Winter gardening

Gardening in winter around Saint-Aignan is a mostly passive experience. You do more watching and worrying that weeding. Will there be a hard freeze? Will snow cover and smother all the plants, or break their stems?

Persil (parsley), which has taken root in a back-yard planter box

Joubarbe (houseleek or sempervivum), a hardy perennial

Sauge (sage), a bush that was growing here when we moved in 10 years ago

Collard greens (related to kale), which can over-winter in this climate

Artichaut (artichoke), which can survive all but the coldest weather

Will the constant rains drown the plants, or wash them away? Will the lack of sunlight do them in? Finally, will the moles uproot everything as they build their wintertime network of underground tunnels and push up mounds of soil all around the garden and yard?

A Saturday-morning dusting

Saint-Aignan in winter is moderately cold, often rainy, sometimes icy, with light snow

once in a while. It can get boring. But it's pretty if you look closely.

It was nice to be able to get out and take photos yesterday morning.

The light comes earlier and stays later in February.

Sun in my eyes

The sun was shining brightly yesterday afternoon when I went out for my walk with the dog. The ground is still sloppy wet, and the clay soil of the vineyard is very slippery. Today, it's supposed to snow, but not much. It will be nothing compared to the snowstorm they're having in the U.S. Northeast. I was just watching CNN's coverage of the wind-driven snow accumulating and drifting around back there.

Stepping out the back door late yesterday afternoon

In Saint-Aignan, we're right in the middle of a long, narrow strip of territory running north-south through the center of France, from Paris down to the Pyrenees, where mild wet air off the ocean is supposed to butt up against cold air sitting over eastern France, dropping snow. In Saint-Aignan, the snow will change over to rain by tomorrow morning — steady rain, they say, will fall in the middle of the day. I guess that's better than a blizzard.

Sunset seen from the vineyard

So I'm glad that we got a break yesterday, and that it was my afternoon to do the walk with Callie. I didn't exactly get a tan, but the setting sun was warming to the spirit. Walt will have to walk in the snow or rain this afternoon and tomorrow morning.

Looking down the hill out over the river

I've concluded that my knee problems I mentioned a few days ago were the result of an injury. I must have twisted my knee slightly on a walk on slippery surfaces — slick mud or ice — when I was out walking the dog. The knee is much better now. I'm happy about that.

Callie the border collie on her walk yesterday

At seven-thirty, Walt got up and informed me that the skylight windows upstairs are iced over. It's snowing. So I'll have to go out and walk on slippery surfaces again this morning.

Spaghettis et boulettes de viande

This is a food post just for the pleasure of it. Nothing exotic. Nothing particularly French. In fact, it's particularly American, by way of Italy. We all grew up eating and loving spaghetti and meatballs.

This is not Chef Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti and meatballs.

Even me. I grew up in a small town in the American Southeast, on the coast of North Carolina. There were few if any Italian immigrants there. We started getting Italian food in the 1950s, about the time I started school. I remember Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Italian dinners in cardboard boxes — some pasta, a can of sauce, and a little cellophane package of grated cheese (I'm sure it wasn't really parmesan). Pizza makings in a box too: "Crust Mix, Pizza Sauce with Pepperoni & Grated Parmesan and Romano Cheese Topping," the Chef Boyardee web site says.

Then the management and cooking in our school cafeteria was taken over by a woman from New York City. Her name was Lorraine, and she passed away recently. She was my aunt's neighbor, so we knew her. And she made spaghetti, New York style. She also made lasagne. We loved the school cafeteria when she ran it, planned the menus, and supervised the cooking.

I took advantage of the drive-up butcher's visit to buy a big piece of lean beef on Tuesday. As I've said, all the meats he sells are of the best quality, but they are expensive. Buying from him is a once-a-week treat. I asked him what cut of beef he would use to make meatballs. He said basses côtes. I think that might be what we would call a chuck roast.

We have a meat grinder attachment on our stand mixer, and we almost always grind meat ourselves instead of buying ground meat at the supermarket or from the butcher. That's what we did this time. I cut the meat into strips and Walt ran it through the grinder. It weighed two pounds (900 grams).

Meanwhile, I chopped up three shallots and a hot banana pepper (which we grew in the garden and put up in vinegar). I added some Mexican oregano, which I brought back from N.C. a while back — there's a Mexican grocery store there now. I think the Mexican oregano tastes like thyme, really, and I like it.

I had about a handful of leftover cooked brown rice so I put that into the meat mixture, and I also added about half a cup of coarse polenta (corn meal), uncooked. It would absorb liquid and plump up as the meatballs cooked, making them lighter and juicier.

That was about it, I think. Oh, I pressed in a couple of cloves of garlic, and added salt and pepper. And some celery seed. I also put in a squirt of tomato paste out of a tube (we buy it in tubes, like toothpaste — very handy), and two beaten eggs. I mixed all that up with my hands and weighed it again: the scale read 46 oz.

I wanted to make fairly small meatballs, and I arbitrarily decided they should be one ounce each. I made one and weighed it, using one ounce of the meat mixture, and it looked about right. Then I just had to make 46 meatballs of that size. To do so, I weighed out, for example, 16 ounces of meat, shaped it into a log, and cut it into 16 pieces. Then I rolled each chunk of meat into a ball.

That's more than you ever wanted to know, I'm sure.

In a big non-stick skillet, I sauteed the meatballs in two batches in olive oil, covering the pan with a lid so that they would steam through and hold together. Then I drained them on a rack before putting them on to cook slowly in about 6 cups (1.5 liters) of tomato sauce. We have sauce in the freezer that we made last fall with tomatoes from our 2012 vegetable garden.

I called this "spaghetti" (often in France you see it written as « spaghettis », with an -s because it's plural) and meatballs, but actually we cooked linguine to go with it. Grated parmesan cheese. Olive oil. Good.

So what to do with the leftovers? The two of us obviously couldn't eat all that at one sitting. Today we're having meatball-and-tomato-sauce pizza.

Different days, same scene

Yesterday afternoon I decided to take a picture of our nice sunny weather out the kitchen window. When I picked up the camera, I found it didn't have a card in it. I looked at the camera's internal storage, and I found a photo I'd forgotten. It's the same scene exactly, looking out the same window. Look at the difference.

January 20, 2013

February 6, 2013

I think I'll take the second view, please, many times over through February and March. And on the same subject...

TF1's evening journal télévisé last night featured a report saying that, according to official weather statistics, the January we just suffered through here in northern France was the grayest month of January, with the fewest hours of sunshine, in more than 60 years.

Did Walt ever post a picture of this Tarte Tatin that he made a while back?

It brightened up a couple of dreary winter days, for sure.

The TF1 report picked the upper Burgundy town of Auxerre as its example. Auxerre is about two hours south of Paris, and about three hours east of Blois. Les pauvres Auxerrois got a total of 14 hours of sunshine over the course of the entire month of January 2013. France 3 TV, I see on the web, reported similar statistics for the towns of Troyes and Langres, farther east. Reims (in Champagne) had 80% less sunshine than in an average month of January.

I don't have statistics, but I can't imagine that Saint-Aignan got much more January sunshine than Auxerre or Troyes. Remember all those black & white photos I was posting last month? The news reports say that luminothérapie devices — special sun lamps, for example — are big sellers in the stores this winter. And the sunny islands near the equator in the Indian Ocean are attracting a lot of French vacationers.

Curry de crevettes avec oignons et carottes

This shrimp curry with onions and carrots was so good that I just barely had time to take a couple of photos before we had wolfed it all down. I'm so glad to be able to get frozen, raw queues de crevettes — shrimp tails, or headed shrimp — in the Asian groceries in Tours and Blois, even if the shrimp do have to come half way around the world before arriving in France. In France, most of the shrimp you find in the markets and supermarkets are sold already cooked.

Shrimp curry with onions and carrots

Would it be chauvin of me to say that these shrimp from Asia aren't quite as good as the North Carolina brown shrimp that we used to have when I was younger? But it's the truth. Anyway, the ones I get here can be thawed in cold water, peeled, and then "de-veined" — that means cutting a slit along the back of the shrimp and pulling out the digestive tract, which can sometimes have sand in it or give a bitter taste to the shrimp. For many people, de-veining is perfectly optional.

Cooked "brown" rice — riz complet in French

We also found a bag of "brown" rice and the Asian supermarket in Tours a while back, so we cooked some of that to go with the shrimp curry. And I decided carrots and onions would be good with the shrimp. I cut a large carrot into sticks and parboiled them in water first. When they started to get tender, I poured off the water and added sliced onions to the pan, with some vegetable oil. When the vegetables were nearly done, I dropped 20 or so shrimp into the pan and sauteed them for two or three minutes, until they were just starting to turn pink.

Then I poured on about a cup of a curry sauce I had made using a blend of spices and herbs, some chicken broth, and some cream. The sauce had cumin, cayenne pepper, cilantro, basil, turmeric, ginger, mustard powder, cloves, allspice, and other spices in it. You can make your own spice blend or use commercially blended curry powder. Make the sauce to your own taste, and as piquant as you like your curry. Add garlic. Let the shrimp and vegetables simmer in the sauce for five minutes, and serve the curry with rice or noodles.

Rouen in summer

Ten years ago, when Walt and I came to live in France, we arrived at the airport and drove directly up to Rouen, in Normandy, to spend a few days with friends there. They lived in the center of town near the old marketplace and the cathedral, and they had a studio apartment they let us stay in. The pictures in this post are ones I took on June 3, 2003. It was my second stay in Rouen that year. I've been posting about the first one for a few days now.

One of the symbols of the city of Rouen is this old clock
in a tower over one of the main streets.

You can click on the pictures to see them at a larger size.

In 2003, the great Canicule — the deadly European heatwave — had already started, but we didn't know it yet. The Normandy climate is essentially damp and cool, but by early June ten years ago the weather was already hot and strangely sunny, even in Rouen.

Buildings around Rouen's Vieux Marché — the old market square.
The one in the middle all decked out in red flowers is La Couronne,
the restaurant where Julia Child had her first meal in France.

The reason we were in Rouen was that our friends who gave us use of the studio apartment were going to lend us some sheets, towels, and other essentials that we could take with us to Saint-Aignan, where we would move into an otherwise empty house. Those things would tide us over until our container of furniture and other possessions arrived in July — we had shipped it from California a month earlier.

Walt and 11-year-old Collette in front of
the Eglise Saint-Ouen in Rouen

Rouen is a magnificent old city with one of the most impressive cathedrals in France, two other fine churches, and the old tower where Joan of Arc was supposedly held prisoner before she was burned at the stake in the city's old marketplace in 1431. Historically, Rouen was considered the capital of Normandy. Victor Hugo called it « la ville aux cent clochers » — the city of 100 church towers. The novelist Stendhal called Rouen “the Athens of the Gothic era” for its great architectural treasures.

The city of Rouen is an open-air, living architecture museum.

The historic center of Rouen is on the right bank of the Seine. On the left bank is a newer urban area, and the whole metropolitan area has a population of half a million. There's a new tramway that runs underground through the old part of the city. Rouen less than 90 minutes from Paris by train.

Here's a view of Rouen from a high viewpoint on the edge of the city. The cathedral is in the
middle of the picture with the Seine on the left and the Église St-Maclou on the right.

I haven't spent nearly as much time in Rouen over the past ten years, since moving to Saint-Aignan, as I did back in the 1990s. Walt and I went to Rouen to visit other friends there in August 2006 — I posted about it here. A few years ago I did a series of four topics about Rouen and the time I spent there in the early 1970s. It starts here, and there's a link at the bottom of each topic to take you to the next one. And CHM and I made a quick stop in the city a couple of summers ago, posted here.

Visiting Rouen

Old Rouen, or what we Americans might call "downtown" Rouen, is full of old half-timbered houses, called maisons à colombage in French. Colombage is related to the word "column" — you can see the wood framing or columns of the walls. In recent years, people have taken to painting them in all different colors.

Just a sample of Rouen's many maisons à colombage

Rouen, which is on the Seine about halfway between Paris and the sea (the English Channel, in this case, is a major port city, with ocean-going ships coming up the river to load and unload goods. The city itself is only about 100,000 people, but the urbanized area counts half a million.

A signboard for a luthier — a maker of stringed musical instruments — in old Rouen

The city was founded two thousand years ago and was named Rotomago something similar in Latin. The name slowly "eroded" phonetically over the centuries to become today's Rouen, pronounced approximately [roo-WÃ] or even just [RWÃ] — [Ã] represents the French nasal [A] vowel. It was conquered by the Vikings — Norsemen or Normans, where the name of the province of Normandy comes from —  more than a thousand years ago.

Two views of the cathedral towers in Rouen

The city has a major cathedral and two other famous churches, Saint-Ouen and Saint-Maclou. The first cathedral of Rouen was built in the fourth century A.D. A second cathedral replaced it in about the year 1000, and construction of the current cathedral building dates back to the year 1200, after the second one was destroyed by fire.

Rouen's Eglise Saint-Ouen and the surrounding neighborhood

The smaller Eglise Saint-Maclou was built in the 1400s. Like the cathedral, Saint-Maclou suffered considerable damage from bombardments during World War II. Restoration and repair work has been ongoing ever since.

A charcutier is a butcher who specializes in pork products, and the charcuterie is a kind of

French delicatessen selling sausages, cured and fresh meats, salads, and cooked dishes.

Besides its great monuments, old-town Rouen also has scores of shops, restaurants, and cafés. It's a living city where buildings have shops and storefronts at street level with apartments above. If you are going to be in Paris for a week or more, a side trip to Rouen by train is easy and rewarding. It takes less than 90 minutes to get there from the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris.

Sunday in Rouen...

...in my mind. Here are a few street scenes, taken in the soft light of a Normandy winter.

As best I can determine, all these were taken between 6 and 7 p.m. on February 1, 2003.
I wonder if I was looking for a place where I could have dinner.

Rouen reminiscences

My '72-'73 Rouen adventure was my second stay in France. Earlier, I had lived in Aix-en-Provence, way down south, where I was a student for 6 months in the winter and spring of 1970. When I got a chance to go back to France and spend a year in Rouen as a teaching assistant, I didn't hesitate. I was 23 years old. In my naïve mind, I thought I was going back to Aix, with its sunshine, wind, and dry climate. I was in for a big surprise.

Shopping in 2003 on the rue Cauchoise in Rouen, near the Vieux Marché, in 2003

I don't know why I thought the weather in Normandy would be like the weather in Provence. It wasn't a conscious thing, and I didn't realize I had that expectation until after I arrived in Rouen in September 1972 and experienced the gray and damp days of the northern maritime climate. I had spent two weeks in Paris in March or April 1970, and it had been gray, rainy, and even snowy there. But I guess I wasn't in Paris long enough to really get a feel for the variety of French climate zones.

I did manage to scrape together enough francs to have an infrequent dinner or an ice cream at the Drugstore in Rouen back in '72-'73 (it's a pizzeria now, but hamburgers, club sandwiches, and banana splits were its specialities back then). And I might have shopped at the Charcuterie Hardy on the place du Vieux Marché once in a while too. The photos are from 2003.

Anyway, I loved Rouen despite nearly dying of the flu at Christmastime and not having decent heat or a bathroom in my apartment. Central heat was being installed in the building when I moved in in September, but it didn't actually start working until mid-January. I had a little gas heater with a bottle of butane as fuel, and by January a bottle was lasting only about two weeks. To get a new one, I had to walk across town with the bottle on my shoulder and buy a new one.

The cathedral in Rouen is famous for having been painted so many times by Monet. And the modern
Eglise Jeanne d'Arc on the place du Vieux Marché didn't yet exist when I lived in Rouen.

The funny thing about that bouteille de butane is that I probably bought the replacements from the business owned and operated by my friend Marie's father. I didn't actually meet Marie until 2001, however (she comments here as Mary07 once in a while). Carrying that empty metal gas canister across town was a chore, but carrying a full one back through the slippery, dark steets to my apartment, and up the two flights of stairs was a Herculean task. It weighed a ton. It was not fun.

Restaurants like this one in old Rouen were out of my price range when I lived there.

My life that year revolved around the Lycée Corneille, of course, because I worked there and also went and took showers there in the boys' dormitory a few times a week, when the students were in class. And I spent a lot of time in Le Vieux Marché (the city's old market square), where I went shopping for food.

Rouen in Normandy, 01 February 2003

I didn't make enough money as a teaching assistant to be able to afford to eat in restaurants, so I was forced to develop my cooking skills. All the food in the shops looked so appetizing that I wanted to be able to prepare it properly. Luckily, by November 1972 I had been "adopted" by the family of one of my students — those were the friends who let me stay in their apartment in 2003. The student's mother showed me how to prepare a lot of the delicious food that came out of her kitchen.

Rouen, February 1, 2003

Ten years ago today, I was spending some time in the Normandy city of Rouen. I had friends there who let me stay in a little apartment in their building that they owned but didn't use much. Walt and I had been in Saint-Aignan a couple of months earlier and had signed what is called the promesse de vente (shouldn't it be called the promesse d'achat?) on the house we live in now. We'd already sent in the down payment.

Rouen and Normandy were clearly a different world compared to San Francisco and California.

Walt still had a job in California, and he stayed back there to continue getting our San Francisco house ready for showings and eventual sale. I came to France to work out some details of the real estate transaction with the notaire in Montrichard. To give myself time to get over jet lag before arriving here, I stopped to see my friends in Rouen.

That February 1, I wandered the streets of Rouen with my camera. Since I was staying
in an apartment with an equipped kitchen, I could visit the shops
to buy food I remembered enjoying 30 years earlier.

As you can see, it was snowy in Rouen that winter. Snow there is not entirely unusual, but it doesn't happen as often as you'd think, considering how far north Normandy is compared to the U.S. Rouen is farther north than Quebec City, but it, like France overall and the British Isles, benefits from a maritime climate warmed by the Gulf Stream. Well, "warmed" is an exaggeration. "Moderated" might be a better term.

The sidewalks were treacherous but the town was picturesque and inviting.

As I was thinking about February 1, 2003, and looking at old photos on my computer this morning, it dawned on me that I was also in Rouen 40 years ago today, on February 1, 1973. My 24th birthday was rapidly approaching, and I was spending the year working as an English-language teaching assistant in the Lycée Corneille in Rouen. Back then in Rouen was the stay in France when I realized I had become pretty much fluent in the language.

The narrow streets of the old town are essentially alleyways. This is near the

Eglise Saint-Maclou, behind the grandiose Cathédrale de Rouen.

In 1972-73, I lived in a little apartment with no bathroom except a toilet that was in a tiny (water) closet on a stair landing. I had to share the WC with other tenants of the building. My apartment was near the train station, a 15-minute walk from the school where I worked. I don't remember snow that year, but I do remember a lot of rain. What they told me then was: A Rouen, il ne pleut pas beaucoup. Mais il pleut souvent.

Shopping in the Blois 'burbs

I don't have much to blog about today. But you know me — that's never stopped me before! So here goes.

Yesterday's shopping trip to Blois was a success. It's a 40-minute drive though it's only about 25 miles. The most direct road runs through the middle of a string of villages and small towns: Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, Noyers-sur-Cher, Saint-Romain-sur-Cher, Couddes, Contres, Cormeray, and Cellettes. The shopping center, with an Auchan hypermarket as its "anchor" store, is partly in Saint-Gervais-la-Forêt and partly in Vineuil, both south suburbs of Blois. Can you pronounce all those names?

Snail tongs

At Auchan, which is a big new store with a shopping mall attached (maybe two dozen shops), we found some pinces à escargots, which we had been looking for, but we didn't fine a plat pour escargots in which to cook the snails and which we've also been looking for. I have three dozen snails in the freezer — I put them in there, they didn't just crawl in (ha ha ha) — and we bought some disposable aluminum-foil snail dishes a few days ago. They'll have to do. Now we are equipped and we can have another appetizer escargots à la bouguignonne with our dîner one day soon.

Snail pans

We also bought some flour and corn tortillas so that we can make tacos or burritos with some of the pulled pork I cooked and put in the freezer last week. We looked for a bag or box of dried black beans, but with no luck. We got a new throw rug for the kitchen. Some gallon-size zip-top plastic bags. Two huge sweet potatoes for 1€/kilogram. I think the sign said the patates douces were imported from the U.S. — they were probably grown in North Carolina. All this is very exotic stuff when you live in the country outside Saint-Aignan.

Patates douces géantes

Then we went to the big Intersport sporting good store, which is right across the parking lot from the Maître Kanter sauerkraut restaurant where CHM and I had a good lunch last summer (I believe it was last summer). I had browsed Intersport's line of hiking boots on the company's web site beforehand and had tentatively picked out the boots I was interested in. Of course, they didn't have those. The salesman (who was about 13 years old, I think) said they only had fin de séries ("discontinued" lines) shoes and boots right now, and that they would receive a shipment of the new lines in February.

Bertie the black cat couldn't figure out what I was doing with the camera.

I was disappointed but I had a look at the discontinued boots, which were heavily discounted. There were only two or three pairs in my size. I tried one of those pairs on, and then I tried on a couple of promising pairs at the next largest size, where there were four or five pairs. Those were too big. After much trying on and walking around, and detailed discussion with the teenage clerk, I made a decision. I absolutely have to have waterproof shoes or boots right now for walks with Callie, and I can't do much long walking on gravel and through muck in my waterproof but low-top gardening shoes. The pair of boots I finally chose were priced at 120€ (at about $160, pretty expensive IMO) but with a 40% mark-down. So for 72€ I can hike again through the muddy vineyard, fearless.

At that point, we high-tailed it back to Saint-Aignan, under a fine but heavy drizzle and leaden gray skies, for a lunch of raclette and green salad.

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I bought these "sweet and sour" pickles
at Auchan just for CHM, for his next visit.
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