Vents violents

The wind started blowing at about two this morning. Or at least that's when it woke me up. After that, there was no going back to sleep. I just lay there listening, and watching the huge trees on the other side of the window glass sway and swing when the gusts were strong. It didn't rain much, and the moon was shining brightly, its light making the swaying, bending limbs of the big trees that much more visible.

Looking at this roof, you can see how wet it has been this winter.

There were a few lulls, and each time the wind calmed down I thought the storm might be over. "Think again," answered Nature. Strong gusts continued until five o'clock, when I must have fallen asleep again. The wind is still blowing now at 7:20, but it doesn't seem to be making as much noise now. Maybe that's because I'm downstairs and I have the TV on. At least we didn't lose power.

Not every day is wet, though most are. Here's where a utility pole used to stand. I assume this break in the woods will now fill in with new trees over the next few years.

It's still dark and Walt closed all the shutters late yesterday afternoon, so I haven't been able to look outside to assess the situation. I wouldn't be surprised if we lost some limbs. That big old apple tree out back is pretty fragile. In an hour or so, I'll take Callie out for a her walk in the vineyard. At least out there, there aren't any trees or limbs that can fall on us, as long as we stay on the gravel road.

Looking out across the river valley (same viewpoint as above)

The storm was supposed to be worse to the east and north of us, especially in Brittany, Normandy, and even in the Paris area. I'm waiting for reports on the 7:30 news. Brittany, especially, has been really hammered over the past few weeks, with one storm after another bringing damaging winds, extensive flooding, and huge "submersive" waves along the coast. Today's storm will have disturbed southern England too.

The village's annual report

Every January, the village authorities publish a kind of annual report to inform residents of progress made on different projects over the past year and plans for the coming year.

This year's report features two of my photos. One is on the cover (left). Both of them have appeared on this blog in past months.

This isn't the first time village officials have asked us for permission to use our photos. They had some of Walt's printed and framed a few years ago to put up in a new vacation rental apartment they were decorating in the village château.

The other photo of mine appears on the report's contents page along with the mayor's greetings. As you might know, the mayor is one of our neighbors.

Some other photos of mine and Walt's are included in a smaller format on a kind of gallery page at the end of the report.

It's an honor and a pleasure to be recognized this way and to be of service to village projects, of course. We participate strictly on a volunteer basis.

Pataugeant dans la gadoue

« Gadoue » is a good word, and it certainly describes what we have to deal with right now. In everyday language, la gadoue [lah gah-DOO] means la boue [lah BOO] — mud. Or muck. Instead of a real winter, all 2014 has brought us is a very long mud season.

Looking up the hill past our garden shed and toward two of our neighbors' houses

The big excavating machine they brought in to remove the utility pole that stood on the northwest corner of our yard didn't help matters. Its wide metal treads mashed down the green grass and pressed all the water and mud up to the surface, producing — yes — even worse gadoue, and right outside our back gate.

Callie and I like to walk down this hill on the tractor path in the afternoon. It's a slippery slope right now.

It's not only squishy but it's very slippery. I have to step very carefully when I walk down the hill toward the bottom of the vineyard. The soil is mostly clay, and you know what that's like when it's wet. We're expecting more rain today and tomorrow — another storm is moving in off the Atlantic Ocean this morning.

The pole in the distance is the last one standing. It's in the middle of a plot of vines so not easy to take down.

Imagine, however, how nice this mud slick will be in a few months when grass grows over it all. Especially now that the utility pole is gone. Where Callie is standing is about the limit of our property, even though that spot is outside our fence. I think I might plant a tree back here this spring — or next fall, if this rainy weather continues into April.

The overflow from the pond out back flows down this so-called "road" all winter.

Oh, the verb « patauger » [pah-toh-ZHAY] means "to wade" — wading in mud is what it feels like we are doing when we go out the back gate. The whole vineyard is mud and muck, but no other place is as bad as this right now. It's time for me to go out there....

Old and new

In the years before we came to live here, the exterior walls of the house we bought was covered in vines. As far as I know, the plant was vigne vierge, a.k.a. Virginia creeper. That's what Josette, the woman who owned the place back then, told us. I asked her why it had been removed, and she said it had all just died at some point.

The picture above is an aerial shot that was taken at some point early on — maybe in the 1970s. In 2004 or '05, Josette invited us for lunch at her apartment in Saint-Aignan, and she had the framed photo on the wall in her den. A few months later, she offered it to us as a gift. I thought it was a nice gesture.

Here are another couple of before and after photos. The weather was obviously different, and the light, but the angle of the photos, taken from a back window in our house, is about the same.

Today I have to go into town to consult with a French Social Security counselor about my small French retirement pension, which I'll be ready to take soon. I turn 65 in March. I didn't even know I qualified for a French pension until we moved here and I got a letter informing me of the benefits. I worked as a teacher in Paris, Rouen, and Metz back in the 1970s and early 1980s but had no idea I was paying into the retirement system.

The back corner

I'm still getting used to the views without those ugly utility poles out back. I just spent an hour looking through my blog to see if I could find any photos that could serve as good before and after shots. Here's one pair:

A view of the back corner now, sans concrete utility pole

We've made a lot of changes in that back corner. Before we came to live here, there was a compost pile back there. We slowly turned that spot into a garden plot, and I've grown potatoes, collard greens, kale, mustard greens, and Swiss chard there over the years. I finally planted a plum tree back there, and last year we had the laurel hedge and the row of hazelnut trees cut way down.

The view looking toward the back corner in 2007, avec le poteau électrique

Now I need to figure out what to do out there next. I think I might plant a tree where the old utility pole was, outside our fence. That plot of land belongs to us. There's a letter to that effect in the file of papers we got when we when we bought the house — the previous owner had given the electric company permission to put the pole there.

Sunset over the Renaudière vineyard on February 2, 2014

Gratuitously, here's a shot of yesterday's sunset, taken from a loft window. We are finally getting some clear weather. The sun is getting ready to come up in a clear sky this morning.

Crêpe Day

Today is crêpe day in France. It's a holiday called La Chandeleur (Candlemas in English) and millions of French people will make and eat thin little pancakes today. They're easy to make and even easier to eat. The photos in this post show different kinds and styles of crêpes that we've made over the past 10 years.

Walt and I always make crêpes on February 2. Today we are going to go whole hog and make two different kinds, savory and sweet. Both kinds are unleavened — no baking powder or soda goes into the batter.

"Authentic" savory crêpes are made with buckwheat flour, called sarrasin or blé noir. These crêpes are also called galettes bretonnes, since they are a specialty of Brittany. They are cooked in a big skillet and then filled with or wrapped up around slices of ham with cheese and an egg. They can be folded or rolled up and then reheated in the oven until the cheese melts and the egg cooks.

Sweet crêpes are made with white wheat flour (recipe in this old post). Some people put a little sugar in the batter, and some recipes call for a glug of rum. Otherwise the batter is just flour, egg, water, milk, and a dribble of vegetable oil. The richness of the crêpe comes from the filling. Since there's no sugar in the batter, the crêpe can be made either as a savory (salty) main dish or as a sweet (dessert) treat. We've also been known to make dessert crêpes out of galettes bretonnes...

Simple sweet crêpes can be buttered and sprinkled with sugar, with a few drops of lemon juice added. Or they can be filled with jam or jelly. Then they get rolled up or folded and reheated in the pan they were cooked in.

The word crêpe derives from the same root word that gave us "crisp" — the edges of the thin little pancake should be a little lacy and crispy. Tradition has it that you should hold a gold coin in one hand as you toss the crêpe to turn it over in the frying pan. That brings you good luck and prosperity for the rest of the year. Trouble is, I don't know where to get a gold coin.

More hamlet house pictures

I recently published pictures of some of the houses in our hamlet. Here are some more pictures, but of just one house: ours. We've lived here for more than ten years now. That's longer than we've ever lived anywhere else, except for my growing-up years, when I lived with my family in the same house for about 17 years. In his entire life, Walt has never lived in any other house longer than in this one. He and I have been living together for more than 30 years now.

For nearly 20 years, back when we lived in California, we talked about moving to France one day. Then in 2002, a whole set of circumstances brought us here. I had quit my job because I couldn't stand the heavy-handed management I worked under, and I just couldn't take the long commute on crowded freeways any more. I thought I might not survive the stress. Walt was getting a little bored with his job and wanted "a new adventure." So we decided to come look at houses in the Loire Valley, where we had spent a few nice vacations. We both already spoke French fairly fluently.

We contacted a real estate agent in Amboise by e-mail. In early December 2002, he showed us about 15 houses around the area (Amboise, Montrichard, Saint-Aignan) in four days. On the second day of looking at properties for sale, we saw this one. It wasn't perfect, and on paper we wouldn't even have been attracted to it. The real estate agent insisted we give it a look. The house sounded kind of small. However, when we saw it, with its big windows, its front terrace, and its location at the end of a road out in the vineyards, we knew it was the one. We hadn't yet made the decision to leave California and relocate to France, but we figured we might be able to buy a house here by refinancing our place in San Francisco and come live here a few years later.

After returning to the U.S., having signed a promise to buy this house in France, we decided to see if we could sell our San Francisco house for a good price and just pack up and move. The idea of living in the quiet French countryside was just too tempting, compared to the traffic, noise, politics, chilly summers, and earthquakes of San Francisco. To make a long story short, our California house sold quickly, and for a very good price. By March 2003 that house was no longer ours, and in April we closed the deal on this house near Saint-Aignan. We arrived here — lock, stock, and barrel, with our 11-year-old dog in tow — in June 2003, and here we still are...

Improved views, and fewer power outages

Having wide, unobstructed views — like having big windows to let daylight in — are pleasant perks at this time of year, when gray skies and rain are our lot in life. As you know, our hamlet's overhead electrical feeder wires were replaced by an undergound cable a couple of months ago.

If you can see the patch of black dirt in the center foreground of this photo taken from one of our our back windows, you know where one of the the ugly concrete utility poles stood.

The old wires were strung up on tall concrete poles, two of which were located on the western edge of our property, marring our views of the Renaudière vineyard. Now the poles have been knocked down — sawed off, really. They are history.

One man sat at the controls of a pelle mécanique with the business end pushing the pole in the direction where they wanted it to fall, while the other man sawed the pole off close ground level.

In this deal, we made out like bandits. We didn't have to pay a single centime. We got rid of two unsightly poles. And we don't have to worry so much any more about power cuts caused by falling trees pulling down overhead wire or lightning striking transformers hanging on poles during storms. Both of those things happened in 2010 and 2011, leaving us without electricity for days at a time.

Mexican “lasagne”

This time of year, when most of the color in my environment is found inside the house — especially in the kitchen — or on TV and computer screens, I entertain myself by taking pictures of the food we make and eat every day. I really believe in turning one of life's necessities — the daily meal — into a hobby and a pleasure. Especially if you don't otherwise work for a living.

Yesterday, we were going to make Tex-Mex style burritos for lunch. I had some cooked beans in the freezer, and some cooked rice in the refrigerator. I had pulled pork, which is a more than a little like Mexican carnitas, in the downstairs freezer. (You could use cooked and spiced ground beef.) It was easy to make some salsa with a can of tomatoes, some chopped onion, and some hot sauce (pureed cayenne peppers, also in the freezer). And to add in a little can of corn.

We had a package of what are called « wraps » — pronounced [VRAHP] in French — on hand. They are large-size Mexican tortillas that we get from the supermarket, and they're good. Trouble is, they're not quite large enough to make a decent burrito, like the ones we used to get from restaurants in San Francisco. So I came up with the idea of making a layered casserole or gratin with the ingredients we had ready to go. Layered like a pan of Italian lasagne.

A layer of rice and cheese, a layer of beans (black-eyed peas in this case) and meat, and then another layer of more rice and more meat, and finally a cheese-covered tortilla on top, and you've got it. You just have to be careful that everything is wet enough but not too wet, so that the tortillas will cook but not get too soggy. And that you have salsa and spices like chili powder, cumin, and Mexican oregano in the right amounts throughout. We'll get two good meals out of our "lasagne" and enjoy them both.

A view from the kitchen window

Maybe it's the loneliness as much as the wet weather that's making this seem like a very long winter. Out of the kitchen window, we can see (or almost see) five houses strung out along the road that goes down toward the village. Doesn't it look calm and quiet? That's because it is.

Sunrise out the kitchen window

All these houses, including the one directly in our line of sight, are empty at this time of year. The owner of one house died last summer. Another house has owners who live most of the time in Blois, and still another has owners who spend most of the winter in their apartment in the Paris suburbs.. A fourth house is empty and for sale. And the fifth is also owned by people who live in the Paris area.

Sepia-toned views seem more realistic than color photos this winter.

The house we see out our back windows is also empty in wintertime. In the photo above, the femme de ménage (the cleaning woman) has parked her car in the yard across the street. She comes in to clean two mornings a week, even though the house is empty and has been since September. I can't imagine what she does over there for eight hours a week.

J'ai trouvé des gaudes !

I found bags of French corn meal. (It doesn't take much to get me excited.)

A few years ago when I published a blog topic about cornpone (!), a recipe for which I got from my Illinois friend Harriett, my Parisian-American friend CHM wrote a comment and told me about a French version of corn meal called « gaudes », pronounced [GOAD] as one syllable.

Normally, corn meal in French is « semoule de maïs » (corn semolina) or just « farine de maïs » (corn flour) — « maïs » [mah-EESS] being what we Americans call "corn" and others might call call "maize". Coming from the U.S. South, I'm more than familiar with — I grew up on and continue to cook and enjoy — things like grits, cornbread, cornpone, and hushpuppies.

In Italy they call corn meal polenta and in eastern France, in the area known as Franche-Comté, people call it gaudes. It's made into a bouillie — in other words, the corn meal is boiled in water — and served with butter and milk. In English, some people call that "gruel" — not very appetizing — or "porridge". I call it "grits". The word gaudes apparently derives from a German term.

In his book The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen, the Franco-American chef and TV host Jacques Pépin, who comes from eastern France, describes a meal served by a woman on a farm when he was a child. He and his family were getting ready to relocate themselves from their home in town and go live on the woman's farm for the summer:

...the farmer's wife heaped dinner on the table — literally. She slopped spoonfuls of a yellowish brown porridge, called gaudes, not onto plates or bowls, as we ate it at home, but directly into hollows carved into the wooden tabletop. We gathered around as the farmer's wife poured cool, raw milk over our gaudes. With no further ceremony, we all sat down and dug in. The gaudes were thick and smooth and had the salty, slightly nutty taste of the roasted corn flour from which they had been made.

The directions on the package explain how to make the gaudes into "porridge" or grits. It also says that you can "flour" fish with gaudes before frying it for better flavor and crispness, and that you can use gaudes to replace part of the flour in cake batters for good flavor. I already do all that.

I was out shopping yesterday when I found the bag of gaudes. I bought two bags (2 kilos). I keep corn meal in the freezer, and I try always to have a supply. I can buy it at certain shops and supermarkets in the Loire Valley, but not everywhere.

Corn meal was on my list yesterday because I was running low. I'm glad it was. This time, I was over in the town of Selles-sur-Cher, ten miles upriver from Saint-Aignan, where there's a Belgium-based chain supermarket called Colruyt that has a strong presence in the Franche-Comté region. I haven't opened a bag of gaudes yet, but maybe today....

Une vie en noir et blanc

We might see a little bit of sun today, but that will be the exception to the rule. I've decided to post some black-and-whites of our village in honor of the season. Actually, these photos are slightly sepia-toned.

We are spending our 11th winter here in this little hamlet outside Saint-Aignan. Last winter was long and dreary, and this one seems to be competing to see if it can outdo the last. The newer looking house in the photo above is ours. It was built in the 1960s by people who planned to retire here from Paris.

The house in the photo above is distinctly different in style from the others in the hamlet. It's built of gray stone, with battleship gray metal shutters. The people who own it (I assume) come in fairly regularly but for short stays. Last summer they did a good amount of work in the yard and around the house.

The house above has bright red shutters now. Its owner also comes to the hamlet fairly frequently for short stays — except that she spent a whole month here last summer. She's been having a lot of work done on the house, including putting in a new kitchen and a new bathroom.

The vineyards come right up to our property lines. The tall tree in this photo is in our yard, and it's the tallest tree in the area. The smaller tree on the left is an old apple tree that's being taken over by mistletoe. There's Callie running down a row of vines. The ground is absolutely slushy right now — not with ice and snow, but with splashy mud and slippery muck.

“Boiled” lamb

Yesterday I did something very strange in the kitchen. I boiled — simmered, really, or poached — a boneless piece of leg of lamb. Yes, instead of roasting the lamb in the oven, I put it in a pot of boiling broth and let it cook for 40 minutes. It's not the same thing as boiled meat, though.

In France, this kind of cooking is called « à l'anglaise » — English-style. You can cook potatoes or green beans à l'anglaise, for example — boiled in a larg quantity of liquid. Since I consider myself to be English, at least ethnically, I figured it would be an appropriate way for me to cook a roast of lamb. In France, there's a similar method of cooking beef in simmering liquid that's called « bœuf à la ficelle » — "beef on a string." So why not make « agneau à la ficelle »?

 A boneless, tied lamb roast from the leg

I didn't use a whole leg of lamb, but the shank end of a leg (or gigot) that had been deboned and tied up as a roast. I read in cookbooks and on the Internet that a gigot à l'anglaise should simmer for 12 to 18 minutes per pound in broth or water. The piece of lamb I had weighed two pounds, so I figured about 30 minutes of simmering would do the job. It turned out that 40 minutes was better.

The poaching liquid was a light beef and vegetable broth in which I had cooked turnips, rutabagas, carrots, and onions.

You want the meat to be between rare (saignant) and medium (rosé), not well-done, when you slice it. That's the same with "beef on a string" or, in this case, "lamb on a string." Why is it called that? Because in theory you tie a loop of string around the meat and tie the other end to the pot handle such that the meat is suspended in the simmering liquid and never touches the burning hot bottom of the pot.

It looked like... well... boiled meat. No surprise there.

You can accomplish the same thing by putting a wire rack in of the pot that will keep the meat a centimeter or two from the bottom. That's what I did. Would I make gigot à l'anglaise again? Maybe. It was good, but certainly no better than an oven-roasted lamb roast. We ate the lamb, which was done rosé or medium, with some ratatouille (zucchini, eggplant, tomato) and steamed rice.

But it was good to eat, cooked just to medium or rosé, with the ratatouille liquid as a kind of sauce.

I'm sure this method of cooking a beef or lamb roast originated in the days before people had gas or electric ovens in their kitchen. People in France like to tell about their ancestors taking a roast or a casserole to the baker's shop in the afternoon, when the bread was all cooked, and having their dish cooked in the baker's oven, which stayed hot for hours. In villages, there was often a communal oven (called un four banal) where village residents could take their roasts, casseroles, or pies and cook them. I know all this existed, but I wonder how many people actually did their baking or roasting away from home like that.

Notaires et testaments

Yesterday Walt and I went to town for an appointment with the local notaire. In France, a notaire is a contracts lawyer who is licensed and appointed by the government to deal with "legal instruments" like last wills and testaments, deeds, and marriage contracts.

This Wikipedia article explains how the the notarial function in France and other Roman-law countries differs from the function of a "notary public" in common-law countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, including this introduction:

Civil-law notaries, or Latin notaries, are lawyers of noncontentious private civil law who draft, take, and record legal instruments for private parties, provide legal advice and give attendance in person, and are vested as public officers with the authentication power of the State.

Unlike notaries public, their common-law counterparts, civil-law notaries are highly trained, licensed practitioners providing a full range of regulated legal services, and whereas they hold a public office, they nonetheless operate usually—but not always—in private practice and are paid on a fee-for-service basis.

[Civil-law notaries] often receive the same education as attorneys at civil law but without qualifications in advocacy, procedural law, or the law of evidence, somewhat comparable to solicitor training in certain common-law countries.

The purpose of Walt's and my visit to the notarial office was to find out how to go about drafting a legally binding testament in France. It turns out to be very simple in our case, because each of us wants to designate the other as his sole heir (or légataire universel).

It turns out to be a very simple process. We each have to write out our last will and testament by hand following this template or modèle that the notaire gave us:

        Je soussigné, Monsieur [prenoms NOM, profession] marié à [lieu] le [date], demeurant à [adresse], né à [lieu de naissance] le [date]
        Révoque toutes dispositions testamentaires antérieures,
        Et institue pour mon légataire universel Monsieur [prenoms NOM], demeurant à [adresse], né à [lieu de naissance] le [date].
        En cas de prédécès de ce dernier, l'ensemble de mes biens reviendra à [prenoms NOM], demeurant à [adresse], né à [lieu de naissance] le [date].

        Fait à [ville]
        Le [date]
        [signature]

After we have written out and signed the two testaments, we just put them in envelopes and include a check for 30 euros with each. That fee covers the registration of the wills in a French national registry and their storage in the notarial office's safe until they are needed. (I thought it was going to cost more than that.)

I had also thought that what we would need to do was sign a donation au dernier vivant (a.k.a. une donation entre époux) but the notary assured us that the testament was the best solution in our case, because neither of us has any children.

One down and two to go

Yesterday afternoon I went downstairs and looked out the back window. To my surprise, I saw that the first local utility pole to go was already history. I hadn't even heard the crew working out there. Walt was watching tennis on TV, and he hadn't heard anything either. The undergrounding saga had entered into a new phase.

Good riddance — bon débarras ! That's what we say. The big old concrete pole was just plain unsightly. There's another one on the other corner of our back yard that we'll be glad to see gone, too, and a third one in the middle of a parcel of red-wine grapevines out on the north side..

It's surprising that we didn't hear any sawing or hammering. The pole-removal crew obviously left a stump. Maybe they'll come back and dig it out one day. Until they do — and whether they do or not — we can live with it.

Unsettling news, but forewarned is forearmed *

L'époque est difficile. Les temps sont durs. Ça va mal pour beaucoup de gens. That's the tone of the news this morning. Unemployment is high, and people are feeling the pinch. As a result, crime is on the rise. In Paris and other big cities, there are more and more purse-snatchings on the streets and in the metro, and even armed robberies and holdups. Out here in the countryside, the biggest problem is burglaries. Tout le monde en parle. It's the lead story on this morning's Télématin news segments.

So many houses in the French countryside and even apartments in Paris are occupied for only a few weeks or months out of the year that they become easy targets for burglars when nobody's home. There are a lot of hamlets and villages where half or more of the houses are only occupied for short periods of time — they are what are called résidences secondaires. We're happy that ours is occupied 99.9% of the time, and we try to keep an eye on our absent neighbors' houses. We know quite a few people who have houses around the region that they use only for infrequent short stays.

The news says burglaries — cambriolages — of French vacation apartments and houses are up 10% in the cities and 17% out in the country. Just the other day, when I went to get my hair cut by the new barber in the village, she told me that somebody had tried to break into the bar-tabac across the street from her shop. The burglar or burglars didn't manage to get in, but they irreparably damaged the shop's back door, which needed to be replaced at a cost of more than a thousand euros. Amélie the barber also said her boyfriend's car had recently been stolen, and told me stories about recent robberies in Saint-Aignan.

When we moved into this house, there was a primitive sort of alarm system. There were also signs in some of the ground-level windows warning potential burglars that the house was piégée — booby-trapped (2002 photo above). One day early on we opened the wrong door without thinking, and an old siren up in the attic started blaring. It wasloud enough to be heard a mile away. Since we planned to live here full time, we permanently disabled the alarm and eventually threw the siren out. In other words, the current crime wave is not exactly a new problem.

* "Forewarned is forearmed" = « Un homme averti en vaut deux. »

Mon mercredi muet

Le Petit Déjeuner du chat

What does your cat eat for breakfast? Do you just call it cat food? We call it that, but the company that packages and sells it here in France has more specific ideas. And isn't it nice of them to put a picture of Bertie the Black Cat right on the package?

This morning, for example, Berti enjoyed lapin — that's rabbit — for breakfast. He obviously really likes it. Whenever the package of rabbit comes out of the box of 24 packets, I remember our neighbor telling us about how he saw Bert prancing across his yard one day with a little rabbit in his jaws. He'd been hunting. Bert opened his mouth to meow bonjour at the neighbor and the rabbit got away.

Another flavor of cat food that Bert gobbles down on a regular basis is poulet haricots. That's chicken with green beans. There are actually recognizable little bits of green bean mixed in with the reconstituted chicken, all in an appetizing sauce. Other flavors are volaille carottes — turkey (or fowl, anyway) with bits of carrot — or truite saumon — trout and salmon. Such is the diet of a domesticated and pampered French cat.

Cheesy bacon-olive loaf

It's been a while since I've made or blogged about savory cakes (breads, really), which people in France like to serve at cocktail time, or l'heure de l'apéritif. That's the glass of wine or distilled spirits that people enjoy before dinner to stimulate their appetite.

Often the apéritif and accompanying foods can stand in for a full dinner when you want to do something informal and convivial. Here are a couple of examples: one with chicken and dried tomatoes, and another with ham and olives. A slightly more elaborate cake of the same kind is the « pounti » from the Auvergne region, made with prunes and Swiss chard.

This example is what's called a "quick bread" leavened not with baker's yeast but baking soda (bicarbonate de soude) or baking powder (levure chimique). It's simple to make and the cake or bread just rises in the oven rather than in a bowl for an hour or two before baking. You can add whatever flavor ingredients you want — in this case, I used half a cup each of cooked bacon, diced cheese, sliced pitted olives (green, black, or both), and diced roasted red pepper, along with black pepper and a pinch of crushed red pepper.

Here's a recipe for the bread itself that I posted last June. You need three cups of flour, a tablespoon of baking soda or powder, and a teaspoon of salt. Mix those together, adding all the other dry ingredients so that they get coated with flour. That will keep them from falling to the bottom of the bread as it bakes. By the way, chunks of cooked chicken breast or ham could replace the bacon.

In a separate bowl, mix together one egg, a cup of plain yogurt, and half a cup each of milk and sour cream (or crème fraîche). Add three tablespoons of olive oil. Then fold the liquid ingredients into the flour mixture. Don't over-mix it — the dough, which will be very thick, should just barely hold together. Spread and press it into a couple of oiled and floured loaf pans or a big bundt pan and bake it for 45 to 50 minutes in a medium oven (180ºC / 350ºF).