.

I also bought two other bottles for dinner last night. One was a 2006 Saint-Roman Cabernet Franc — Cuvée des Côtes — and the other was what the co-op calls its Cuvée Romaine — the traditional blend here in the Touraine wine-production area. That wine, a 2007, is made with a combination of Gamay, Cabernet Franc, and Côt grapes. Both the Cab. Franc and the Tradition were good, but not as good as the 2007 Côt, in our humble opinion.

Before dinner, we had a taste of a Touraine sparkling wine from the co-op over near Chenonceaux that's called La Gourmandière. I posted about that place, here, recently.

A 2006 Touraine Brut sparkling wine from La Gourmandière

I like the co-ops because they have regular business hours and you can drop in at your convenience. The Touraine wines are good and prices are reasonable. When you buy from small individual producers in Touraine, you often have to call ahead and make an appointment. It's a little more complicated, though it can be very interesting to see the old wine caves and cellars they operate out of.

Rabbit « rillettes »

Rillettes, a kind of potted meat, are a specialty of the Loire Valley and nearby regions. People in the city of Tours and, especially, the city of Le Mans (of car racing fame) to the north maintain a friendly rivalry over the quality of their particular styles of rillettes.

According to the Grand Robert dictionary of the French language, the word rillettes first appeared in print in 1835 in the writings of Honoré de Balzac, the great 19th-century novelist. Balzac was a native of Tours.

The standard rillettes, available in markets, charcuteries, and supermarkets all over France, are made of pork. Contrary to what you might think, and unlike pâtés and terrines, rillettes are made exclusively with lean meat. Pâtés, on the other hand, include chunks of fat, pieces of pork or chicken liver, and ground or chopped pieces of meat that are far from lean.

Pieces of chicken and rabbit cooked in white wine

The meat used to make rillettes is lean meat (pork shoulder or loin, for example) that is slow cooked in liquid or fat and then shredded or pounded in a mortar and pestle. The meat in rillettes can also be duck, goose, chicken, rabbit, or a combination of any of those. Rillettes can even be made with fish, including tuna or salmon. What we call "tuna salad" in the U.S. is known in France as rillettes de thon.

When I say the meat used to make rillettes is lean, I'm telling the truth. But what holds the shredded meat together to give it a pâté-like consistency is definitely fat. It's usually rendered pork fat, also known as lard in English (saindoux in French). It can also be rendered (melted) duck or goose fat. For tuna rillettes, the fat is vegetable oil emulsified with a raw egg yolk — the stuff we call mayonnaise.

Shredded rabbit and chicken meat simmering in duck fat

A few weeks ago the idea of making rabbit rillettes came to me. I'm not sure if it was because Intermarché had rabbits on special in their advertising flyer that week, or if the supermarket special was just coincidental. At any rate, I went and bought two rabbits and put them in the freezer, and then I waited for an opportunity. One of the rabbits got cooked with a cherry sauce back in June. I made the other one into rillettes yesterday.

Pack the rillettes in ramekins and refrigerate them.

The process of making rillettes out of a rabbit can be pretty complicated or it can be very simple. The complicated way, as I learned from the first few recipes I found on the Internet, is to first de-bone the raw rabbit and then cook the meat. A year or two ago I de-boned a raw rabbit to make a Thai curry dish, and I really didn't want to start that kind of job again. It was a lot of trouble, and pretty messy.

The simple way to make rillettes out of a rabbit is to cook the rabbit, whole or cut into pieces — the legs and the fillet (or râble in French) — in liquid and then take the meat off the bones after it is cooked. That's so much simpler. Actually, the meat just kind of falls off the bone. And rabbit is a very lean meat, so it's not messy.

The rillettes before they are chilled...

Just to keep the recipe a little complicated, the one I decided to make called for marinating the rabbit in white wine with aromatics for 24 hours before cooking it. The aromatics include a couple of carrots, an onion, some garlic, some herbs, and salt and pepper. I ended up marinating my rabbit for just about 8 hours because of time constraints.

You then cook the rabbit right in the marinade on top of the stove. Add a little water if necessary so that the meat is completely covered. Let it simmer for 90 minutes to two hours. In my version, because the rabbit I bought was fairly small (just 2 lbs.) I also added two chicken leg & thigh pieces to the pot. Rabbit looks and kind of tastes like chicken, anyway. Nobody would ever know.

... and after, ready to serve

When the rabbit is cooked, you let it cool down and then you take the pieces out of the broth and start taking the meat off the bones. You have to be meticulous, because rabbits have a lot of little rib bones and you don't want any of those to end up in the rillettes. Strain the broth and save it for soup or for cooking rice or vegetables.

Once you have a bowl full of boneless rabbit (and chicken) meat — and believe me, it smells really good cooked this way — you put it in a pan and add as much fat (lard, or duck or goose fat) as you want. Let the fat melt and stir the shredded meat over low heat around for five or ten minutes so it's all well blended.

You need enough fat so that when you put the rillettes in the refrigerator and chill them down, the meat holds together kind of like a pâté. Don't put in any more fat than that. ;^) You'll want to be able to spread the chilled potted meat on toasted bread. Salt the rillettes generously because you are going to eat them cold.

Yes, you eat rillettes on bread or toast, just the way you eat pâté. You can make sandwiches with them. And with them you usually serve little sour pickles called gherkins. Those are called cornichons in French. Olives are good too.

We ate one pot of rillettes with our apéros last night. They were a hit, if I do say so myself.

A plum tart

Or, une tarte aux prunes. All these little red plums are ripening on trees around the hamlet. On some trees, larger plums are still green and hard, but on others these little ones are red, sweet, and juicy. I planted a tree in our yard last year. I started it from the pits of little red plums I picked up in the neighbors' yard in 2007.

Little red plums the size of cherries

Yesterday I found two more trees. Nobody ever picks the fruit. One is in our next-door neighbor's yard and some of the branches hang over on our side of the fence. The other is in a vacant lot down the road. Nobody ever tends that lot, except once a year in July when somebody comes and mows down the tall grass. That mowing was done last week.

I know of at least four trees in the hamlet that are
loaded down with these plums right now.

Walking through there yesterday morning with the dog, I saw a big tree with branches hanging heavy with little red plums. They're ripe. These are plums that are not much bigger than cherries. They have sweet yellow pulp under the dark red skin.

Pitting them takes time.

I promised I wouldn't make any more jam or preserves. I still have a couple of quarts of plum preserves that I made in 2007, which was a banner year for stone fruit. This year is nearly as good.

What else can you do with ripe plums? Bake a pie, of course. First, pick some plums. Then blind-bake a pâte brisée crust — that's the standard pie crust. It's better if it's made with butter, of course, rather than some other fat. Put a sheet of foil in it and weigh it down with dried beans, pebbles, or ceramic pie weights. When the crust is lightly browned and fully set, take it out of the oven, lift out the foil and weights, and let it cool slightly.

Arrange them however you want over some sugar
and almond powder in a half-baked crust.

Meanwhile, pit the plums. That's tedious work with tiny plums, but it's worth it. Helping pit them was my main contribution to the pie effort, along with picking the plums in the first place. And taking the pictures.

Sprinkle a thin layer of sugar over the bottom of the half-cooked pie crust. For best results, sprinkle a thin layer of ground almonds (almond "flour" or powder) over that. The almond powder will absorb liquid released by the plums as they cook, and it will taste good too.

Sprinkle some sugar and lemon juice over the plums
before putting the tart in the oven.

Arrange the pitted plum halves over the sugar and almond powder. Arrange them as carefully as you want, or not carefully at all. Just spread them out into an even layer. Sprinkle them with a little lemon juice to accentuate the flavor, and sprinkle a tablespoon or two of sugar over them.

This would be really good with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Bake the pie for 15 or 20 minutes in a moderately hot oven so that the sugar on top will caramelize. The plums will start to brown or even blacken slightly. They will be sweet, tart, and kind of syrupy. It will be good.

Developments

Busy today. Making rillettes de lapin — deboned rabbit, cooked, shredded, and potted up in duck fat. We have guests from Rouen arriving tomorrow. They're not staying with us, but we would like to have them over for what is called un apéritif dînatoire — a light dinner of, basically, finger food — tomorrow night, and probably for another meal before they go back to Rouen on Wednesday.

The Sempervivum flowers are opening now.
Some are really pink, others are a lighter shade.

Meanwhile, here are some garden pictures. I need to go walk the dog right now....

Tomatoes are progressing nicely, despite
the cooler weather this past week.

...and now I'm back. It's very gray and kind of muggy out there this morning. We wish it would rain. I keep finding plum trees all over the neighborhood, on land that nobody seems to tend to. Some of the plums are ripe, and some are still green. The ripe ones are falling now, and I'm picking them when I can. Plum tart for lunch today...

Little daisies in the vineyard....

...and much bigger ones in the garden.

Time to go pit some plums. Walt is blind-baking the crust for the tart.

Loches, a royal town in the Loire Valley

After our walking, self-guided tour of La Corroirie Wednesday, Kay, Joe, and I were on our way to Loches. We made a stop at a little chapel in a field in the middle of the forest, called Saint-Jean-du-Liget (here's a link to an earlier post), but found it surrounded by a big fence. It's being cleaned and restored, from the look of it. It was too bad we couldn't get close enough to the little round chapel to admire the architectural details.

The Logis Royal, or royal residence, at Loches

In Loches, we drove through the "new" town's semi-pedestrian main street, past all the shops and shoppers, and wound our way up to the main gate of the old medieval city on a hill. We parked easily and walked through the Joan-of-Arc portal onto the steep narrow streets of the old town.

The 12th-century church in the old city at Loches

There are two "castles" in the old town at Loches, along with an ancient church, dating from the 12th century. One of the castles is the "royal lodge" — le logis royal — which was the French king's residence in the 1400s. The other is a medieval castle keep, or donjon, which is a few centuries older. I've posted pictures that I've taken in Loches several times since I started this blog (April 2006, Sept. 2008).

Views from the top of the fortified medieval tower at Loches.
Above, Loches and its old church. Below, the neighboring
town of Beaulieu and the old church there.

A striking feature of Loches is that the castles and church are on a high promontory above the newer town — which isn't new at all by American standards, of course. The views from the terrace next to the royal lodge are phenomenal. And then the views from the top of the fortified medieval towers are even more impressive, because you are on a much higher perch if you climb all the stairs to get up there.

A couple of typical views from up on the terrace of the
royal residence, looking down on the "new" town

On Wednesday, we were lucky to have breezy, clear weather, with beautiful skies and clouds. There were a few other people poking around in the old town, including some families with young children. No crowds, though.

A 16th-century tapestry from Brussels on display
in the old royal residence at Loches

Loches is always worth the visit. Along with Amboise, Blois, and the major châteaux at Chambord, Chaumont, Chenonceaux, and Cheverny, it is one of the most interesting places in the area. And it's an easy drive from Saint-Aignan.