Paupiettes of turkey breast

Paupiettes are little packages composed of thin slices of meat rolled up and tied around a lump of a flavorful filling. The filling can be made with meat or with vegetables and usually includes onions and mushrooms either way. The meat is thin — flattened — scallops of either veal, poultry, beef, pork, or fish.

Paupiettes de dinde with peas and carrots

The most common paupiettes you find in France today are paupiettes de veau. But since veal is so expensive, more and more people substitute turkey breast. One of the butchers at the Saturday market in Saint-Aignan makes paupiettes using the breast meat of guinea fowl (pintades). The paupiette is not as much about required ingredients as it is about method.

Flatten the turkey breast slices and add a dollop of stuffing

Walt and I made paupiettes the other day using thin scallops of turkey breast and a filling of ground pork with mushrooms, onions, garlic, and parsley. They turned out perfectly, if I do say so, and it was actually easy to do. I'm planning to make paupiettes soon with some thin slices of beefsteak that I have in the freezer.

Paupiettes rolled and tied, wrapped in strips of bacon

By the way, a "scallop" is a thin slice of boneless meat — une escalope in French, as in escalopes de veau milanaise, thin slices of veal breaded and pan-fried. When made into paupiettes, the thin slice of meat becomes a kind of shell, like a scallop shell, to hold the filling. There's also an old French term escalophe meaning "walnut shell" — same idea...

Paupiettes braised and served with their reduced sauce

The first step in making paupiettes is to pound out the slices of meat to make them as thin as possible. They need to be big enough to wrap around whatever filling you want to use. To flatten the meat slices, you use what in French is called une batte or un attendrisseur — a meat pounder or tenderizer.

First brown the paupiettes in oil or butter...

The second step is to make a filling. Chopped mushrooms and onions, for example, with herbs and bread crumbs, including (or not) a beaten egg as a binder. Or ground meat with the same kind of aromatic ingredients. Some chopped sun-dried tomatoes would be good, and then you could cook and serve the paupiettes in a tomato sauce. Whatever filling you choose to make, it should be highly flavorful, because the meat "shell" is fairly bland.

...and then add liquid, cover the pan, and braise them

The third step in paupiette-making is rolling up and tying off the little packages of scalloped meat with filling inside. It's not that hard to do, but it doesn't hurt if you have somebody to help you by putting a finger on the string as you tie the necessary knots.

The meat pounder or batte/attendrisseur

Spread a meat slice out on a work surface, and put a lump of the filling on top. Stretch and pull the meat, turning up the ends and then the sides to make a little ballotine or package. Wrap the package with a slice or two of bacon to keep the lean meat from drying out too much as it cooks. Then use two or three lengths of kitchen twine to tie up the package as you see in the pictures here.

Lunch

To cook the paupiettes, first brown them in oil or butter. Then pour on broth, wine, or, for example, tomato sauce and cover the pan to let the little packages cook all the way through — it takes 30 minutes or more. Toward the end of the cooking, take the lid off the pan so that the broth or sauce can reduce and thicken a little. It should be a syrup or glaze that you can serve with the paupiettes and any side dish of vegetables, rice, or pasta you decide to have with them.

A Chinon winery

One of the places we went to last Wednesday was the Domaine Baudry-Dutour winery in the village of Cravant-les-Coteaux. It's just a few kilometers east of Chinon — Cravant is at the heart of the Chinon vineyards.

Domaine Baudry-Dutour in Cravant-les-Coteaux...

...and a close-up, with the tasting room on the left

Christophe Baudry and Jean-Martin Dutour are the owners of the Domaine. Both have been making wine in Cravant for 20 years or more. Their vineyards are extensive — 115 hectares (more than 250 acres), according to the woman in the tasting room. (In contrast, our neighbors at the Domaine de la Renaudie near Saint-Aignan work 26 hectares (60+ acres) of vines, which makes theirs a large property in our area.)

An old delivery truck in the courtyard at the winery

Chinon, on the west side of Tours, is one of the two prime red wine production areas in Touraine. The other is Bourgueil, just across the Loire River to the north. Both Chinon and Bourgueil specialize in the Cabernet Franc grape, which is the only grape used to make their AOC wines. In our part of Touraine, east of Tours in the Cher River Valley, the AOC red grapes are Cab. Franc along with Côt (Malbec) and Gamay.

Here's the Baudry-Dutour price list.
Notice that wine in a box (a BIB or "bag in box")
is also available — red or rosé.

At Baudry-Dutour, we tasted four red wines, including one from each of the property's vineyards (see map) — Domaine de la Perrière, Domaine du Roncée, Château de la Grille, and Château de Saint-Louans. The wines went from light and thirst-quenching to much more structured, complex styles.

Chinon vineyards at Cravant

Chinon also produces white wines, made with Chenin Blanc grapes. That's the grape of Vouvray and Montlouis, the two most prestigious white wine vineyards in Touraine. Both are on the east side of Tours where, like Chinon and Bourgueil, they face each other across the Loire River. We didn't taste any white wines at Baudry-Dutour on Wednesday.

Lunch at the Val de Vienne (2)

We had lunch at the Auberge du Val de Vienne in Sazilly on Wednesday April 11. I posted about the restaurant and the menu yesterday. This is a post about the food we ate.

The two starter course choices were both duck dishes. One was a pâté or terrine made with duck foie gras, and included a small salad of frisée lettuce and cherry tomatoes. The other was a lentil salad topped with thin slices of smoked duck breast proscuitto (salade de lentilles au magret fumé).

The two starter courses, both featuring duck

The main course was either lamb — a serving of navarin d'agneau au curry — or a sauté of chicken au vinaigre — in a light but tart tomato sauce made with vinegar. I had the poulet, and it was excellent. I made a poulet au vinaigre at home a few years ago, and this one was different only in the way it was served. The sauce was strained and then spooned over the two pieces of chicken (breast and thigh pieces) rather than being served with the aromatic vegetables (onions, carrots, mushrooms) still in the sauce.

Poulet au vinaigre

Walt had the lamb and he said it was good but was served in a very concentrated tomato sauce with just a touch of curry. It wasn't what he expected, but he said the meat was tender and tasty. The lamb came with steamed potatoes, and the chicken came with pasta (tagliatelles) that had some peeled and steamed fava beans in it for color and flavor.

Navarin d'agneau au curry

Desserts were either a slice of apple pie with a red wine glaze and a scoop of vanilla ice cream, or a carpaccio of pineapple — thin slices of fresh pineapple. The pie is called a tarte vigneronne, or "winery pie", and is a specialty of the Chinon region. We had tried it in Bourgueil last summer when we were invited for lunch at Amy and Laurent's house.

Tarte vigneronne with a scoop of vanilla ice cream

With lunch we of course had a bottle of Chinon red wine, which is made with 100% Cabernet Franc grapes. Chinon red is a good-quality wine with its own appellation d'origine contrôlée, and it's a wine that can be aged. The bottle we had was a 2009. We had coffee at the end of the meal, before driving over to the other side of the river in search of a couple of good wineries we had heard about...

Lunch in a Loire Valley auberge (1)

The restaurant where we had lunch on Wednesday is called L'Auberge du Val de Vienne. That means the Vienne Valley Inn — it's an old roadhouse where in other times travelers could get meals and rent sleeping accommodations. The auberge is in the village called Sazilly, on the south (or left) bank of the river, not far from Chinon (pop. 8,000).

The Vienne is a river that flows into the Loire from the area south of Tours, passing through the town of Chinon and the Chinon wine production area. The Vienne valley is very wide and fairly deep. Some of the most prestigious Chinon vineyards are on the up-slope on the north (right) bank of the river, facing south so that the vines benefit from good sun and warmth.

A nice sign on the façade of the Auberge du Val de Vienne

I knew about the Auberge du Val de Vienne but had never had a meal there. Nick and Jean knew it too, from personal experience, and recommended it as our meeting place. The daily lunch menu is priced at 18 euros, or just less than $25 U.S., with an extra charge for pre-lunch drinks, wine, and coffee. The meal for 18 euros includes a starter course, a main course, and dessert, with two choices in each category.

L'Auberge du Val de Vienne in Sazilly, near Chinon

Before the first course was brought out, we were served a tray of little appetizers called amuse-bouche or amuse-gueule — "mouth amusers" and in this case, four crevettes (shrimp, prawns) stuck on little metal fork-stands and bathed in an herby, spicy sauce, along with four little shot glasses filled with chopped fresh tomato topped with a puree of cauliflower.

Les amuse-bouche

Most restaurants in the area have this kind of daily special menu, and many price it at 11 or 12 euros. Some even include a glass of wine for that price. The Val de Vienne is definitely more upscale than the little restaurants that cater to a working crowd at lunch all around the Loire Valley area. With our extras, including wine and coffee, we ended up paying 65 euros per couple, or about $85 U.S. That's fairly expensive, but not comparable to prices you might pay in Paris or even in other cities like Tours or Orléans.


We arrived just before 12:30 for lunch, and were the only customers in the dining room for nearly an hour. Between 1:00 and 1:30, several other groups came in, and the place was bustling when we left. There was only one young waiter to take care of all the tables, and he did a good job.

More about the food tomorrow...

Trip report

Date: 11 April 2012
Kilometers driven: 250 (150 miles)

Kilometers of four-lane highway: zero

An old farm compound near the village of Luzé

Rain showers driven through: 5
Times we felt like we were lost: 2

Walt taking a photo of a field of golden rapeseed flowers

Golden fields of flowers seen: too many to count
Photos taken: ditto

Jean, Nick, and Walt in front of the restaurant in Sazilly

Restaurants visited: 1
Courses eaten: 4
Hours spent at the table: 2

Une crevette en amuse-bouche — the shrimp course

Wineries visited: 3
Wineries offering tastings: 2

We tasted fewer wines than these Chinon grape-growers did.

Wines tasted: 9
Bottles of wine purchased: 2
Liters of wine purchased: 20

Bottles of Chinon at the Baudry-Dutour property in Cravant

Minutes we spent in the town of Chinon: zero

Dandelions a.k.a. pissenlits

Yesterday I posted a couple of photos of flowers you might think of as exotic and unusual — orchids. Today, here's a plant that is anything but. It's the dandelion.

A dandelion flower out in the vineyard

The word dandelion comes from the old French name dents-de-lion, which means "lion's teeth." The name has to do with the shape of the leaves, which are jagged and pointy. Names like dandelion appear in other languages too.

Dandelion seeds and their "parachutes"

In French today, however, the plant has another name — it's called le pissenlit. That means more or less "pee in the bed." It refers to the pronounced diuretic effect the dried, pulverized taproot of the plant has on the human organism when ingested.

More flowers than leaves here

You can also eat the leaves of the pissenlit, but they are bitter. Cooking them a little before eating them in a salad dressed with a vinegary sauce that includes a little bit of bacon or ham can make the leaves more palatable. Walt and I actually picked some dandelion leaves in the yard a couple of weeks ago and tried them, but they were too bitter even for us. They say you should pick the leaves of young dandelions before the plants have flowered.

This one just needs a puff of air to start sending seeds far and wide.

One last thing about dandelions: they appear in an expression in French where we favor a different flower, daisies, in English. We all know what it means when we say that somebody is "pushing up daisies" — it means the person is dead and buried. In French, the equivalent expression says that the dead person « mange les pissenlits par la racine », or "is eating dandelions by their roots."

We are off to Sazilly, near Chinon, today, after a 24-hour delay. It did rain some yesterday, but not as hard or long as the weather reports said it might. Today is just supposed to be showery.

Dry, dry, dry... until today

Even though it's extremely dry right now, yesterday I noticed that the wild orchids have started blooming in at least two spots in the Renaudière vineyard. Evidently, these orchid plants like boggy, damp conditions, so I'm a little surprised to see so many of them blooming this spring.

Today we are supposed to have our first significant rain in a while. Of course, this is the day that we picked a couple of weeks ago for a long drive over to the Chinon area, a hundred kilometers west of Saint-Aignan, to have lunch with friends Jean and Nick in a restaurant in the village of Sazilly.

Little orchids like these come up all around
the vineyard in the spring.

If you can believe Météo France and France 2 television, it's going to rain all day. I recently bought some new windshield wiper blades, so I think I'll put them on the car before we leave. We really need the rain, and the plants and yard will be happy for the moisture.

The orchids are blooming despite the drought
conditions we've been under.

More about today's excursion later this week, though I might not be able to take many photos. At least I can try to take pictures of the restaurant food we'll be having for lunch.

Lapin à la moutarde

This mustardy braised rabbit was the best rabbit that I'd cooked in a long time. I wanted to make a lapin à la moutarde — rabbit in a mustard-cream sauce — this time, and I looked around on the web and in my favorite cookbooks to see what the options were.

I have a memory of a whole rabbit roasted in the oven that was served by a Frenchwoman who rented out rooms to students in Grenoble back in 1974. I was the assistant to the professor who was running the University of Illinois Year Abroad program that year, and the woman had invited us to dinner. I'm not sure I had ever eaten rabbit before — but maybe I had, because I had already spent a year and half in France on earlier trips.

Rabbit braised and served in a creamy mustard sauce

Whatever... the rabbit was delicious. It looked a little strange laid out whole in a baking pan. I remember the woman opened the oven and basted it while we watched. She chattered away in French, and I could understand what she said but probably couldn't add an awful lot to the conversation. She was used to having American students living in her house, so she didn't mind.

The rabbit browned, with sliced onion added for flavor

Yesterday, I was tempted to cook the rabbit whole, because that would have avoided the whole problem of cutting it up. The recipe I found, however, called for rabbit cut into serving pieces, and it was otherwise a simple preparation that sounded very good. Walt and I have been eating rabbit once or twice a year for nearly 30 years now, so I've had a certain amount of experience when it comes to carving up a raw rabbit. Mainly you need a sharp knife, some kitchen scissors, and a lot of patience.

The rabbit cut into serving pieces before cooking

If you want to know how to go about it, have a look at this web page. It's not for the faint of heart. I won't show you the process here — just the result.

Mustard is a classic ingredient in sauces for braised or roasted rabbit in France. Sometimes the rabbit pieces — or the meatiest pieces, like the rable (the "saddle") or the back legs — are basted with Dijon mustard and then wrapped in strips of fat or bacon and roasted in the oven for 60 to 90 minutes. It's basted frequently with the mustard-flavored pan juices and fat.

Take the rabbit, onions, and carrots out of the pan and
serve the sauce separately if you want.

Or, as in the recipe I chose, the rabbit pieces are browned in butter and/or oil and then braised in a mixture of stock (chicken or vegetable) and white wine (half a liter in all), with sliced onions and carrots, bay leaves, thyme or rosemary, and salt and pepper. After the rabbit is braised and completely cooked to your taste — some like it a little firm, others prefer it falling off the bone, so cook it anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes — you just add about half a cup of cream and 4 or 5 tablespoons of Dijon mustard to the sauce and let the dish simmer for another 10 minutes before serving it.

Steamed broccoli is a good accompaniment —
broccoli is good with the mustard cream sauce.

It's easy to see why mustard is a classic ingredient in rabbit dishes. It's delicious. This kind of thing would be really good made with chicken thighs and legs too. I'd take the skin off to minimize the amount of fat and to mimic the skinless rabbit pieces.

Domestic rabbits (farm-raised, not wild) give a very lean white meat that is not strongly flavored. Rabbit is a standard item that's always available in French markets and supermarkets (as is duck), alongside chicken, turkey, guinea fowl, beef, pork, veal, lamb, and so on.

We ate the lapin à la moutarde with broccoli
and steamed new potatoes.

Ginette Mathiot's classic home cookbook Je sais cuisiner includes a dozen recipes for rabbit — stews like gibelotte (white wine) or civet, (red wine) roasted rabbit, or fried rabbit — and even gives instructions on how to kill, skin, and dress a live rabbit before you cook it. The edition I have dates from 1970. I wonder how many French people were still buying live rabbits that recently. Probably not many — especially not in the cities.

The Easter market at Saint-Aignan

The market in Saint-Aignan was hopping yesterday. Walt and I got there early, before the biggest crowds showed up, but still we waited a while in line to buy a rabbit from our favorite poultry vendor. I know, rabbit is not poultry... but the meat resembles poultry — tastes like chicken, isn't that what we say? — more than pork, beef, or lamb.

When we left the market at about 11:15, after having a glass of local white wine in a café with a young American woman who is spending the month of April in Saint-Aignan, we just about had to push our way through throngs of people. The weather was sunny but chilly, and there was a festive, bustling feel to the whole town.

The château up above the streets of Saint-Aignan

So as I was saying, rabbit is sold by the poultry vendors at the market and is stocked in the poultry section at the supermarket. I had no doubt that we'd find a rabbit at the market; it's a standard item. I was interested to see that the rabbits at the poultry stand at the open-air market were less expensive (at 8€/kg) than the ones I'd seen in the supermarket (11€/kg) on Friday. And I think the quality is better. The one we got weighs about 1.3 kg, or nearly three pounds. This morning's job is to cook it.

A gourmet grocery shop has recently opened up in this
old Saint-Aignan house — 15th century, I think.

We saw a lot of asparagus on different market stands too, but much of it was for sale at 10 or 11 euros per kilo. We'll wait for prices to come down, as they'll do over the next couple of weeks. Last year the lowest prices we saw were about 5€/kg. I'm not sure that much of the asparagus on sale yesterday was really local — it probably came from farther south, if not Spain.

The church in Saint-Aignan seen from the market square —
the red horse's head signals a shop that sells horse meat.

The other thing we wanted to find at the market was escargots, but we didn't find any. The man who specializes in snails seems to have disappeared. A few weeks ago, during school vacations, I wasn't surprised when we didn't see him at the market. But I figured he'd been there on "Easter Saturday" for sure. He wasn't. So no snails for us this weekend.

Je vous souhaite à toutes et à tous de passer un très bon [dimanche de] Pâques ! Ou simplement un bon dimanche.

This little piggy...

...is going to market. I hope I'll be saying oui, oui, oui all the way home.

Bon Pâques ??

Easter in French is « Pâques ». Happy Easter, then — or Bon Pâques. What an unusual word in French. It looks like it would be feminine and plural, and it can be in some contexts. But in everyday language in France, Pâques is a masculine singular word — even though « Joyeuses Pâques », feminine and plural, is a set expression.

Pâques is masculine and singular because it's a shortcut for saying « le jour de Pâques » — Easter Day, or Easter Sunday — and the word « jour » is masculine and singular. Evidently, the fact that Noël, Christmas, is masculine influenced the usage for Pâques. Rules, exceptions, expressions, and strange agreements like this one is one of those things that will always trip you up if you aren't a native French speaker, and give you away.

Here's the entry from the French Robert Electronique dictionary.Click the image to enlarge it.

We have a lot of little expressions in English that trip up French-speakers too, and give them away no matter how good their English is. One that comes to mind is the distinction between "this" and "that" or "here" and "there" — its instinctual for us but not for non-native speakers. It confuses the dickens out of French-speakers.

Oh well. When you aren't a native speaker, you have to grit your teeth and be resigned to making a lot of mistakes and to confusing people by saying something that's almost correct but not quite. You get used to seeing the puzzlement on people's faces when you talk to them.

Tomorrow is market day in Saint-Aignan. We'll be going into town to look for three specific items. One is fresh asparagus. The season is starting and will run into June. White asparagus is a local crop and specialty. Out of season, you don't find asparagus on the markets or even in the supermarket, except in cans and jars.

Un escargot

The second thing will be some escargots. There's often a man at the market who sells nothing but snails. He sells them raw and he sells them cooked. I don't know if he sells them live, but he might. Walt and I have been wanting to eat snails for a while, but the man hasn't been at the market the last few times we've gone. Maybe tomorrow, Easter weekend, he'll be there.

The other thing we want to bring home is a rabbit — not a live one, but one that's been skinnedk, cleaned, and dressed for cooking. We've been eating rabbit every year for our Easter dinner for decades now, and we don't want to break the tradition. I plan to cook lapin à la moutarde on Sunday morning. That's rabbit braised in white wine with onions, carrots, and herbs, and then served with a sauce composed of the braising liquid, some fresh cream, and a little bit of Dijon-style mustard.

Wish us luck on finding the three things we're hoping to find. And Bon Pâques.

Springtime flowers and candidates

The weather has been beautiful for weeks now, but it's starting to change back to more normal springtime conditions. That means afternoon temperatures in the 50s and low 60s rather than in the 70s, and morning temperatures of 45ºF or less. There's a risk of frost until May 15, according to the conventional wisdom.

It's turned rainy in the south of France, including along the Mediterranean coast. There's a springtime weather pattern in France that I've become aware of over the past ten years. April is often rainy in the south — Provence, Côte d'Azur, Dordogne, Languedoc, the Southwest — and sunnier in the north, where we are. It can feel like a world turned upside down, since during the rest of the year the north is damper and cooler.

This April, however, after the driest March ever, it looks like we'll finally be getting some rain. We have an excursion planned — a drive over to the Chinon area — next Tuesday, and right now the weather forecasts are showing Tuesday and Wednesday to be very rainy and gray. That's disappointing.

In France, you really have to take advantage of the dry, warm weather when you get some. As soon as the sun goes behind clouds, temperatures really drop. The same thing is true in California, where I used to live. In other climates, there is such a thing as warm rain, but not so much here. Chilly rain is more like it.

April showers bring May flowers. Well, this year, warm March weather brought us a lot of flowers. All the local fruit trees are in blossom right now, with the exception of the apple trees. We've cut a lot of mistletoe out of those, and we've pruned three of them back significantly. I don't know if that means we'll get more apples or fewer this year. The fruit trees now need some rain so that the little fruit buds will swell up and fill out.

It's possible that the weather forecasts are wrong, by the way — that's been known to happen.

The polls can change too, of course. The presidential election is now just a little over two weeks away. Current president and candidate Nicolas Sarkozy is coming up in the polls — he's now predicted to be the top vote-getter in the first round of balloting on April 22, with nearly 30% of the total vote. Socialist François Hollande will get something like 27% of the vote in that round. None of the other eight candidates is up to 20% in the polls.

Unless something really unexpected happens, conservative (business-oriented) Sarkozy and liberal (socialist) Hollande will face off in the second round of voting on May 6. Polls say Hollande is comfortably ahead, with 55% of the vote. But polls can be wrong. It's happened in the past. Sarkozy has been president since 2007.

Meanwhile, I'm posting some pictures of the local blossoms and flowers taken over the past week or so.