Balayage

Une nouvelle zone de pluie va balayer la France d'ouest en est... Those are words I hate to hear right now. Another rain front is moving off the Atlantic and sweeping across France today. Oh well, better get used to it. It's only October.

I did enjoy my trip to the "sunnier climes" of Montrichard yesterday morning. LOL. It rained the whole time I was out. I had to go to the bank, and I had to stand in line for 10 minutes or so. I enjoyed observing the people I saw and listening to the conversations around me. It was mostly an older crowd, and I fit right in.

Seen in Paris in sunny July

I went to shop in two different supermarkets, a Netto store (Intermarché's discount outlet) and the SuperU in the Montrichard "suburb" of Chissay-en-Touraine. There weren't many people in the Netto store, but the SuperU was a beehive of activity. People were shopping but also socializing, blocking the aisles with their carts.

I overheard two old men telling each other how old they were (86 both of them). I noticed a younger woman helping her elderly mother (probably) get items down off high shelves. They were accompanied by a man who must have been the husband of the older lady and both of them had to be well into their 80s too.

Spaghetti squash au gratin for lunch

At the checkout line, the man ahead of me was also in his 80s, I'm sure. He and the cashier, a woman my age I'd guess, had a long conversation and I just listened in. Apparently they had a heavy downpour of rain over in Montrichard and Chissay day before yesterday. "It was incredible how hard the rain came down," the cashier said at one point. The showers were localized, and we didn't get that kind of rain in Saint-Aignan at all on Monday.

Back at home, I put together a gratin de courge spaghetti for lunch, along with a salad of mâche with diced beets. Here's a recipe for the simple gratin. I noticed that little spaghetti squashes were selling for 3.89 euros apiece at SuperU. To me, that's expensive, so I appreciate even more the ten that we harvested over the weekend.

Gratin de courge spaghetti

2 to 3 cups of cooked squash pulp

1 egg (or 2)

½ cup or more of crème fraîche

nutmeg, black pepper, and salt

1 cup grated cheese (swiss or cheddar)

butter or olive oil

paprika

Mix together squash, egg, cream, nutmeg, salt, and pepper. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and top with the grated cheese. Sprinkle on some paprika. Dot with butter, or drizzle with olive oil. Bake in a 190ºC / 375ºF oven for 30 minutes or until the cheese melts and turns golden brown.

Dreary days

Walt coughs and then I cough. He coughs again and I cough again. Outside, it's dark. It's mid-October, and the sun already comes up late and goes down early. Even when the sun is up, it's dreary out. We have four months of this kind of weather and these reduced hours of daylight ahead of us. I'm not ready.

The weather forecast for France this afternoon: at least it's not cold out, but it will be rainy and windy.

It's raining right now. The fire wood is not getting cut. The garden is not getting cleaned up. I'd show you photos, but I can't — it's too dark for taking pictures, and I'm not enthusiastic about going outside. But I do have to go out today. I have an errand to run in Montrichard. Maybe that kind of excursion will boost my morale.

Meanwhile, I'll post a photo I took in Paris on hot and sunny July 5th, over at the recently refurbished Place de la République.

La courge spaghetti

Along with a bumper crop of tomatoes in 2013, the other great garden success story this year has to do with squashes, called courges in French. We have about two dozen of them, of three or four varieties: butternut, acorn, one mystery type (they're enormous and dark green), and spaghetti. These are what we call winter squash, and they're good cooked as a vegetable side dish with meats, in soups, or sweetened and baked into cakes or pies.

We cooked a spaghetti squash for lunch yesterday. Big, pale yellow, smooth-skinned, and ovoid, the thing weighed in at 4 lbs. (2.8 kg). We decided to cut it in half and scoop out the seeds before we roasted it in the oven. That was easier said than done, but with a big knife and the two of us working on it, one holding and one stabbing and cutting, we managed it. We'll probably save the seeds and plant them next year, or at least some of them. I've read that they are also good roasted and toasted like pumpkin seeds.

We roasted the squash cut-side-down on parchment paper in a 190ºC / 375ºF oven for about an hour. Maybe that was a little bit too long, because the flesh of the squash was not as spaghetti-like as I thought it would be. However, it had a pleasing texture and was delicious seasoned with olive oil in which I had lightly cooked some fennel seeds, hot red pepper flakes, and a clove of garlic. We ate half the squash, and saved half to have later this week.

Paris walls and illusions

It's really cold this morning — 3ºC (the 30s F). These colds we've got are ticking along. Walt just told me that the weather is supposed to warm up again this coming week, but it's also supposed to rain for three days.

I'm still enjoying looking back at photos I took in July in Paris, and dreaming about the nice hot weather we had then. The sun was magnificent, and skies were blue. We really needed that two-month break in the weather.

What's behind these shuttered windows at the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan?

I'm posting two photos of walls in Paris. The first is one wall or "wing" of the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan in the Marais. The building is named after our town of Saint-Aignan because not many years after it was built in the 1600s, it was bought by the Duc de Beauvilliers. His main residence was the Château de Saint-Aignan, just down the road from our house, and he had this pied-à-terre in Paris.

An architectural "veneer" stuck onto an old wall.

When you look into the courtyard, you have the impression that you are seeing a building with three sections — a main section at the back, plus left and right wings. In fact, the building has only one wing off the main section. On the left, windows and shutters were built up against an old wall that had enclosed the city of Paris in an earlier era. There's nothing but an old wall behind the windows. It's an illusion. You can tell when you notice the more modern buildings sticking up into the air above the courtyard.

Finally, here's a photo of a massive wall near the Place de la République. I think if the wall were blank it would be oppressive. Somebody else must have thought so too, because it has been painted. I wonder what it's like to live in one of the apartments in the building on the right. How much of the paining can people on those balconies really see?

Portraits

Our friend Jean got a new camera, and she was just starting to learn how to use it when she and Nick were here day before yesterday. I don't think she'll mind if I post a couple of her photos, which I edited with Photoshop. She took many more on a walk down along the Cher river with Nick, Walt, and the two dogs, but I decided not to go along because of this lousy cold I've caught.

I don't know what I was reading — maybe the camera manual. Lulu the poodle,  J & N's dog, was focusing her attention on Nick.

Walt and I at the table — we had just had lunch and coffee.

It's not very often that there are photos of Walt and me on the blog. By the way, he now has caught the cold, and we are both running at about half power. We're hoping Jean and Nick didn't take the bug home with them. It's been raining pretty hard for about 12 hours now, with the temperature in the upper 40s F (8ºC right now).

Le monde entier...

...est un cactus, il est impossiiiibllle de s'asseooooiiiir. That's a famous French song. This isn't about a song, it's just about a cactus plant that I'm trying to propagate. The plant was a gift from a longtime friend and reader.

I cut off some pads and stuck them in a rooting medium mixed with sand, in little clay pots. I hope it works.

Otherwise, it's a late blog post today because we have company. We had two big meals yesterday, and then we stayed up way past our bedtime... playing Monopoly!

Not worse

I'm not worse. And no, I didn't try either of the radical remedies for chasing a cold away. I spent a normal afternoon and evening, went to bed early, and slept like a log.

What woke me up early this morning was a mysterious whirring, almost whining, mechanical noise. I lay in bed listening to it, wondering what it could be. If it's a train or an airplane, I thought, it wouldn't last so long. But it was louder than the noise of trains and planes usually is around here. Peut-être que c'était un OVNI — un objet volant non-identifié.

Yesterday's lunch: polenta with okra, tomatoes, and shrimp

The noise continued. I finally got up and opened a window to hear it better. That's when I realized it was a grape harvester. Somebody was out harvesting grapes at 5:00 a.m. That's a first, I think, in 10 years of living here. During the day, you don't even notice the noise of the mechanical harvesters, but in the early morning quiet it sounded much louder.

It's raining right now, and it's supposed to rain more today and tomorrow. I guess getting the grapes in has become urgent.

Homeopathic remedies

The title is kind of a joke, but then I need a good chuckle, and maybe a good tipple, right now. I woke up realizing that I've developed a miserable head cold. With a cough. And crying eyes. Autrement dit, j'ai la crève.

I have really enjoyed this semi-dry Chenin Blanc Touraine-Amboise white wine
that I got at the co-op in Limeray. I wish I had bought more.

Maybe it's allergies, but I usually don't have such symptoms caused by pollen at this time of year. I've felt it coming on for several days and assumed it would clear up when the weather changed. Well, the weather is about to change — for the worse — with high temperatures only in the 50s over the next few days, and rain on Friday. Joy.

Des tomates, encore des tomates !

Abondance de biens ne nuit pas. That's a French proverb. It means: "Plenty is no plague." In other words, there's no harm in having so much of a good thing. (Biens are "goods" and nuit is the third person singular of the verb nuire in French — "to harm" — from which derives the word "nuisance" in French and in English.)

I'm talking about the 2013 tomato crop, of course. Too bad we don't have very many neighbors any more, or we could give some away. Yesterday, I again spent a few hours trimming and cooking tomatoes.

As I was saying a couple of days ago, the 2013 grape harvest is supposed to be the smallest in more than 20 years in France. The same is not true of tomatoes — at least not around Saint-Aignan. We've got red ones and we've got yellow ones. We probably have a ton of green ones too.

When life hands you tomatoes, it's best to make sauce. There was a feature on the French news the other day about how this is the sauce-making season in Italy where, it seems, everybody grows tomatoes and makes sauce in the autumn. Abbondanza non nuoce...

Rue Montorgueil, Paris

The other day I mentioned in my post about cooking a French boiled dinner, a potée, that I learned a lot about traditional French cooking and regional products from a woman who operated a charcuterie on the rue Montorgueil, quartier des Halles, in Paris. That was more than 30 years ago, when I lived in that particular neighborhood for three years.

That little charcuterie (Terroir d'Auvergne) is still there (on the far right in the photo), but it wasn't open the day I walked through the old neighborhood back in July. The Chinese take-away is "new" but the boulangerie Collet may well have been there in the early 1980s.

There are fewer food shops and many more cafés and restaurants in the neighborhood these days. Montorgueil is still a shopping street, however, and nowadays car traffic is restricted to local residents and delivery vans. I think the scene above is actually in the part of the street that's called la rue des Petits-Carreaux.

One place that is still there is called Le Palais des Fruits, a produce stand. I'm not sure why a market specializing in fruit would have a big fake asparagus as its most remarkable street sign.

The little apartment I lived in was on the 6th floor (U.S.) or cinquième étage of the building — spiral staircase, no elevator — that now features a tapas bar at street level, rue Saint-Sauveur. If you knew me back then, maybe you remember the place. The tapas bar then was just a neighborhood watering hole with a working-class clientele. I don't think I ever had a drink or a coffee in there.

Les vendanges de 2013

I've been sitting here for the past hour or longer just looking at some of the photos I took in Paris back in July. The one here reminded me that the 2013 grape harvest is well under way in France. In the French language, there's a special term for harvesting grapes — vendanger is the verb — and the harvesting process is called la vendange, often in the plural when it describes this season of the year: C'est l'époque des vendanges.

According to news reports, the 2013 grape harvest will be smallest one in France since 1991. Weather conditions are to blame. Several regions — parts of the Loire Valley, Burgundy, and Bordeaux included — have seen a significant part of the crop destroyed by hailstorms.

Around Saint-Aignan, the vignerons — grapegrowers/wine producers — have been luckier. The grapes at La Renaudière, for example, are heavy, healthy, sweet, and ripe. Most of them will be harvested this coming week, and the weather is supposed to be warm and sunny. That's good luck.

La Potée — vegetables for lunch

It's not winter yet but we've again had a few rainy, cool days. With the hours of daylight much shorter now than just a few weeks ago, we can feel the season changing. C'est normal — on est en octobre.

Twice I've bought turnips over the past couple of weeks. I guess I had the urge to eat some. My first thought was to make a boiled dinner called a potée in France. I had carrots and onions on hand, but I needed cabbage and some kind of pork and sausages. I ended up cooking those turnips in a curry, so I needed to buy more for the potée Walt and I had been talking about.

We went to Blois last Tuesday and stopped at the big produce market called Grand Frais out in the suburbs. That store has the most beautiful produce of all kinds, at really good prices. I wish it weren't 25 miles from Saint-Aignan, but we make it a point to stop there every time we have a reason to go to Blois.

This time, I chose a leek, a big bunch of celery, some yellow turnips, and a savoy cabbage (chou vert). Oh, and more carrots, since we had already eaten the other ones I had in the fridge. I also got a big bag of brussels sprouts because they were so beautiful.

A potée is a one-dish meal based on salt-cured, fresh, or smoked pork — or a combination of all three. You cook the meat first to make a flavorful broth, with bay leaves, onions, garlic, and cloves (clous de girofle). When the meat is well cooked, you add vegetables as I've described. Potatoes. And sausages, the best being smoked Montbéliard or Morteau sausages from eastern France. (The sausage I cooked this time was a Morteau.)

I started making a potée a couple of times a year back when I lived in Paris 30 years ago, just off the rue Montorgueil in the Les Halles neighborhood. Downstairs from the apartment where I lived there were all the normal shops — fromagerie, boulangerie, boucherie — and especially a charcuterie that I liked.

A charcuterie is a butcher shop / delicatessen that specializes in pork products, fresh or cured, and also salads and cooked, carry-out dishes. The one on the rue Montorgueil (nowadays a "hip" street lined with cafés and restaurants rather than the old-fashioned food shops of yore) always had the most appetizing displays of food products I had ever seen.

And the woman behind the counter liked to tell me how to cook whatever it was that had caught my eye and that I had decided to buy. "Do you know how to cook that [sausage] [cut of pork] [hamhock] [slab of bacon]? Let me tell you," she would say. She'd tell me how long to cook whatever it was, what vegetables to serve with it, how long to leave it in the pot or oven, what herbs and spices to use, and even what to do with the leftovers.

It was great. I'm not sure I ever thanked her enough for all she taught me. The shop (Terroir d'Auvergne) is still there, but I'm sure the woman retired long ago.

Open doors and various victories

I love it when I'm walking the streets of Paris and I see a big porte cochère — a carriageway door — that's usually closed but that this time is just standing wide open. I always have to stick my head in or even snap a discreet picture of the courtyard behind the door. This one is a doorway at 95, rue de Sèvres, near the Bon Marché department store in the 6th arrondissement, that I noticed when I was in Paris back in July.

It turns out to be the property of a religious order called Les Lazaristes, founded by saint Vincent de Paul four centuries ago. I don't know how old the building is, but nosing around on the web I found pages saying you can rent a single room in the order's hotel for 20€ a night (26€ for a double). I wonder how that works.

The man above must be Vincent de Paul. His religious organization is called Les Lazaristes because at some point the order's members moved into an old lepers' hospital named after Lazarus, in another part of Paris. That's what I read. Then I read that the Lazaristes were the founders of several Catholic universities in the U.S., including Saint John's in New York and De Paul in Chicago.

* * *

On another front, I've scored two big victories this week. One was getting the car repaired. The speedometer had stopped working, and it's hard to drive around not knowing what your speed is. Actually, the speedometer had been acting up for nearly three years, intermittently. The needle would suddenly drop to zero and stay there for a few minutes or even longer as I was driving along. Then just as suddenly it would come back to life and work normally for days, weeks, or months.

I did a lot of research on the internet and found a lot of other people who were having the same problem with the same car (a Peugeot) as mine. But nobody had found a good solution. One guy said he had the speedometer replaced for something like 600 euros and it didn't help — the brand new one still didn't work. Another said he had the speed sensor in the engine replaced for a reasonable price and voilà, that fixed it. I had my car's speed sensor replaced a couple of weeks ago but he speedometer problem didn't go away. I didn't want to spend 600 euros for a new speedometer and then have it not work.

Anyway, my mechanic was able to find me a used speedometer and install it this week for a lot less than 600 euros. For now it's working and I'm happy not to have to think about the problem any more. My fingers are crossed — I hope that the problem doesn't come back.

The other "victory" involved years-old hassles with the French bureaucracy. I don't want to go into all the details, but getting it all worked out involved gathering up a pile of documents, some of which had to come from the U.S.; paying a government-accredited translator; going to the U.S. embassy in Paris to have a sworn declaration notarized... and on and on. I finally had to engage the services of an American lawyer who practices in Paris, and I'm glad I did. Of course I haven't received his bill yet.

Well, yesterday I got an e-mail from the lawyer's office saying that the matter has now been resolved. Like the car problem, this had been hanging over my head for two or three years. I took me forever to figure out who to go to for a solution, and involved fruitless appointments with a French lawyer here in the Saint-Aignan area, a notaire in Saint-Aignan, and the staff at the mairie at our village hall — not to mention several phone calls to various administrative offices in Paris and the U.S. and requests for information and assistance. Now it's all behind me and the situation is cleared up. Ouf !

Another tomato idea: Pico de Gallo salsa fresca

So many tomatoes, so little time. Here's one of the least time-consuming and tastiest ways to preserve fresh tomatoes. It's a salsa fresca called 'pico de gallo' — 'cock's crest' salsa.

The makings for pico de gallo: jalapeño, banana, or other hot peppers with tomatoes, onions, garlic, and cilantro (coriandre in French).

It's fast to make because it's not cooked. Tomato sauce requires fairly long cooking. Tomato paste takes several hours longer. And oven-dried tomatoes take a whole day and a whole night (at least the way I do them).

Home-pickled banana peppers from the 2012 vegetable garden at La Renaudière

For pico de gallo, the main thing is to have a lot of fresh and spicy ingredients: tomatoes (4 large), onions (1 or 2 small), garlic cloves (3), herbs (a bunch as shown), hot peppers (2 or 3) and either vinegar, lime juice, or lemon juice (a few teaspoons).

Chopped fresh tomatoes, onions, and garlic

Still, there's a long version and a short version. The long one requires chopping the tomatoes, onions, garlic, and herbs finely with a knife. The second, which I like, involves processing all the ingredients in a blender or with a stick blender. Add vinegar, Tabasco sauce, or citrus juice little by little until you have the flavor and heat you want.

Cilantro, if you like it — otherwise parsley, basil, or oregano — adds freshness to the salsa.

If you buy or grow hot peppers like cayennes, jalapeños, or banana peppers, I recommend pickling them while they are fresh. Poke holes in the peppers, pack them into jars, and pour hot vinegar over them. Put lids on the jars while they are still burning hot. They will end up hermetically sealed and you can store them for a long time. Vinegar doesn't spoil, and it preserves the peppers.

The salsa before and after processing with a stick blender — I made two batches like this.

And vinegar flavored with hot peppers can add spice to so many things you eat. Vegetables like greens and beans. Eggs. Soups and stews. Meats like roasted pork, beef, or poultry. Salsas like pico de gallo — which in turn is good with grilled meats and poultry, beans, quesadillas, tacos, burritos, scrambled eggs, and on and on.

My version of pico de gallo salsa

Pico de gallo salsa freezes really well — at least the more or less pureed version does, prepared using a blender. It's the kind of salsa that I remember being served in Mexican restaurants in California back in the 1990s. By the way, I found the pitcher I use as a container for processing food with the stick blender at Ikea for a very reasonable price.

A jarring experience

I don't think we would qualify as hoarders or pack-rats, but we do collect and awful lot of stuff. Early on in Saint-Aignan, we saved wine bottles for several years, so that we could buy wine in bulk — en vrac in French — getting our plastic jugs filled at the winery and then bottling and corking it ourselves at home. We have a good supply of several different kinds of wine bottles that we keep and use.

A small part of the jar collection that built up over the years — some "donated" by friends

But as you can see from the photo above, we have also saved jars. Way too many jars have accumulated in the downstairs cellier (cold pantry) over the past 10 years. We saved them with the idea that we would use them for what we call "canning" in the U.S., and what the Brits call "bottling" — I'm sure somebody will correct me if I've cited the wrong term (see comments).

We had jars in boxes and jars on shelves. I think these are just the ones we are keeping.

Anyway, certain jars have labels stuck on with glue that is not water-soluble. Others you can soak for a few minutes in hot soapy water and the glue melts, and the labels slide right off. We were saving both kinds, with the idea that we'd remove the labels that required a stronger solvent with what is called "white spirit" in France, or with WD40, which works too. It was going to be a lot of trouble to do.

Finally we realized we were all jarred up. Walt pulled them all out of the cellier into the utility room and went through them. He threw out a good portion of our collection (put the jars in the recycle bins, in other words). He's a better cleaner-outer than I am — more ruthless. The job is done. I didn't really ask him which ones he saved and which ones he got rid of. Too painful for me to know...

Soupe de tomates

Or is it soupe aux tomates ? Either way, it's good, and 'tis the season. The tomatoes keep coming, and we're noticing around the Saint-Aignan area all the gardeners have dozens or scores of big, plump red tomatoes hanging from the plants in their jardins potagers.

This weekend, we decided to make tomato soup. Walt started the process by making a good broth using a pintade (Guinea fowl) carcass that we had in the freezer, with onions, garlic, cayenne peppers, parsley stems, and spices.

When you start with a flavorful broth like that, be it poultry or vegetable broth, making tomato soup is pretty easy. All you need is a lot of tomatoes (even ones out of a can would do the job) and some kind of thickening agent. Potatoes are one choice — cook chopped potatoes and chopped tomatoes together in the broth and then puree everything, using a sieve, a food mill (un moulin à légumes), or a blender. I like to use a food mill.

I didn't have any potatoes of the kind you would use to make soupe or potage (baking potatoes, we call them) so I decided to thicken the tomato soup by making a roux with flour and butter. Here's the recipe:

Tomato Soup

6 cups chopped tomato

3 cups poultry or vegetable broth

3 Tbsp. butter

3 Tbsp. flour

1½ tsp. salt (or more to taste)

3 tsp. sugar (to taste)

Boil the chopped tomatoes in the broth for 20 minutes. When the tomatoes are cooked, let them cool slightly and then puree the mixture. Using a sieve or a food mill has the advantage of straining our the seeds and skins of the cooked tomatoes, but you can also use a blender or stick blender.

Melt the butter in a big pot. When it's bubbly and even beginning to turn golden brown, add the flour and stir it into the melted butter. Let it cook for two or three minutes to make a light brown roux, which will give good flavor.

Add a cup of so of the pureed tomato to the pot and stir well to make a thick paste with no lumps. Then continue adding the pureed tomato, stirring with a whisk until you have a smooth, velvety soup. Season with salt to taste, and optionally add the sugar, also to taste. Serve hot, with or without croutons, cream, or grated cheese.

Calm has returned

This is going to be a quiet Monday morning, I think. First, it's supposed to rain, as it did yesterday and the day before. Second, the undergrounding work seems to be finished now.

Last week, this was the scene out at the end of our paved road. Our access to the vineyard road was completely blocked by big engins and véhicules of all types and sizes. Trenches were dug. A transformer as big as a dumpster was dropped in by crane. The weather was downright hot, at least late in the afternoon.

We could still be in for some activity, however, because the vendanges — the grape harvest, plural in French — are supposed to start today. It's the latest harvest in memory, or maybe ever. Let's hope it's a good one.

Tomato in curries

One way I've been using fresh tomatoes this month is in curries. Thanks go to our English friend Nick, who made us a good tomato-chicken curry for dinner back at the end of August.

Curry of shrimp, cauliflower, zucchini, and tomato, with onions, garlic, and ginger

Tomato wasn't an ingredient I associated with curry, but it really adds freshness and natural sweet flavor to the sauce. The sauce itself I make using curry powders — garam massala from India via England, massalé from the islands of Mauritius and Réunion via France — with some cinnamon, cumin, turmeric, and cayenne added to balance out the flavors.

Chunks of fresh red tomato warming through  in a curry sauce

The sauce can have yogurt, cream, or coconut milk as its base — or broth, or just water. It needs enough curry powder and spices in it to have a pronounced flavor and to thicken the liquid to a creamy consistency. Sautéed onions and garlic are indispensable. Early in the month, I made a curry with Guinea hen instead of chicken.

Curry of pintade (Guinea hen) with green peas and chunks of fresh yellow tomato

And then more recently, I decided to make a shrimp and cauliflower curry. That seemed like an unusual combination to me, but I found several recipes for such curries on the internet. I guess you can find anything you want on the internet. I added sautéed chunks of zucchini and chunks of fresh tomato, and it all went together really well.