Saint Martin

At least 236 towns and villages in France are named after Saint Martin of Tours (b. ca. 316 in Hungary – d. 397 in Candes, near Tours) , and more than four thousand churches are dedicated to him. His baptism name, Martin, is the most common family name in France.

The church in our village, 35 miles east of Tours, is named for Saint Martin, who was known for tearing his Roman army cape in two and giving half of it to a beggar who needed clothing for protection from the cold. Saint Martin also pioneered the growing of grapes for wine in the Loire Valley.

A series of churches have stood on the site of today's building over the centuries. The first ones, built of wood, were burned during local wars between Touraine and Berry forces. A stone church built in the 1200s or earlier was severely damaged by flooding when the Cher repeatedly overflowed its banks. The current church tower dates back to the 1600s.

Maison éclusière

There are two low dams with locks along the Cher River in our village — there are 16 such locks between Saint-Aignan and Tours.

A lock in French is une écluse, and the houses where the lockkeepers lived are called maisons éclusières. The one in the picture below is not much more than a mile from our house.

In theory the Cher is navigable, and in centuries past it was used for the transport of merchandise. Then along came trains and trucks. I don't think all the locks are in working order these days.

From extremely cold to extremely warm, by the numbers

At this moment, the temperature difference between Saint-Aignan, where I live now, and Urbana, Illinois, where I lived for several years in the 1970s and still have good friends, is 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And this is despite the fact that Saint-Aignan is several hundred miles farther north than Urbana.

According to the weather widgets on my Windows desktop, it's 0ºF in Urbana right now — that's extremely cold but far from unheard of — and it's +50ºF here in the Loire Valley — unusually warm for early January but, again, not unheard of. (For the Fahrenheit-challenged, that's –18ºC in Urbana and +10ºC here in Saint-Aignan.)

Autumn in the village

It's been interesting to listen to the reports on the French TV news about the current cold wave in the northeastern U.S. The other day, Claire Chazal on TF1 reported, in vague terms, that temperatures in New York and New England were « en dessous de zéro » ("below zero"), which was, she said, the coldest they had been in decades. People here might draw the conclusion that Chicago, New York, and Boston lie in a tropical climate zone, if those are unusually low winter temperatures.

Golden leaves

Chazal was talking about degrees Fahrenheit, but must not have been aware of that fact. In degrees F, "below zero" is frigidly cold. But zero on the Celsius scale is equal to +32ºF, so "below zero" in Celsius might be, say, +30ºF. That's not very cold in New York or Boston. People listening and who were thinking about it must have been mystified. In fact, the temperatures were (and are) –25ºC in places like Chicago today.

I'm worried that all that cold air might end up crossing the Atlantic and putting us in the deep freeze here in the northern half of France in a few days.

As I said yesterday, this week I'm just publishing some old photos taken in the village we live in, outside Saint-Aignan. These were some of the photos we contributed to the mayor's slideshow.

One village view a day this week

We are going to have a busy week, with trips to Tours and to Romorantin, a haircut for me in the village, and all of our other routine to keep going. Dog-walking, cooking, eating...

So for a week or so I'm just going to post one photo a day from among all the photos I've taken in our village over the past 10 years.

Above is a photo of the New Year's ceremony that we attended yesterday in the village meeting hall (it's like like a church social hall in the U.S). Three things struck me about the people in attendance: (1) They were definitely a senior citizen crowd (I'm a senior citizen now too, I guess) and there weren't many young people at all. (2) It was a remarkably homogeneous crowd from an ethnic point of view (all white European) but I guess that's rural France. And (3) they all seemed to know each other (this is a very small town).

I was also surprised to see so many people in attendance, since there are only 1,100 people living in the village. I think most of these people grew up together here, and many of them are cousins, I'm sure. We saw many of the people who live in the village that we actually know. Several of them are in the wine business. Another was the father of a friend of ours who died suddenly 1n 2009. Others were people who work or used to work at the Mairie. And then there were several of our nearby neighbors in the crowd — including the mayor and her husband. The atmosphere was relaxed and festive.

At one point in her annual report, the mayor thanked those who had contributed photos to the slide show that ran on a big screen during the entire ceremony. She included us by name, thanking « mes voisins, Ken et Walter... ». She was obviously doing everything she could to welcome us and make us part of the event.

You won't believe this, but we didn't stay for the verre de l'amitié, the glass of wine served at the reception following the meeting. We had another engagement, unfortunately.

La céremonie des vœux, c'est aujourd'hui

This was the announcement in a recent newsletter from the village mayor's office and on the web site. Les vœux are the mayor's official New Year's greetings and good wishes to her constituents. Attendees will be offered a glass of wine at the end of the event.

Samedi 4 janvier 2014 à 11H

Cérémonie des vœux du Maire à 11h suivie du verre de l'amitié

Vous êtes cordialement invité à cette rencontre amicale. Afin d'organiser au mieux cette réunion, merci de vous inscrire auprès du secrétariat de la Mairie ou par mail.

I tried to RSVP by mail — that means e-mail — but the two messages I sent just bounced back. I picked up the phone and quickly confirmed that Walt and I would attend. It'll be our first time. The town hall is just two miles from our house. The mayor is our neighbor, and she's been in office since 2008. The next municipal elections will be held in March, and I don't know if she intends to be a candidate for a second 6-year term. Maybe she'll talk about her plans at the ceremony this monring.

The village skyline

I thought I'd post a few pictures of village scenes that I took a few years ago.

The village is officially called une commune in France. It consists of the village center — le bourg, or "burg" — and a collection of hameaux or hamlets, little settlements or groups of houses scattered around the commune's 12 sq. miles, or 32 sq. kilometers, of territory. Saint-Aignan is the larger town nearby; it's two miles in the opposite direction from our house. About half of the village's territory is planted in grapevines, I imagine.

La mairie — the village hall

There is a church in the village center. There's a grocery store/bakery, a café-tabac, the municipal library, and the village hall, or mairie [may-REE]. There's also a building called le château but it isn't especially grand or impressive. There are tennis courts, and there's a campground on the banks of the Cher River behind the church.

The village war memorial, or monument aux morts

I don't know how many hamlets (which are sometimes called villages, as opposed to the bourg)  surround the village center. There are quite a few of them, including ours, which is called La Renaudière. Nearby, I'm familiar with La Chotinière, La Besnardière, La Janvrie, Grand-Maison, Les Bas-Bonneaux, and Les Hauts-Bonneaux. On the other end of the village there are Le Vou, Riboy, Le Bas-Guéret, and Le Haut-Guéret. I think there are many more but some are sort of hidden in the woods at the end of little roads that I haven't ever explored.

Driving into the village on the road from Saint-Aignan

The population of the village is about 1,100. The altitude ranges from a low point of 64 meters (210 feet) to a high point of 186 meters (610 feet). I think we live at about the highest point in the commune — at least that's what I've been told by one friend who was born here. The population density is 35 people per sq. kilometer — that would come to about 90 people per sq. mile. (For comparison, Paris has a population density of more than 55,000 people per sq. mile!)

The village church, dedicated to Saint Martin, and a typical house

There's no bridge over the Cher River in the village except the new autoroute (tollway, motorway) bridge and the other end of the village from us. There's no exit or entry ramp in the village, so there's not much traffic. To get on the autoroute you have to drive a few miles in one direction or the other, cross the bridge at Saint-Aignan or Pouillé/Thésée, and then drive a few miles along the other side of the river to get to the only ramp in the area.

The river walk along the banks of the Cher River

The city of Tours is an hour west. Blois is 45 minutes north. Orléans is 90 minutes away, and Paris three or four hours, depending on which road you take. Our village is at the extreme eastern edge of La Touraine, the western edge of Le Berry, and just across the river from La Sologne, which is part of  L'Orléanais — the three historic provinces come together at Saint-Aignan.

The whole world...

...is my oyster, someone said. Really, for me it's been more like this these days: "my whole world is oysters." We bought four dozen nice, big, fresh oysters from the man selling them out of his truck on the market square in Saint-Aignan on Monday. We ate the last of them yesterday — there were 20 left after we ate some on New Year's Eve and left a few with our friends when we drove back home on Wednesday.

It turned that out one of our friends had never eaten oysters before, and the other said he hadn't eaten an oyster in many many years. Because of that, I decided to "cook" them. Well, they really don't cook the way I do them, but they do warm through and the shells are much easier to get open as a result. They don't turn rubbery. They can be a little more appetizing to people who haven't ever eaten oysters than really raw ones are. I know, oyster purists will be scandalized.

An oven-roasted oyster

As I said, I bought large oysters. Normally, Walt and I like them smaller if they are going to be consumed raw. But when you put the oysters in a hot oven for a few minutes to open the shells, the oyster inside does shrink up a little. So starting with bigger oysters makes sense. My method of cooking the oyster comes from coastal North Carolina, where outdoor oyster roasts are an old autumn tradition.

Oysters washed and ready to be eaten... or roasted

In N.C. and the whole U.S. Southeast, I think, the way people roast oysters is this: you build a fire and you stand four concrete blocks upright at its four corners. You lay a big, heavy slab of steel or iron down on the concrete blocks to form a kind of table or plancha over the fire. You dump onto the plancha a basketful of oysters that you have washed well with the garden hose. You wet a few empty burlap bags or old towels and lay them over the top of the oysters. The resulting heat and steam "roasts" the oysters.

Some oysters open faster and wider than others when you roast them in the oven.

In the oven, it turns out, the best way to steam the oysters is to heat up a pan of water in a hot oven until it starts to steam. Arrange the oysters on a wire oven rack, arranging them carefully so that the deeper shell is on the bottom and the flatter shell is on the top. Set the rack over the pan of steaming water in the oven. The oven needs to be hot: 225ºC / 425ºF, or even hotter. The oysters stay in the oven just long enough for the shells to start to open — between 5 and 10 minutes, say. Take them out and let them cool for a couple of minutes.

I made a batch of corn muffins for us to have with the oysters.

Even the oysters that don't appear to be open will be easy to deal with. Hold them in one hand in a couple of thicknesses of paper toweling to protect yourself. All you need to do is get the point of a sharp knife into the edge of the oyster and twist it. The top shell will pop up. Run the knife along the inside surface of the top shell to cut the muscle that hold the oyster in place. Remove the top shell and then cut the muscle on the lower shell. Sprinkle on a few drops of lemon juice, vinegar, or hot pepper sauce. If all the liquid hasn't run out of the shell, drink it along with the oyster. With them, saltine crackers, English water crackers, or cornbread are good — not to mention a cold beer or a glass of cold, dry white wine.

P.S. I know that some people open oysters by putting them in the microwave oven for a couple of minutes. I haven't tried that yet.

First post of 2014

Let me wish all ye faithful a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year one more time. I haven't sent individual messages, but you know who you are and how much I appreciate your loyalty and your comments. I blog largely for myself because it's important for me from many points of view, and I blog for you too of course. Thanks.

I didn't take any pictures on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. Sometimes you're either having too much fun, or you're too busy, or you're too tired to pick up the appareil photo. We ate our oysters on New Year's Eve. I did them North Carolina style, which means briefly roasted in a hot oven (makes them easier to open and more appetizing for the slightly squeamish) and served at the table with cocktail sauce (tomato sauce, vinegar, chillies, and horseradish). We also made a French mignonnette sauce, which is wine vinegar flavored with chopped shallots and coarsely ground or crushed black pepper. It was a success, and we have fresh oysters left over for today's lunch.

Oysters for sale at the New Year's market in old Saint-Aignan. Prices were lower in 2005...*

Dinner was pan-roasted magrets de canard — duck breast filets — served rare with an orange sauce, prepared by our hosts. Delicious. With that, there was a gratin dauphinois (potatoes au gratin with cream) and nice fresh green beans. And with all that food, we drank... let's just say... a certain number of good wines — mostly from the Loire Valley, except for some Champagne.

The old (and only) bridge across the Cher River at Saint-Aignan — there used to be a mill here.

We often park the car down by the bridge and then walk up into town when we go to the market.

The weather has been wet and windy for a few days, so we were more or less confined to the house on 12/31 and 1/1. Still, Callie and her canine friend Lulu needed to be walked. I didn't volunteer. I had taken Callie out on her two previous walks, so it wasn't my turn. And then we all actually stayed up until midnight to welcome in the New Year. That's two hours past my normal bedtime, so I was pretty wiped out yesterday (Jan. 1).

The display of wintertime pork treats in a charcuterie stand at the Saint-Aignan market

For our New Year's Day lunch back at home, we put together our traditional cassoulet using confit de canard (duck leg/thigh sections cooked in their own fat and left to cure for three months in that fat in the refrigerator), black-eyed peas (for good luck in 2014), and Toulouse-style pork sausages. Here's a link to an earlier post about it. Incidentally, I heard a cook who has a show on the French Cuisine+ TV network say yesterday that for some people in France, it is traditional to eat lentils on January 1 because that is supposed to bring you health and happiness for the rest of the year. Les grandes traditions se rencontrent.

* I reached back in time eight or nine years to find the photos I'm posting today.

Happy New Year, autrement dit

Je vous souhaite à toutes et à tous

beaucoup de bonheur en 2014.

Tous mes bons vœux sont pour vous,

et bonne santé surtout !

Merci aussi pour toutes vos gentillesses

en 2013.

Ken

A demain, si vous le voulez bien.

Oléron oysters, Portuguese beans, and the local vino

It's going to be a busy morning. We have to get everything together for our drive down to southern Touraine for a New Year's Eve dinner — load up the car, get the dog psychologically prepared (she hates riding in the car), and make sure we don't forget anything. Cameras? Check. Batteries? Check. Android tablet? Check. Power supply? Check. Dogfood? Check. Leash? Check. Dog? Check...

And then there's the food and drink. We got oysters. It turned out that there was no special New Year's market in Saint-Aignan yesterday. There had been a market on Monday Dec. 23, and we assumed there would be one on Mon. Dec. 30 (the normal market day is Saturday). We drove down there yesterday morning and we were disappointed.

Two kinds of oysters (4 doz.) spending the night in our dirt-floored cold pantry downstairs

But suddenly our mood brightened. While there wasn't a full market, there was a truck parked on the main square. Out it it, a young man was selling oysters that he had brought up here from the town of Marenne and the island of Oléron, which is about 4 hours southwest of Saint-Aignan. On était sauvé. We bought four dozen Marenne-Oléron oysters, as they are called — two dozen of the ones called pleine-mer (open sea) and two dozen of the ones called fines de claires.

 Like me, you probably can't tell which variety of oyster these are...

They are the same oysters, but they are treated differently. The pleine-mer [plehn-MEHR] oysters stay in seawater until they are harvested, sold, and served. They have their own particular taste. The fines de claires [feen-duh-KLEHR] are gathered in the sea and then put into salt ponds (claires) to spend the last three or four months of their life. They have a different taste because of that method of "finishing" — they're called fines because they are extra "refined". Millions of oysters from Marenne-Oléron, Brittany, and Normandy will be consumed tonight at New Year's Eve dinners all over France.

Bubbly wine made from grapes grown in our village

As I mentioned yesterday, before going to get the oysters we went down to the village hall and dropped off a CD we had burned after gathering up a total of about 130 photos. We figured the mayor or whoever on her staff is in charge of organizing her New Year's ceremony could pick out whatever photos they wanted to use for their slideshow or whatever. We hoped they wouldn't feel completely overwhelmed.

Right after lunch, the mayor came by and rang the bell at our front gate — she's our neighbor. Walt went out and talked to her. She said they were thrilled with the photos and had decided to use all of them. It was nice of her to stop and tell us. She urged us to attend the event on Saturday. Embarrassingly enough, we've never attended before. We'll have to make a big effort to get ourselves there this time. To thank us, she brought us a bottle of the local bubbly, which is made like Champagne but using local grapes like Chenin Blanc instead of Chardonnay.

Cornilles or black-eyed peas imported from Portugal, cooked

Finally, I cooked up a big pot of black-eyed peas yesterday for our New Year's Day dinner. For people from the U.S. South, it's considered good luck to eat black-eyed peas (called « cornilles » [kor-NEE-yuh] in France) on January 1. I love the old superstition, because I love black-eyed peas. Most French people seem never to have heard of them before. Luckily, they eat them in Portugal, so I can always find them, either dried or in cans, in the Portuguese products section in all the local supermarkets.

Beans bubbling in boiling broth on the stove

Black-eyed peas are beans, actually but they have much thinner and more delicate skins than other beans. And they have a distinctly different flavor compared to white beans like navy beans, French lingots, or Italian cannellini, or like red kidney beans and pinto beans. It's hard to describe, but the taste is kind of grassy and rich. It resembles the flavor of lentils, I think, and goes very well with duck, including the slow-cooked confit de canard that we'll have with them, and with pork and pork sausages. I cooked my "peas" in a broth flavored with onion, garlic, spices, and bay leaves in which I had simmered a big slice of salt pork to have with our Christmastime feast of collard greens.

Walnut biscotti by Walt, great for dunking in wine or coffee

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that Walt made a big batch of crispy walnut biscotti to take to the friends who've invited us for dinner tonight. There they are.

En panne...

« En panne » in French means "out of order" (a vending machine or telephone, for example), or "broken down" (speaking of a car). One expression the dictionary uses to translate the expression is incapable de fonctionner. What's en panne here is me this morning. Physically, I feel fine, but I'm busy with things other than this blog. The weather, which the Télématin presenter just described as une pertubation par jour (one rain front after another), hasn't been conducive to a lot of photo-taking.

 These are some gratuitous photos of a broccoli quiche we made a while back....

Maybe we'll make a quiche later this week. But first we have to have all the New Year's food that we like to have. Oysters, for example. We'll be going down to the special Monday market on the main square in old Saint-Aignan this morning to buy a few dozen of them.

We'll spend New Year's Eve with friends who live about an hour from here, and they are planning the rest of the menu. On Wednesday, January 1, back at home, we'll have a sort of cassoulet with Toulouse sausages and a couple of pieces of confit de canard that I made back in September or October. It's ready to eat now, after "curing" in its own fat for three months. Oh, I'll make my cassoulet with black-eyed peas, because eating those on New Year's Day is a tradition where I come from.

...just because I think it looks appetizing,

Meanwhile, the mayor of our village (population 1100) has asked us to give her a batch of photos of the local area and vineyards so that she can run them as a slide show during her cérémonie de vœux this coming Saturday. The vœux du maire are a tradition in all the villages of France — it's the mayor's official greetings to her or his constituents and a kind of kick-off for the new year. We've burned some 130 photos onto a CD that we'll take down to the village hall this morning. Then it's off to shop...

Le temps passe...

28 décembre 2003

28 décembre 2013

Callie

Callie the collie will be seven years old in a couple of months. And she doesn't even know it. Or do you think she does? Who knows what goes on in a canine mind. Here's a holiday portrait for 2013. I don't think she could figure out why I was taking her picture.

The news here in France mostly has to do with the weather these days. There's flooding in Brittany and there are avalanches in the Alps (two skiers were killed yesterday). We've been having heavy downpours of rain over the past few hours. The noise woke me up a couple of times during the night. I can hear a hard rain falling right this minute.

La météo du jour

Here's my periodic weather report. We're back in a rainy pattern for the next few days, but it's not cold. Today it's windy, but not nearly as windy as it was a few days ago, when a major storm went through.

Remember, France is about the size of Texas — 250,000 sq. mi. or so. That makes it five times as big as U.S. States like North Carolina, Illinois, and New York. It's not quite twice as big as California. By comparison, if you add up the areas of the states of NY, NJ, PA, MD, DE, VA, NC, and SC along the U.S. East Coast, it comes to 250,000 sq. mi. The shape is different, but that's how big France is in surface area. The combined states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois are similar in size. Sorry to be so nerdy.

Revenons en France. Big swirling low pressure centers keep moving in off the Atlantic Ocean. The center or "eye" of these storms passes well to the north, over Ireland, northern England, and Scotland, but bands of rain and wind extend far to the south and brush across France. Brittany, the western point of the country, often takes the brunt of such weather.

I added city names to this weather map so that you can get oriented. Paris is in the center-north part of France. You'll see the city of Tours 150 miles to the southwest, and Saint-Aignan is just 35 miles east of Tours.

As usual, you can click or tap on the images to see them at a larger size.

On the map above, you see that winds are at 80 kph over Brittany and Normandy. That's about 50 mph. Over the center of the country, including Paris and Tours (and Saint-Aignan), wind velocities are 70 kph, which is between 40 and 45 mph. With rain, that's not so pleasant.

To the right, you'll see this morning's low temperatures. Paris is at 6ºC, which is in the low 40s F. Tours is at 8ºC, which is closer to 50ºF. That's pretty warm for a low temperature in late December. Brittany is even warmer, because air is flowing in off the warm Gulf Stream ocean current. 12ºC is about 55ºF. Only in eastern France are temperatures approaching or going below the freezing point, which is 0ºC.

The weather isn't supposed to get much better in the afternoon today. Rain and strong gusty winds will continue to blow over the northwestern part of the country, especially over Brittany and Normandy. Toward Tours and the center of France, there will be less rain and slightly less violent winds, but we won't be doing much outside today — except walking the dog this morning and again late in the afternoon.

Temperatures will be falling from their morning lows out in Brittany. But pretty much over the whole country, temperatures will stay unseasonably mild. Notice the two 18s in the southwest, near the Pyrenees mountains. That's close to 65ºF. It'll be 15ºC, or 60ºF, in the southeast at Nice. That's nice for them.

Here in Saint-Aignan we'll have about the same high temperature as Paris, with 13ºC or the mid-50s F. That's pretty warm. The first winter we spent in Saint-Aignan, 11 years ago, we got snow at this time of year. It's hard to tell what to expect from year to year, because the weather is very variable.

The weather report in France is called la météo [lah-may-tay-OH]. We keep tabs on it very closely, because we are gardeners and dog walkers.

A thingamabob and a guineafowl

Do you have any idea what this little thing is? Have you ever seen one before? Have you ever used one? Can you imagine what purpose it serves?

I won't make you guess, really. Here's the answer. It's a doohickey that you use to "sew up" a chicken or other fowl so that the stuffing you put inside won't fall out. Even if you cook the volaille on the tourne-broche (rotisserie) in your little French oven. But I think we bought the gadget in the U.S. I can't really remember.

I stuffed the cavity of the bird with a kind of sausage meat dressing and then used the whatchamacallit to "sew" it up...

That's what we did yesterday. We had a 4¾ lb. chapon de pintade for our Christmas dinner. That's a "Guinea fowl" capon. I don't know you are familiar with Guinea fowl. I know my great-aunt in South Carolina used to raise them, back in the 1960s, but I don't think they are easy to come by in the U.S. And I'm not even sure if my S.C. relatives ate them. I think they kept them for the eggs.

...before putting the guineafowl on the broche ("spit") and roasting it in the oven.

Guinea hens or "guineafowl" are available year-round in French markets and supermarkets. At Christmastime, you can find capons everywhere — both chicken and Guinea fowl capons. They are especially fattened birds that people serve for holiday feasts.

Here it is with the whatsit still in place...

Guineafowl resemble partridges, Wikipedia says, but they have featherless heads. They make their nests on the ground. They are related to chickens and pheasants, and the French name for the bird is la pintade.

...and finally with it removed so we could start carving the bird.

Guineafowl meat is darker and more flavorful than chicken meat, and I like it better than turkey myself. Guineafowl are African. There are both wild and domesticated species. Try one. You'll like it.

Christmas Eve activities on a stormy day

This morning I'm seeing stars, and I mean that in the very best way — out the bedroom window, in the sky. One is so bright it might be the legendary star of Bethlehem. I think it's probably Jupiter. Yesterday, after the winds came the rains. The high winds lasted all day. At nightfall the skies opened up and dropped buckets of rain on us all night. I'll be interested to see how much water is in the rain gauge tout à l'heure.

We stayed busy all day yesterday, almost racing to get things done in the kitchen in case our electricity went out because of the strong gusty winds. The first thing I needed to do was wash and trim about 4 pounds (a peck, I think that is) of collard greens. I had picked them out in the garden the day before. I wanted to cut out the stems and just save the nicest leaves to have as a side dish with our Christmas Guinea fowl capon and oven-roasted buttercup squash. It took me less than an hour to pick through the collard greens one leaf at a time and trim them up. Out in the garden, I left the plants in the ground with their newest and smallest leaves still growing, hoping that they will give us new crops January, February, and March.

A 12-liter pot of fresh collard greens, grown in our garden outside Saint-Aignan

At the market on Saturday, I bought a chunk of smoked pork belly, known here as poitrine de porc fumée (smoked breast of pork), from the charcuterie stand where I used to buy things a lot more often than I do nowadays. I don't know why I've sort of stopped going to the open-air market in Saint-Aignan. Maybe it was because nearly every Saturday over the first six months of 2013 was rainy. And then I was in Paris for a few Saturdays in July, just before the vegetable garden harvest kicked in. Anyway I'm glad I got the poitrine fumée this time. You can see how I cooked it with the collard greens. I also had a good chat with the woman I have in past posts called Mme Doudouille.

That's a chunk of smoked bacon about an inch thick. Most of these greens will end up in containers in the freezer.

The next thing to do was to start the process of making the stuffing for the chapon de pintade. I had got a piece of veal (200 grams or about 7 oz.) from the butcher and also used a packet of supermarket lardons fumés of the same weight. Walt ground all that meat using the grinder attachment on our KitchenAid stand mixer. I wanted to lightly cook the meat with some flavor ingredients — a chopped shallot, a pinch or two of dried thyme and ground cloves, a smashed garlic clove, some hot red pepper flakes and black pepper — and let it cool and blend overnight, before it was time to stuff it into the bird.

Pork, veal, and shallots for stuffing

Today, I'll add some chopped, cooked chicken livers to the mix, and a couple of raw, beaten eggs as a binder. Oh, and a handful of shelled and coarsely chopped pistachios (pistaches californiennes, it says on the label). Then I'll stuff the Guinea fowl before putting it on the rotisserie in the oven to cook for a couple of hours.

I'm trying to make a meat stuffing like I remember eating with poultry in restaurants in Paris back in the 1970s and 80s.

Finally, it was time to get the Christmas Eve fondue savoyarde — a cheese fondue — ready. That meant weighing out 200 grams each of Gruyère, Comté, and Emmenthal cheeses, and then grating them. We didn't take any pictures of the fondue as we made and ate it, but I can tell you it was good. Maybe not as good as last year's, when we used a cheese called Beaumont de Savoie instead of Emmenthal.

We couldn't find any Beaumont de Savoie this year. I think it melts more smoothly and liquidly than Emmenthal, and has at least as good a taste. Maybe next year. This morning I have to get to work on finishing the stuffing and getting the bird into the oven. Walt roasted the buttercup squash yesterday, so lunch is almost ready. Oh, he also made a beautiful blueberry tart, using blueberries that he picked at a farm over in the Sologne last July and froze for use in cakes and pies all winter.

Merry Christmas and Bon Appétit...

Tempête !

I don't think the wind is as bad as the weather reports said it was going to be. They told us to expect, and to prepare for, virtually hurricane-force winds of 120 kph (72 mph). I think Brittany got the worst of the storm, along with the British Isles. Here's the post I wrote yesterday, thinking that we might be in the dark this morning:

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It's not often that I write my blog post the day before I put it up on the 'net. My normal routine is to get up between 5:30 and 6:30 a.m., go down and make some coffee or tea, and then sit down in front of my laptop computer and put something together.

 The view out the back window at about 6 p.m. Monday night

Today's post is pre-programmed. We are supposed to have a heavy-duty windstorm starting around midnight tonight (it's Monday afternoon as I type) and continuing all through the day tomorrow, which is Christmas Eve. Even though the electric lines coming up out of the river valley to our hamlet have now been undergrounded, and we stand less of a chance of having a local power failure because of trees falling on the lines, we could well be victim to a much wider-scale outage when this storm comes through.

This the 4.85 lb. Guinea fowl capon that we are hoping to be able to cook Weds. a.m., Christmas Day 2013.
It's fermier et élevé en plein air, which means farm-raised and free-range.

So here's a post for Christmas Eve, written on Christmas Eve eve. We have a plan in place that will allow us to enjoy our traditional December 24 cheese fondue, even without electricity. Maybe the current will come back on — if it does indeed go out tonight or tomorrow morning — by Christmas Day so that we will be able to roast our Guinea fowl capon and cook our squash and collard greens.

I went out to the garden this morning picked a big mess of collard greens to cook for our Christmas Dinner.

If you are reading this, it means we are in the dark today, Tuesday, Christmas Eve, 2013. The wood- burning stove will keep us warm. Winds are supposed to gust up to 60 mph. Earlier, they were predicting 70 to 75 mph winds, but they've scaled that back. Our house is especially vulnerable to high winds. Wish us luck.

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The wind is really whooshing through the trees outside, but TV, Internet, and electricity are still on here. I imagine we are having gusts at 60 mph (100 kph) right now, and the vents tempétueux are supposed to continue until this afternoon, with heavy rain. I think I'll get to work sorting through my greens and preparing them for cooking this morning.

Fish tacos with salsa and avocado

In December, between the 21st (Walt's birthday feast) and the 25th (the Christmas feast), we really need something spicy and tasty to eat that doesn't seem too heavy. Yesterday, that turned out to be fish tacos. I'm not even sure where the idea came from. Walt might have mentioned it first.

We had fish left over from the soupe de poissons we made a couple of weeks ago. It was frozen Alaska pollock, a fairly neutral white fish, in fillets. I found a recipe on Simply Recipes, Elise Bauer's site. She's in Sacramento, California, and the recipes she posts are unfailingly good. Here also is a French recipe that's similar.

These were soft tacos, the kind we used to enjoy in San Francisco way back when. They're full of fresh ingredients, including a tomato-pepper-garlic salsa that has some sting to it. Ours was a pico de gallo that I made last fall, when we were overwhelmed by a bumper crop of tomatoes from the garden. I had put a few containers of salsa in the freezer.

I thawed some fish fillets, dried them off, and sprinkled them with hot pepper, chili powder, and ground cumin. Then I sauteed them briefly in olive oil in a big skillet. I also sliced an onion and sauteed that briefly in olive oil, with no salt so that the onion would retain some crunch and just brown a little bit. Here's the cooked fish:

I cut up some roasted red bell peppers (poivrons rouges) out of a jar, and a fresh avocado. To keep the avocado from going brown, I squeezed a fresh lime over it. Lime juice is a flavor you want with Mexican-style food. The other ingredients in the tacos were iceberg lettuce and fresh cilantro a.k.a. coriander. We each made up our own tacos at the table.

We used small corn tortillas (Mexican tortillas, not the Spanish tortilla, which is a potato omelet). We can buy corn or wheat tortillas at the supermarket nowadays  — the supermarket chains have their own brands and they're good. We heated the tortillas up very quickly in the same non-stick skillet that I had cooked the onion and fish in. As for salsa, you can of course buy it in jars at the supermarket, or you can make your own with either fresh or canned tomatoes.

The pico de gallo salsa is very easy to make, by the way, because you just have to roughly chop some fresh or tinned tomatoes, hot chili peppers, onion, garlic, and herbs, put everything in a pitcher or other tall container, and blitz it all quickly with a stick blender. If it's too liquid, pour it into a fine-mesh strainer and let the liquid drain off. Don't throw it away though. Freeze it for later use in soups or sauces.

Along with the lime juice, I think a little dash of hot-pepper vinegar adds good punch to the taco. We put a lot of jalapeño, cayenne, and banana peppers up in vinegar in years when we have a good crop, and we save the vinegar for uses like this after the peppers are gone. The hot pepper vinegar is good with beans like black-eyed peas and with greens like collards.