Dangerous

No, not yesterday's post about the pucker (how many people can I offend today?). Dangerous applies to our weather conditions. What an autumn! You can imagine how happy we are at the prospect of the actual winter beginning this coming week.

Yesterday the temperature went up above freezing in the afternoon, and the sun came out for a while. The morning snow started to melt on the roadway, especially where the sun could shine on it. In shady places, it just became a little slushy.

A wintry view of the Renaudière hamlet

Then overnight the temperature, of course, went back down below freezing. Those slushy spots on the road — even out on the gravel road through the vineyard — froze over and are exceedingly slick this morning. This is nothing unusual for people who live in regions where the winters are cold. In this part of France, it creates pagaille — havoc, chaos. Again today, many big trucks are parked on highways around the country, blocking lanes, because the drivers found it too dangerous to continue and had nowhere else to park.

Looking back toward our house and the maison de
vigneron from the vineyard. The tall conifer is ours.

I went out with the dog a while ago and I slipped and slid all along the way. It was dangerous for me, especially, because I am still not fully recovered from my ankle sprain. I got off the road to walk on grass and in places where there wasn't so much slick ice. Callie loves to go off the road, anyway, so she was happy. And then after a decent distance, I turned around and headed back home. It had started snowing again.

The north side of our neighbors' roof and the shaded patches
of the road were all frozen over this morning.

Walt just yelled up from downstairs: "Hey, we're having a blizzard!" It's coming down fast and furious right now. The snow is falling on slippery ice.

The French pucker

Last night I watched the news/interview program called Le Grand Journal on the French Canal+ TV station. The guest was the ministre des Finances, a woman named Christine Lagarde. She was born in Paris and educated in France, but she also graduated from a high school in the Washington DC area and spent many years as a member of a big law firm in Chicago and some years in a DC think tank (pronounced [teenk-tawnk] in French, LOL).

Madame Lagarde was cool, glib, earnest, and well informed, as always. What I noticed about her, however, was her French pucker. To speak French like a native, you have to purse your lips rather tightly when you say a lot of vowels and words. French is spoken sur le bout des lèvres — with your lips in a round pucker. American English is pronounced in a slack-jawed — or at least relaxed-lipped — kind of way in comparison.

Christine Lagarde showing us her vertical lip lines.

One phenomenon I've noticed and that I've attributed to this puckered-lips posture that speaking French requires has to do with lip wrinkles. French as it is spoke in France, I mean. Often when you look at French women, especially, as they are talking, you'll see that they have vertical wrinkles or lines on their upper lip, in in the space between the nose and the lip itself. I haven't noticed it as much in men.

A recent photo of Brigitte Bardot that I found here.
Same lines, if you look closely.

My take on it is that it's the pucker that causes the vertical upper-lip lines. I wondered for a long time if anybody else had ever noticed or thought about this phenomenon. Then one day a few weeks ago, another American expatriate mentioned it to me. Her analysis of the causes of the lip wrinkles differed from mine, though. She said: it's from years of smoking — holding the cigarette between your puckered lips and sucking in the smoke. It's true that that could be a contributing factor.

I don't think Mme Lagarde was trying to hide her upper lip...

I have no idea whether or not Mme Lagarde smokes or used to smoke cigarettes.

But she does have the lip lines and the pucker. The pucker is not optional for speaking French, really. You have to hold your lips very tight and not be afraid to exaggerate the rounding of them to pronounce certain common vowels. Just take the pronouns tu, nous, and vous. Pronouncing them correctly requires what can seem like labial gymnastics to Americans (and probably other speakers of English).

Here's a much younger woman talking
on the TéléMatin show this morning.

As for the weather, we seem to have gotten a dusting of snow overnight. I have peered out into the darkness to see what I can see, and there's definitely some white stuff out there. It was raining heavily when I went to bed at about 10 p.m. At least it sounded like rain. It must have snowed later. At the same time, the temperature is slightly above freezing.

Walt and I have talked about it and we are convinced that MétéoFrance, the French national weather forecasting service, is now exaggerating its forecasts to make sure it doesn't get blamed again for failing to predict significant snowfall. That's despite the fact that the service did predict last week's four to six inches of snow in the Paris region. Because the prime minister criticized weather forecasters on that one, they are covering their derrière very carefully now.

Looking out the kitchen window a few minutes ago...

P.S. 10:30 a.m. — it started snowing again and it's coming down pretty heavily. Walt had an appointment to get his hair cut and he decided to keep it. I went out and inspected the front tires on the Peugeot and I have to say they are not nearly as worn as the CT guy said. They are far from bald or slick. I'm biased (but the tires aren't — they're radials LOL) but I don't think they're too bad. Of course, if this kind of snowy weather continues through the winter it will be better to have new tires now rather than waiting until next summer.

Contrôle technique

The temperature this morning is actually above freezing. Any precipitation we get will probably be cold rain instead of snow, and I'm glad of that. However, they are saying that it will get cold again later in the day and snow overnight and tomorrow morning.

Today's weather map — I added some city names for reference.
Saint-Aignan is about 40 miles east of Tours,
right on the line between rain and snow.

As usual, Saint-Aignan is right on the line between the rain and snow areas on the weather maps. That's the nature of this particular area. We have a semi-continental climate with oceanic influences. And we are at low altitude, so that plays in our favor as far as avoiding snow goes. I'll report on the situation tomorrow morning. (I'm sure you can't wait.)

Tonight we'll be in the snow zone, but only for an inch or two.
It's also supposed to snow on Saturday and Sunday.

Meanwhile, one of the things I had to get done Tuesday morning was a car inspection — called a contrôle technique in France. « Contrôle » is one of those French words that looks like an English word, but it has a subtly different meaning. Its first meaning is "inspection, examination, verification." For example, a test given to university students is called (or used to be called — my university days are far behine me) un contrôle de connaissances — a "verification of knowledge."

From there the meaning slides into the meaning of the English word "control" — meaning maîtrise, or mastery, as of your vehicle, for example. Or your temper. Of course, in English we also have "controls" on an experiment to check or verify the results against some standard. Anyway, contrôler is a word you have to use carefully in French.

And are they ever careful when they do a contrôle technique on your car. You have to go in every two years once your vehicle reaches the age of four years, and you have to display a current CT sticker or you can be fined by the police for not keeping your vehicle under contrôle... sorry, inspected.

The contrôle technique checklist
for vehicles registered in France.

The list of checks the CT people do includes about 120 items in nine categories, from pollution to brakes, lights, tires, steering, and much more. The company I go to for the CT (and this was my Peugeot's fourth, I think, because the car is now 10 years old) sends me a letter in November to remind me to make an appointment in December.

When you take it in, they drive the car up over one of those pits like the ones they have in oil-change places in the U.S. and they spend quite a while underneath. They have machines that do a bounce test to check the shock absorbers. They race the engine and catch the gases coming out of the tail pipe to see if the car is meeting pollution standards. They tinker and fiddle...

Anyway, it takes a while and for my diesel Peugeot 206 model it costs 70 euros (about 90 dollars). As I said, it's every two years.

How did the Peugeot do? It needs new front tires and an alignment. « Vos pneus avant sont morts ! », the man told me. I knew it was time for new tires in 2011, but I had no idea the front tires were so worn. "You can't see it, because they are worn on the inside," he said. "From the outside they look fine." That's because the front end is out of alignment, he said.

He also said the gendarmes might give me a ticket if they stop me for any reason and decide to look at the tires. Luckily, I don't drive much. And with the snow coming tonight and all through the weekend — if the forecasts are accurate — I certainly won't be out on the road.

So I went to see Dominique at the tire shop and I ordered a set of four new Michelins for the car. He'll put them on next Tuesday. He'll go through the checklist and fix any other minor defects, and he'll do an alignment, which is called un parallélisme in French — the front wheels need to be aligned so that they are absolutely parallèles.

Glasses woes

The snow is supposed to come back today. Nobody is predicting just how much we might get. But it is very cold again — colder this morning than yesterday morning, when we had a few flurries before the clouds broke and pallid sunlight graced us with an appearance in the afternoon.

I had to go out yesterday. On Saturday, the two pairs of glasses I depend on for reading, and all close work, both fell apart. That morning, I was cleaning the glasses I like the best when the lens fell out in my hand and I realized I had lost the screw that held it in.

No worries, I thought. I have the other pair of glasses and I have some replacement screws and a tiny screwdriver. Walt and I were headed out to the market so I just but the broken glasses aside and wore the other pair. I'd fix the broken ones later.

No matter whether you live in France or not,
this is the kind of stuff that happens!

In the afternoon, I was cleaning the second pair of glasses in preparation for trying to put that tiny screw back in the better pair. Suddenly it happened again — the lens came out in my hand and I had lost the screw! Damn. Now I was really in trouble.

I asked Walt if he could fix the first pair for me, and he said he'd try. I went ahead and took the dog out for her walk, because it was starting to get dark. When I got back, Walt said he had tried and tried but couldn't get the tiny screw back into the hole. So I still had no glasses. I would never have been able to do it either, even if my vision wasn't impaired. My fingers are too fat and clumsy.

There it was Saturday evening and I had no glasses. The optical shops in Saint-Aignan and Noyers are closed on Mondays. I was faced with the prospect of being able to do no reading (and no blogging) or other work requiring glasses for the next couple of days. Why do such things (including sick animals) always seem to happen on Saturday evening?

I decided we could rig up a repair using a thin piece of wire (the wire in a twist-tie, with the paper pulled off). Walt was able to insert the wire in the two holes, get the lens in, and twist it tight to hold the whole thing together. I was saved. I could see again.

It's hell getting old. I remember when I didn't need glasses at all. And I remember when I could still read without wearing them, though not as well as with them. Now I can't read at all without them.

Mes lunettes réparées

Yesterday I went over to Noyers (5 miles away, across the river) to do a few errands (supermarket, hardware store, car inspection) and stopped in at the optical shop with my two pairs of broken glasses. The shop itself was being redecorated, and several workers were taking down old display racks and putting new ones up on the walls. At first I thought the shop was closed for the day. But the optician turned out to be there, and in less than 10 minutes' time he had repaired both pairs of glasses.

I was his first customer of the day so there was no waiting. And there was no charge. I told him I was American and that the glasses came from the U.S. « Ce sont les mêmes vis, de toute façon » he said — the screws are the same.

Poultry, selon Tante Marie

I've been reading a lot about chickens recently. In cookbooks, of course. I came across this introduction to a chapter about poultry in a 1920s cookbook with the title La Véritable Cuisine de Famille, written by a woman who called herself Tante Marie (tante means "aunt").

The cookbook's title page

This chapter introduction explains the different types of chickens you can buy in France. This is especially interesting to me, I guess, because I live here now. Some of the terms defined here are ones I've seen but have never completely understood before.

Volaille (Poultry)

The term volailles (poultry) includes poules (hens), poulardes (pullets), chapons (capons), poulets (chickens), oies (geese), pigeons, and dindons (turkeys).

Poules are females that have begun to lay. Poulardes are young hens that are carefully fattened and that have not yet begun to lay.

Chapons are young male chickens that have been castrated, fattened with care and kept in little cages where light hardly ever penetrates.

Here's the text in French.

Poulets de grain are free-range chickens. Chickens called poulets à la reine ("the queen's chickens") are confined in small cages starting when they are three or four months old and then fattened over a period lasting at least two months.

Young chickens have very large feet and knees compared to older chickens. The males possess a vestigial heel claw or spur (l'ergot). If the spur is not very prominent, the bird is young. If, however, it is well developed, the bird is old and therefore should not be chosen for roasting.

We cooked a turkey breast (with the wings) for Christmas

in 2003, our first year in Saint-Aignan.

A chicken should be as tender as possible, unless it's one you plan to use only for making broth. In that case, you can use an old hen. If possible, choose a chicken with thin white skin and nice meat. The chicken should be killed at least two days before you are planning to eat it. If you can't wait two days, then feed the chicken a teaspoonful of vinegar one minute before killing it, and store the carcass in a cool place.

Pluck the chicken as soon as you've killed it and then gut it to avoid having the intestines impart a bad taste to the meat. Once it is gutted, pass the carcass over a flame to remove any hairs and little feathers that remain, and lay the feet over glowing coals to remove the outer skin, which is tough and dirty.

I'm not sure why canards (ducks) are not included in the classification along with chickens, geese, pigeons, and turkeys. Or pintades (guinea fowl) either. Also coqs (roosters in American English), as in coq au vin... I see coqs being sold in the markets (and have bought them), so they are available nowadays, as are all the other types of poultry mentioned here.

When we buy poultry in the open-air markets, the birds often still have the head and feet on them. The vendor — le volailler — cleans them for you so that they are ready to cook when you get them home. But if you want you can take the volaille home and do it yourself. I'm sure you can ask to keep the head and feet, but I've never done so.

Hibernation

Some days I feel like I've gone into hibernation. The sun comes up late (8:35 right now) and goes down early (just before 5:00). The days are often gray and dim. By the way, it's supposed to start snowing again tomorrow. I don't think we'll get the 40 to 50 cm they just got in places like Minnesota and Wisconsin, however.

But then we not in the far north. Still, several buildings had their roofs cave in up on the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy during the last snow episode. Some were farm buildings, but at least one collapse caused damage at a shopping center. The weight of the snow was just too much, with some places getting 70 cm (over 2 feet).

The Renaudière vineyard, outside
Saint-Aignan- sur-Cher, on a December morning

Anyway, hibernation. I find myself going to bed earlier and earlier, and getting up later and later. Often by 10 I'm asleep. And I'm still covered up and warm at 7:30 or even 8:00 in the morning. And I've always been an early bird. Is it the cold? The darkness? My age? All of the above? It's just the season, I guess.

Last week a major four-lane highway on the southwest side of Paris was a scene of chaos for drivers. The road goes through a hilly area and is also fairly curvy. And it was iced over after 4 or 5 inches of snow fell. Several hundreds or even thousands of people — it's always hard to get a firm number in such situations — of people were stuck in their cars for many hours, with no way to get off the road.

December sunrise (1) over the Renaudière vineyard

The government was blamed for not calling out the snowplows and road-salting equipment early enough. With trucks and cars blocking all lanes for miles, getting such equipment in became impossible. People interviewed on TV said they had been sitting in their vehicles for 6, 8, even 10 hours without making any significant forward progress.

They started abandoning their cars and walking to exits, looking for some hot coffee or food and maybe a warm place to spend the night. Different towns along the road set up emergency shelters for them in gyms and other public buildings. Shopkeepers let people sleep in their heated storerooms.

December sunrise (2) at Saint-Aignan

The prime minister, François Fillon, was asked why the government hadn't sent out crews to plow and salt the roads. He promptly blamed MétéoFrance for failing to predict the intensity of the coming storm. That caused an uproar, with the TV news broadcasts re-screening the predictions that had preceded the storm to show that the weather service wasn't at fault. It was all a big exercise in passing the buck, as we say.

So hibernation isn't so bad, on second thought. It's better than being out on the highways in bad weather, as so many people are. We'll see how much snow and how much chaos this week's weather brings.

Mustard, and the market

Busy this morning and posting late. I'm making bœuf bourguignon. I bought the beef a few days ago and bourguignon has been on the schedule for a while. I think everybody knows that that's beef stewed in red wine with onions, carrots, smoked-pork lardons, and mushrooms.

Notice we don't talk much about the weather much any more. That's because it's back to normal. Yesterday morning it was very cold but we were able to enjoy going to the open-air market in Saint-Aignan. One reason for going was to order a "bird" — une volaille, a fowl — for our Christmas dinner.

Browning chunks of beef for a bourguignon

As far as I know, there will be just the two of us for Christmas. We both wanted to roast a turkey, but that's a lot of meat for just two people. Anyway, we went to see the poultry vendor — le volailler — that we like at the market. We figured if we couldn't order a small turkey, or it was just too expensive, we'd place an order for a nice guinea hen, une pintade.

Chez le volailler, the woman in charge knows us. We told her we wanted a turkey and she said the smallest dinde she'd be able to get us would weigh 3.5 kilos. Walt and I looked at each other and said, « Pourquoi pas ? » A bird like that would be in the 8 to 9 lb. category.

Besides, we have a plan. We will probably roast the turkey breast and save the leg-thigh sections for another dish. Maybe confit de dinde, where you cook the turkey pieces slowly in melted duck fat until they are very tender. They take on some of the flavor of duck in the process.

We'll pick up the turkey at the Friday morning market in Montrichard on December 24. That'll be fairly convenient. And we'll cook it during the day on the 25th.

The flavor base for the bouguignon — sautéed onions, lardons,
and carrots, with thyme and bay leaves

Oh, about the market — I was pleasantly surprised to see what a good mood everybody was in. Customers joked and laughed with each other as they stood in fairly long lines, waiting to buy fromage, charcuterie, or légumes. And then they chatted and laughed with the vendors too. I think the beautiful food in a French market puts people in a good mood.

Evelyn asked about ways to use the very hot Dijon mustard she got from a French friend of ours who visited her recently. It's true that the French mustard is much much hotter than about any mustard you can find in America. I love it. But I also remember times when we lived in California and we'd fly to Paris and eat French mustard at one of our first lunches or dinners. It was always a surprise.

You'd take some out of the little mustard pot on a café or restaurant table and slather it on a piece of steak or a French-fried potato. You'd put it in your mouth and you'd feel like the top of your head was going to blow off. The hot mustard "goes right up your nose" as they say in France, and it really clears out your sinuses.

One thing about hot Dijon mustard though is that it's only really hot when it's very fresh. If you leave the jar in a kitchen cabinet for a week or two, the flavor will end up toned down and the color of the mustard will go from bright yellow to mustardy brown. It will still be good to eat and cook with, but it won't make your head feel like an erupting volcano.

I think that's why you can't get really hot Dijon mustard in the U.S. The American companies make it for American tastes. But even the imported stuff has lost a lot of its heat by the time it finally gets across the Atlantic — and across the continent to California, for example.

Bœuf bourguignon ready to go into a slow oven
for a three-hour cooking

Ways to use Dijon mustard in cooking? Well, in vinaigrette is the first thing that comes to mind. But not everybody likes to eat vinaigrette on salads every day. In France, one of the most common dishes containing mustard is lapin à la moutarde. You don't have to do it with rabbit, however; you can use chicken. Rub mustard on skinless chicken pieces and sprinkle on some bread crumbs. Bake them in the oven. Cooked mustard loses most of its fiery pungency, but still has a nice flavor.

Pork chops fried and then served in a cream sauce that has a tablespoon of Dijon mustard are very good too. I've blogged about that before. You could do the same with steaks or chicken. Those are the first ideas that come to mind.

I'd better go check on the bœuf bourguignon, which is bubbling away in the oven. I still have to trim, wash, and slice the mushrooms that go in toward the end of the cooking. It should all be ready about 1:00 for lunch.

Sauté de poulet au vinaigre

Poulet au vinaigre is a movie made by Claude Chabrol in 1985, with a cast including three of my favorite actors: Jean Poiret (of La Cage aux Folles fame), Stéphane Audran (Babette in Babette's Feast), and Michel Bouquet (who's been in so many great French films — starting in 1947).

But poulet au vinaigre is also a distinctly French recipe that they say comes from the country's gastonomic capital, the city of Lyon. It is "chicken with vinegar" — and I do love vinegar. Vinegar is a North Carolina staple. We eat cucumbers, tomatoes, beets, and other vegetables in vinegar as side dishes or garnishes to big meals.

We make Eastern N.C. barbecued pork with a vinegar and hot red pepper sauce. We splash vinegar on our beans and on our greens at the table. In fact, we also cook chicken on the grill or in the oven with that same vinegar and hot red pepper barbecue sauce.

Marinating the chicken pieces in white wine and vinegar,
with onions, carrots, and herbs, is an optional first step.

And in France, how can you eat salads without loving vinaigrette dressing? For me, vinegar is a requirement with fresh oysters too — vinegar with chopped shallot and coarsely ground pepper is a mignonnette sauce that is my favorite with oysters on the half shell. Others prefer lemon juice, but not me.

Besides, vinaigre is made from vin — that's wine. And you wonder why I like it....

While the chicken pieces are browning, splash some vinegar
on them to tenderize and flavor them.

So poulet au vinaigre. Yes, it's chicken with a vinegar sauce. But the title of the Chabrol movie is also a kind of joke. Poulet in French slang means "policeman" or "cop" — and not at all what "chicken" means in English. The main character in the Chabrol film is a detective who is also a gourmand — he loves good food.* As in most French movies, many of the scenes show him in restaurants, eating. So poulet au vinaigre was a good title, since it's good food.

What is it, then? Well, it's what is called a sauté. You sauté the chicken (or, in other recipes, pork, beef, veal, turkey, or rabbit) until it is browned. Then you add a liquid — water, wine, broth — and things like onions, garlic, mushrooms, or carrots to the pan and let everything cook all together. The difference between a sauté and a fricassée is that for the former you brown the meat first, but for the latter — the fricassée — you don't. A fricassée is like a blanquette in that sense.

In France, they say we should eat servings of five vegetables
or fruits every day. So I put mushrooms, onions, and carrots
in my sauce. That's three in a single meal. Add salad.

A coq au vin is a kind of sauté. So is a bœuf bourguignon. Well, both of those cook longer than a chicken sauté, but that's because they are made with tougher meat. Otherwise, the process is about the same. Herbs — parsley, thyme, bay leaf, tarragon, rosemary — and aromatics — onions, shallots, garlic, carrots — can make a big difference in the flavor.

For flavor, as well, the liquid you add to the pan to make a sauce, after the meat or poultry for a sauté is... well, sautéed ..., is often wine. It can also be cream, tomato sauce, chicken or vegetable broth, or it can be a combination of all of the above. And it can include vinegar, for a distinctive taste.

Poulet au vinaigre, donc. It's not pickled. It just has a nice tang, an acidic note.

The basic method calls for sautéing pieces of chicken — legs and thighs, for example, or whatever you want, remembering that white meat can get kind of dry — in butter or oil or both. You take them out of the pan and sauté some onion, garlic, carrots, and mushrooms in the same pan. Then you sprinkle flour over the vegetables and stir it in until the flour is lightly cooked, and you add liquid.

In this case, the liquid is ½ to ¾ cup of vinegar (in all) and 1 cup of white wine. Add herbs and spices — black pepper, allspice, hot red pepper, bay leaf, salt of course — and let the liquids and spices cook with the vegetables until you have a nice thickened sauce. Add a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste or sauce for color and, optionally, a couple of tablespoons of cream for richness. A tablespoon of Dijon mustard can also be a good addition. Here's the recipe:

Poulet au vinaigre

2½ lbs. of chicken pieces
¼ lb. of bacon, chopped (optional)
½ lb. of mushrooms, sliced
1 large onion, chopped
1 large carrot, sliced
1 Tbsp. of flour
salt and pepper
pinches of allspice and crushed pepper, to taste
a pinch of dried thyme
1 or 2 bay leaves
1 cup white wine
½ cup cider or white wine vinegar
2 Tbsp. tomato paste or sauce
1 Tbsp. Dijon mustard (optional)
2 Tbsp. heavy cream (optional)

Brown the chicken pieces in butter or oil. Sprinkle some vinegar on them as they cook. Season with salt and pepper to taste. After about 10 minutes, take the meat out of the pan and keep it warm in the oven.

In the same pan sauté the sliced mushrooms. Set them aside with the chicken. Then sauté the onion and carrot (and the optional bacon) in the same pan.

Sprinkle the flour over the sautéed vegetables and stir well until it is absorbed. Add the mushrooms back into the pan and stir again.

Pour on the vinegar and white wine. Stir well, scraping the bottom of the pan with a wooden or plastic spatula. Add the herbs and spices and let the sauce cook and thicken for 5 minutes. Add the tomato paste or sauce, along with the optional cream and mustard, and wine or water as necessary for consistency.

Then put the browned chicken back into the pan. Cover it, and let it cook for as long as 30 minutes on low on top of the stove or in a 300ºF/160ºC oven, until the chicken is as done as you want it.

When it's cooked, taste the sauce. Thin it with more vinegar (to taste) or with white wine or water. Serve with rice, potatoes, or pasta.

One of the most famous chefs who has made a specialty of poulet au vinaigre is Georges Blanc, whose three-starred restaurant near Lyon is called La Mère Blanc. His recipe leaves out the cream and mustard, and that's fine, but I think it's better with them. Everything in moderation... but don't leave out the vinegar.

Other recipes for poulet au vinaigre that I've seen include only chicken, vinegar, water, onions, and flour for thickening. That's very simple. In many fancier French recipes, you would cook the onions, carrots, garlic, herbs, etc. in the sauce and then strain them out and discard them. Then would you add the sautéed mushrooms or bacon to the sauce. I like the rustic style better myself. I don't throw anything out.

You can serve the chicken and sauce
right out of the pan.

I think poulet au vinaigre would be really good made with red wine instead of white, along with balsamic or red wine vinegar. That's what I'll do next time Looking at the recipe, you might also find yourself thinking: "Needs (more) garlic!"

I've looked through all my cookbooks and I've found only a very few recipes for poulet au vinaigre. Two are American. Jacques Pépin has one for "Sautéed Chicken Legs with Garlic Slivers and Balsamic Vinegar" in his book Simple and Healthy Cooking (1994). A man named Michael Roberts from L.A. has one in his book Parisian Home Cooking (1999) — it calls for a big boiling hen, aged red wine vinegar and aromatic vegetables including celery — plus "2 chicken feet, ½ calf's foot, or 1 pig's tail"! It's probably good... if you can get one of those ingredients.

* There's another French movie called Tendre poulet with Annie Girardot and Philippe Noiret. It is a comedy that's also about a cop — a hard-nosed policewoman.

Woodpecker visit

Wednesday afternoon, just when it was getting dark, I went down to the utility room to take some things back down there, and to put some laundry in the washing machine and set it to run overnight. The utility room in our house is a combination chaufferie, or boiler room, and buanderie, laundry room. There are big storage closets in there, as well as a shower stall, a chest freezer, and an electric water heater. The room is big — about 30 feet long and 15 feet wide, or 40 square meters.

As I pushed the door open, I heard a loud fluttering sound to my left. My first thought was that Bertie the cat was in there and had somehow made that noise. When I looked up in the corner at ceiling level, however, I saw a bird. It was a green, red-headed woodpecker — a bird we see a lot around here, and called a pic vert [peek-VEHR] or pivert [pee-VEHR] in French. I certainly never expected to see one in the house.

The green woodpecker is sedentary in France. We see them
year-round in our back yard and out in the vineyard.
The one on the left is a male, and on the right a female.
Photo credits: http://www.oiseaux.net/photos/alain.fosse/pic.vert.1.html
and http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pic_vert

I had my arms full of things I was taking down to the pantry — le cellier — so about all I could do was continue on my way. Walt had just gone out for the afternoon walk with Callie. I turned on the light (the switch is outside the door) and pushed the pantry door open. As soon as I was inside and setting things down, the woodpecker flew in there with me. The pantry is a small, unheated, windowless room with a dirt floor.

Having the woodpecker in there with me was a little unnerving. A pic vert is a fairly big bird — 12 or 13 inches (31 or 33 cm) long, with a 16-inch (40 to 42 cm) wingspan. It also has a very long, pointed beak. It was flapping wildly up where the walls meet the ceiling, and the ceiling is not very high downstairs. The poor bird was in a panic.

The pivert — this is a male; you can tell by his red "mustache" —
often feeds on the ground, eating ants and other insects.
Photo credit: http://www.vertdeterre.com/nature/animal/oiseau-pic+vert.htm

I went back to the other end of the utility room and opened the back door wide. In a corner, I found a broom. I took the broom back to the pantry and gently tried to shoo the woodpecker out. It worked, but the bird couldn't seem to find the back door, and soon he had flown from one end of the big utility room to the other and then back again, into the pantry. I started over again.

I kept thinking: what if he turns on me? He could hurt me with that beak and those claws he uses to grip onto the bark of trees. But I needed to get him out of the house. The second time he flew, with the broom nudging him, out of the pantry and across the utility room, he found the open door and he was gone into the semi-darkness.

The last lumps of last week's snow, on the side of
the road that comes up the hill to our hamlet

Whew. Success. When Walt got home with Callie, I told him about it. He said I was making stuff up. But I wasn't. We've had little European robins (rouges-gorges), titmice (mésanges), and even bats (chauves-souris) in the house before, but never in the utility room. And never anything as impressive as a woodpecker. I wonder how he came in. Through the garage, maybe, using the window we leave open for Bertie to come in and go out during the day. Or could the woodpecker have slipped in when Walt opened the back door to go out with Callie?

Here's a link to a video showing the green woodpecker's feeding behavior, and here's another one. One more link: the Wikipedia article on the green woodpecker in English.

A babbling brook, exceptionally

It didn't snow in Saint-Aignan yesterday but did it ever rain! Walt got another 30 mm out of the rain gauge in the morning, and I'm sure the gauge is full again today. In other words, we've had at least 75 mm, or 3 inches, of rainfall in less than 48 hours. That's six weeks' worth.

Yesterday when I went out (in the rain) with Callie for the morning walk, we followed one of the dog's favorite off-road paths, despite the muddiness. The dirt road itself was so muddy I figured it didn't matter, and I had my waterproof hiking boots on. Callie's favorite path turns off the road out past the maison de vigneron, right behind the first stand of trees that runs perpendicular to the road. Here's a map:

Our house is in the upper right corner. The red line marks

the path of the walk and the white line is the creek bed.
Click on the map to see it full-size.

When it rains, water flows down and across the dirt road all along the way. The shallow gullies formed where the run-off crosses the road serve drainage purposes, but they also prevent cars and motorcycles from going along the mile-long road at high speed — they are the concave equivalent of speed bumps. Finally, all the water runs down into a fairly deep gully — a ravine, I guess you could call it. When there is water, that is. Normally the ravine contains little or no water — it's a dry creek.

The back yard and the vineyard yesterday afternoon.
You can see the maison de vigneron and, in the
distance, the trees that grow along the ravine.

But yesterday morning it was a torrent. It babbled and gurgled and splashed in a way I've never seen before, after living here for 7½ years. There were swirling rapids. The sound was very pleasing to the ear.

Easy, spicy chicken wings

As I've said, ever since the SuperU store in Saint-Aignan started selling packages of chicken wings — or ever since we noticed them — we've really been enjoying them at lunchtime. They're not very expensive and they are good finger food, whether for an American-style, eat-it-with-your hands meal, or as an accompaniment to the inevitable glass when you have people over for a visit.

This recipe is a variation on Buffalo-style wings. We've made those other times, different ways, but they can be a little messy to eat, because often the wing sections are first dredged in flour and then baked or deep-fried. Finally, they are coated in a hot red-pepper sauce. The sauce really sticks to the crust on the wings that way, and then it sticks to your fingers when you eat them.

Baked chicken wings with a hot red-pepper sauce

For this version, you don't need any flour. Just put the wing pieces — about two dozen of them, both drumettes and flats — in a bowl and pour in a little bit of vegetable oil. Toss them to coat them in the oil, and then salt and pepper them.

Put them on a rack or on a silicone baking mat on an oven pan and bake them in a 350ºF/180ºC oven for about 30 minutes. Or cook them on the grill outdoors if you can.

While the wings are cooking make a sauce using equal quantities of melted butter and hot red-pepper paste. Three tablespoons of each will make a fairly mild but spicy sauce. Use more pepper paste for a hotter version. Also, add a tablespoon of vinegar to the sauce unless your red pepper paste or sauce (Tabasco or other Louisiana hot sauce, for example) already has vinegar in it, and a dash of Worcestershire sauce. Taste the sauce to see if it's to your liking.

Put the partially cooked wings back into the bowl you used earlier and pour on the sauce. Stir them so they're well coated and use tongs or a fork put them back in the oven or on the grill for a second cooking. If there's sauce left in the bottom of the bowl, you can brush the wings with it as they cook for another 10 to 15 minutes.

A platter of wings for lunch or apéros

When they're done, chicken wings made this way are not especially greasy or sticky to the touch. They are good finger food because they don't get your hands too messy — and because they taste so good.

Here's another idea for chicken wings: Yakitori de poulet. You could use the same method to do them. Just vary the sauce.

And here's a link to some pictures and a recipe for the classic way of making and serving Buffalo-style wings that Walt posted last year.

Pre-winter, post-snow green

The rain is pouring down again today. We got over an inch —
26 mm — of rain yesterday. Or was it the day before? These gray days tend to run together in a blur.

But not the weeks. This week is very wet and chilly. And green again. It's quite a contrast to last week's frigid white decor.

It's very hard to take pictures right now, with the rain and the gloom. But I managed to take these three this morning, from various windows around the house.

I've gone back to look at previous years' photos taken here in Saint-Aignan on or about this date, December 7. In some years, the sun is shining brightly and everything is green, even though the leave are off the trees. In those years, we had raked up all the dead leaves and everything looked much neater.

One year, we had a big windstorm on this date. The weather varies a lot. I guess it does in most places, doesn't it?

It was 8 years ago this week when we found this house we now live in. Soon after, we decided to pack up and move to France to live full-time. We have no regrets, no buyer's remorse. I'm enjoying retirement but I hate to watch the years just fly by.

At the same time... is it spring yet?

Snow melt + tides = flooding in Cherbourg

Rain is pouring down this morning. Not a deluge, but a steady rain that is slowly melting all the snow. It rained all afternoon yesterday. The high temperature was about 38ºF.

The deluge happened in the port town of Cherbourg, up on the northern extremity of the Normandy peninsula called Le Cotentin. That's an area that very rarely has any significant snowfall at all because of maritime winds that keep it relatively mild.

They say the big dump of snow that covered the area melted so fast, because of heavy rains that followed the snowfall, that the local river, La Divette, reached flood stage very quickly. Unfortunately, this is the time of year when the highest and lowest tides occur along the French coast.

There was what is aptly called a "flood" tide this weekend, just as it was raining the hardest and the snow was almost all melted. The tide caused the Divette to back up, and much of the center of the town was suddenly knee-deep in water. In some places it was waist-deep. The ground floor of many buildings was inundated. Cars were floating down the streets.

A Cherbourg, l’avenue de Paris se transforme en torrent

Click the forward arrow on the graphic to play the video.

People said they had never seen anything like this happen in Cherbourg, which normally benefits from what is called a temperate climate.

Nothing like this happened in Saint-Aignan over the weekend. I imagine the Cher River is nearly at flood stage, however, with all the melting snow and the steady rain. I didn't go out yesterday to see it, but I do plan to go to the supermarket today. It's been over a week since the last shopping trip.

Saint-Aignan on a cold Saturday

For the first time in a while, the low temperature was above freezing this morning. It was all of +1ºC, so Mother Nature was not going overboard with her generosity. However, the snow is melting... slowly.

The weather was bright and sunny yesterday morning. Today, skies are gray and it's supposed to start raining by noon. It will be a cold rain, and it's going to make for a sloppy mess outside. I'm staying in — except for the obligatory sortie with the chien this afternoon.

A Saint-Aignan street corner, with icicles

Yesterday I made a quick run down into Saint-Aignan to go to the pharmacy (just daily meds, no illnesses here right now). The drive down the hill, which I took very slowly and deliberately, was fine, even though the roadway was covered in a thin sheet of iciness. The bigger road down along the river was clear, and there was little traffic.

Rays of sunlight streaming into our kitchen
yesterday morning

The hard part was getting the car out of our driveway. I backed it out of the garage, turned around, and slowly moved toward the front gate and the road. There's a slight rise in elevation involved. As it turns out, there was also a little ridge of hard-frozen snow in the way, just outside the gate, along the edge of the road. The tractor that the village has sent to keep the road clear this week had piled up snow in front of our gate.

And the car couldn't make it over. I floored it, and the front wheels started spinning wildly. Problem was, I and the car were making no forward progress. Instead we were sliding sideways, toward a concrete fence post and a ditch. I thought better of stepping down any harder on the gas pedal.

Bad weather has disrupted regular garbage collection.
Trash is piling up in Saint-Aignan.

Walt was upstairs running the vacuum cleaner, so he didn't hear all this happening. I thought I remembered that we had a bag of sawdust in the garage, so I went to look for it. I figured that if I poured some sawdust onto the snow in front of the two front wheels, I might be able to get enough traction to make it over the snow bump.

(In France, a speed bump is called a gendarme couché — a sleeping policeman. This bump was more like a gendarme givré — a frozen policeman.)

Sunlight filling the living room
For Judy ;^) and for those of you who have visited, so you can see the new look

No sawdust. But look, there's a bag of kitty litter. Perfect. I knew there would one day be some advantage to having a cat living here. Besides the affection and entertainment, I mean. Back outside, the litter did the trick and the Peugeot and I were soon out on the road and on our way down the slippery hill.

The crêperie in Saint-Aignan looked like it was getting ready
to open for lunch. A crêpe sounded really good right then.

At the pharmacy, a customer came in and starting chatting with the employees, just as I had. She said she had parked her car in the big new parking lot on the east side of the old town. There were so few cars in the lot, she said, that suddenly she thought maybe it wasn't market day after all.

Or maybe the market had been canceled because of the bad weather. But no, the market was set all up and most of the vendors were there. Only the customers were missing. There weren't many customers at the pharmacy either.

It's hard to believe it was only a week ago today that the first real snow fell. It seems like a month. This has been a long week.

Maybe the last...

...snow pictures for a while. It's supposed to start melting today. The sun is out this morning but it's still very cold out. The rain or rain/snow that was predicted seems to have stayed to the north of Saint-Aignan. Rain is still expected tomorrow.

La Renaudière, a hamlet near Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher...

...and a view from farther out in the vineyard

The vineyard was frigid but picturesque on my walk with the dog earlier. I took my camera and my right hand got pretty chilly. I also had to be very careful where I stepped so I wouldn't find myself face down in the snow. Or on my fesses.

Callie surveying part of her domain...

...and then waiting patiently to be let in the back door

Callie doesn't worry about any of that. She just runs through the snow, stopping every few meters to sniff at something. She uncovers whatever it is with her paw. You don't know what it is! Then she eats it, and I yell at her: « Ne mange pas ça ! Tu vas être malade après. » She looks abashed, but then she does it again just a few meters farther on.

Snowy branches and vines

Walt just saw the woman who, with her husband, owns a lot of the vineyard parcels out back. She was walking down the road taking pictures. It's that kind of morning. I bet she's going to use them on her web site, or in some marketing materials. The winery is the Domaine de la Renaudie and here's a link to the web site in English.

Braised endives au gratin

I bought a piece of Gruyère cheese the other day. Usually I buy Comté, a French AOC cheese that is similar to the Swiss Gruyère. Both would be in the category that we in America label as "Swiss" cheeses but which are not made in Switzerland at all.

Both AOC Comté and AOC Gruyère are made with lait cru de vache — raw (unpasteurized) cow's milk. Similar cheeses from the Alps, with slightly different flavors, are Beaufort, Abondance, and Emmental.

The other thing that SuperU was running a special on was Belgian endive — in French, that's endives, in the plural. This is their season, and they are really good au gratin — in a cheese sauce with melted cheese over the top.

Gratin d'endives au jambon

Even if Belgian endive is expensive where you live, this dish is worth the cost. That's especially true on a cold snowy day, when your body needs comforting and your senses need stimulating. Endive has a slightly bitter taste and is good braised in butter with white wine and/or lemon juice to add some sweetness. A few cloves of garlic in the braising liquid don't hurt either. The endives need to cook on low for 60 to 90 minutes, until they're tender.

That gives you plenty of time to grate some cheese. Wait until the endives are nearly cooked so that you can use the endive braising liquid to make the sauce, along with milk and cream. Be sure to add a pinch or a grate of nutmeg to it along with the grated Swiss or cheddar cheese. As I said, I had Gruyère cheese, and Walt and I decided it really does taste different from Comté, though both are excellent.

Braised Belgian endives wrapped in ham slices
and cooked in a cheese sauce

When the endives are tender, put them in a baking dish and spoon some of the cheese sauce over them. Actually, put a spoonful or two of sauce on the bottom of the pan before you put the endives in, so that they won't stick. Sprinkle some grated cheese over the top for good measure, and put the pan in a hot oven for a few minutes until it turns a golden brown.

As an extra touch, you can roll each braised endive up in a slice of jambon de Paris or slices of smoked turkey or chicken before you put them in the pan. Then spoon on the sauce and top it with melted cheese. Now it's a full meal, with meat, vegetables, and cheese.

Here's a post with more pictures and with links to other posts about cooking endives.

Here's a big photo — click the image twice to see full size —
that I took about five minutes ago out the back window.

P.S. It snowed again overnight. I had intended to take the car out yesterday and go to town, but I thought better of it after my walk with the dog. It's just too icy out there. Now I have to decide whether to venture out today, but it snowed again overnight. It's snowing right now, in fact, and it's really coming down. I'm starting to get cabin fever but I still don't feel like going out in it.

Here's a link to the weather map showing the snowy areas — the north coasts of Brittany and Lower Normandy, along with the whole center of the country.