Life in mid-March

Cold mornings, warm afternoons. That's the pattern. We're getting work done in the yard and garden. We'll definitely be doing a lot more grilling — making lunch on the terrace. I'm headed to SuperU to buy some lamb this morning.

The photo above is one I took yesterday morning, looking west. It was still foggy. By afternoon the sun was shining and I spent some time sitting outside listening to the radio. You'll just have to imagine the scene with me in it.

Callie is ecstatic about being able to spend a good part of the day out in the yard again. We're happy about it too. The more she stays outside, the less dog hair we have in the house, especially now that she's starting to shed her thick winter coat.

Springtime scenes from our walks in the vineyard, like this one, only make us realize that soon we won't need to turn the heat on during the day. We'll get the garden going. Walt planted some seeds in little pots yesterday to get seedlings going. Tomatoes, eggplant... summer crops for our 12th summer in Saint-Aignan.

Above, I focused the camera on a water hole out in the vineyard, along the gravel road. The surface of the water was reflecting back the blue sky and the tangle of branches that nearly hide the trou d'eau from view.

Harvesting and cooking the kale

I noticed a couple of days ago that my kale plants were starting to bolt — à monter en graine. They were getting ready to send up flower stalks, and would soon go to seed. It was time to pull them out of the ground. The collard greens planted out there show no signs of bolting yet, so I weeded all around those plants and left them to grow a little more.

Kale on the stem

I got a good crop. I pulled the plants out, roots and all. Then I cut off the root end and washed the leaves well in the downstairs shower. I brought them up to the kitchen and cut each leaf off the stems, and I washed the leaves again.

The leaves cut and thoroughly washed

In all they got three washings. This is curly kale, and a lot of sand can get lodged in the wrinkles of the leaves. In fact, though, these leaves were pretty clean. I guess we've had enough hard rain over the past few months to keep the leaves pretty clean.

Kale cooking in the pot with smoked pork lardons, chicken broth, and white wine

I cooked all the leaves, after throwing out the blemished ones. I seasoned the greens with smoked pork lardons, chicken broth, and white wine, along with hot red pepper flakes, black pepper, and salt. I ended up with more than five pounds of cooked kale greens and "pot liquor." It's all in the freezer for now.

Jasmin d'hiver

Last summer when I went to Paris, CHM had taken some cuttings from a winter jasmine plant that grows in his little back garden. I brought the cuttings back to Saint-Aignan and planted them in a big pot.

When winter came, all the leaves on the stems dropped, and I was afraid they all were dead. I just left the pot out on the terrace for the winter (or what passed for winter this year, which was very wet but not very cold).

Now, however, the stems are sprouting a lot of new leaves, so the plant has survived. It didn't flower over the winter, which it would have normally been expected to do, but maybe we'll get flowers next year.

The winter jasmine, or jasmin d'hiver (Jasminum nudiflorum), usually produces yellow flowers between November and February, making it one of the few plants that flower in winter in this climate.

Spaghetti squash a new way

Yesterday was an incredible spring day, with temperatures as high as 60ºF / 15ºC. The ground, while still too wet to work, is rapidly drying out. The sunny mild weather is supposed to continue for another week.

A whole chicken, cut in half and marinated with onion, garlic, thyme, hot paprika, a little vinegar and some olive oil, and then grilled on the new gas grill

Yesterday, we grilled a chicken on our new gas grill. We decided to have a spaghetti squash with it, because we still have half a dozen of them stored downstairs. Over the past few months, we have made spaghetti squash a variety of ways: with tomato sauce, with pesto, with cream and onions, curried, or with just butter, salt, and pepper.

Spaghetti squash served with peas, carrots, onions, mushrooms, and honey

I find the spaghetti squash flesh to be fairly bland compared to butternut squash or pumpkin, for example. So I wondered how I might spice this one up. We didn't really want a curry flavor. I was looking in the fridge when I realized there was a bowl of leftover peas and carrots in there from a couple of days ago. Actually, it was peas, carrots, onions, and mushrooms cooked in chicken broth with a good amount of butter in it.

The view off the front terrace yesterday afternoon

So I cut the squash in half, roasted it for 30 to 40 minutes cut-side-down in a hot oven, and then scraped the flesh out of the shell and separated it into strands using a fork and a spoon. I reheated the peas in the microwave, and to add flavor to the whole dish, I mixed a big spoonful of honey into the hot liquid. Then I poured the peas and all, with the liquid, over the cooked squash. It turned out to be really good — an idea to remember for the future.

Winter or spring?

The weather is spring-like. The calendar says winter still. Yesterday Walt cooked hamburgers on the grill. It's the new grill, and getting it going took a couple of hours. But once it got started it was great. It must be spring.

Everything is moss-covered at the end of winter.

Other signs of spring: I washed the car. Boy, did it need it, after all the rain. Afternoon temperatures are in the mid-50s F, but it feels warmer than that in the sun. The car looks almost new.

These dried sedum flowers are left over from last fall.

Some signs of winter remain, as you see in these photos. There's lots of moss everywhere, because it's been so rainy. But it's feast or famine: now they say we won't get any rain for the next 10 days. Big high pressure systems have moved into this part of the world, preventing maritime rains from coming our way.

Different mosses growing on and around trees in the woods we walk through

That means the ground will get a chance to dry out and I'll be able to till up some garden plots. It's a little early to plant much, but we can grow some radishes and maybe Swiss chard. Our summer growing season doesn't start until May 15 in these latitudes.

Morning haze in the vineyard

Today, we'll be barbecuing again. I bought a nice chicken. Memories of winter: we still have several spaghetti and other squashes to be cooked. Poulet et courge will make a good lunch. But it's not quite warm enough for lunch out of the terrace yet.

An excellent Vouvray, and an elusive stove

Last Sunday afternoon, our friends Susan and Simon, two Australians who've been living in the area for about five years now, stopped by for a short visit. S & S operate a business called Loire Valley Time Travel, offering guided tours in a beautiful 1950s vintage Citroën traction avant. You can read about it and reserve a tour here.

S & S were kind enough to bring us a bottle of a very nice Vouvray wine when they came by. Vouvray is a wine village on the Loire River just east of Tours, a short hour's drive from Saint-Aignan. Vouvray wines are whites made exclusively with the Chenin Blanc grape, in a range of styles from dry to sweet and still to sparkling. You can read about Château Gaudrelle on the blog that S & S author, Days on the Claise.

This Vouvray was a 2007 vintage — that's pretty venerable by Loire Valley standards (or any other standard, I guess). Age is a good thing when it comes to wine, of course, provided it's the right kind of wine, like this one. The label says you can keep it for 8 to 10 years, and it will gain in complexity and refinement. I enjoyed the delicious Château Gaudrelle with my birthday feast on Wednesday. Thanks, S & S.

I served my birthday lunch in this 50+-year-old dish that my mother gave me years ago.

It was made in Louisville, Kentucky, and decorated with what could be a Loire Valley theme.

Meanwhile, Walt and I drove up to Blois yesterday to see if we could inspect a new kitchen stove that we are interested in. No luck. We had actually planned to go to Tours, which is a longer drive from Saint-Aignan, but then Walt saw on a web site that the store that sells the stove we wanted to see does not have a floor model we could look at. For that, you have to drive four hours over to Nantes, in the west, or four hours to Châlon-sur-Saône, in Burgundy, east of us. No way.

Here's the kitchen stove we are thinking about buying. It has all the features we want, including a rotisserie.

Other friends of ours have a stove that might be a good one for us. We hope to go inspect and measure that one next week chez eux and then make a decision. We may end up having to order a kitchen stove sight-unseen and hope for the best. For a $1000 purchase, that's a little nervous-making.

I ate my greens...

...and that's not all. It was a beautiful day. The sun streamed in through the French doors that lead out onto the terrace. It was my birthday.

After my walk with the dog, I stopped at the vegetable garden and cut myself a couple of dozen kale leaves for my lunch.

I washed the leaves and then sautéed them in olive oil with garlic and a pickled cayenne pepper that we grew last year. A touch of vinegar in the greens perks them up. They stay a little crunchy, but are tender. You feel virtuous eating kale.

It wasn't all we ate, of course. To go with the kale, Walt made me a batch of hushpuppies, which are deep-fried corn bread.

Oh, and there was also a pork roast — we get such good pork here in France. I'll skip talking about that right now. It was a memorable day for my 65th.

Five times, in “brooms”

Are you five times older than your car? Or more? I'm five times older than my Peugeot. The car turned 13 in December. I am turning 65 today. If my arithmetic is right, 5 x 13 = my age. Ouch.

The old stone shed in the vineyard is probably older than I am, but my Peugeot is much younger.

My age is higher than the high temperature we are expecting to have this afternoon — even on the Fahrenheit scale. The local weather is improving, however. We now expect a full seven days of sunshine (but not 65 of them).

I'm definitely older than this flower... but who knows the age of the bulb it grew from? Rhetorical question.

I'm older than my father was when he passed away. But I'm not yet older than my mother! I'm older than my sister, who would say that I'm three days older than dirt.

I like to think that these trees are older than I am, but then maybe not. They're taller, though.

I'm older than Callie, even if you count in dog years. I've got clothes older than a lot of people I know. I'm about six times older than the number of years I've spent living in Saint-Aignan.

I'm led to believe that a lot of the vines in the Renaudière vineyard are older than I am.

Anyway, even at 65 balais — that's what they say in French slang: "65 brooms"* — I'm not as old as most of my neighbors, or many of my friends. So there's still hope. Happy Birthday to me.

* One possible explanation for the brooms is that people used to get a new broom every year, because the old one was worn out and, as you know, a new broom sweeps clean. So if you had, or had had, 65 brooms in your life, that was your age.

A simple and good applesauce cake

I mentioned an applesauce cake a couple of days ago. It's one I made on Saturday, instead of working on putting the kitchen back together. Comfort food, in the best sense of the word. And good food for a Saturday afternoon.

Walt made a lot of applesauce from all the apples we got from the trees in our back yard last fall. It's in the freezer, and in fact he had taken a container of it out Saturday morning, with cake-making in mind. So I sneaked into the empty kitchen and made it while he was occupied with a tennis match on TV.

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 My view of the living room

from outside the French doors

that I close in the morning to

keep the cat in and the dog out.

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This is a very simple cake recipe, and I think it's a very delicious cake. It has just enough spice in it, not too much sugar, and just two eggs. Here's the recipe. You can easily vary to spices and sugar to your taste. For versatility — U.S. and U.K. — I'm giving measures in fluid ounces instead of in U.S. cups or grams:

Applesauce Cake

20 fl. oz. all-purpose flour

16 fl. oz. sugar

2 tsp. baking powder or soda

1½ tsp. salt

¾ tsp. ground cinnamon

½ tsp. ground cloves

½ tsp. allspice

4 fl. oz. vegetable oil (or melted butter)

4 fl. oz. water

12 fl. oz. unsweetened applesauce

2 eggs

Preheat oven to 350ºF / 180ºC.

Butter or oil a baking dish or cake pan. (The pan I used was 25 cm x 15 cm.)

Combine all ingredients in a bowl; pour batter into prepared pan.

Bake for 60 minutes or until done when tested by inserting a skewer.

Giving credit where credit is due: here's the U.S. recipe this is based this on. Thanks to Kater and Food.com.

Finishing up with the kitchen

This was not at all a kitchen remodel. It was a ceiling repair. It was spring cleaning. It was a good thing to get done now, as the milder weather sets in, and the garden work starts. Now we can focus on other projects.

We decided the walls didn't

need to be repainted for now.

A good wiping down and

cleaning of walls, tile,

radiator, and floor was

enough. It's only the
ceiling finish that is new.

This is the halogen light fixture
that caused us a lot of trouble.
Parts of it keep coming loose.
It needs to be replaced, I guess.
Problem is, we'd need the same
one because there are two holes
in the brand new ceiling where
the arms of the fixture are attached.

We bought this kitchen as is in
2003,when we bought the house,

with only minor changes. It's a

French kitchen of the 1960s or '70s,

and it's fine (though small). We painted

the walls yellow, and took the doors off

the cabinets to paint them and then decided

not to put them back. on.  We had

some electrical work done (more

outlets) and repainted the radiator.

We had a new window put in.

Now we have a new ceiling.

We also added these pot racks.
The lower one is recent.
There's never enough storage space
in a kitchen, is there?
The refrigerator is a Samsung
frost-free model that has given
us good service for 10½ years
We have a Whirlpool dishwasher
that's of the same vintage.

Now we need to replace the stove.

It's too bad, because it still looks new,

but the manufacturer says it would cost

more to refurbish it than it would cost

to buy a new one. So we're going to

get a new one. With all the cooking

we do, it'll be worth the investment.

Our homeowner's insurance covered the cost of the ceiling repair, with no deductible, because the damage was caused by stormy weather. That has turned out to be a nice birthday present. With the work we did, it's almost like having a new kitchen.

The best laid plans...

The moving back in didn't go on schedule. Walt went out to get some necessary supplies and groceries, and I stayed home and mopped the kitchen floor. When he got back, we got busy trying to put the halogen light fixture back up on the kitchen ceiling.

 The kitchen floor is tile in this pattern.

We were both up on ladders, muttering profanities and getting pains in our neck from looking up toward the ceiling. The wires were a b*tch to patch back together. We ended up taking the fixture down three times before we finally got it right. One of the plastic fasteners that attaches an arm of the thing to the ceiling broke. It's really a piece of junk... Looks good, though, when it stays up there.

It was the part of the ceiling you see here that really needed repairing. It looks a lot better now.

By then it was lunchtime. Lunch was delicious — field peas (a little like black-eyed peas) that I had brought back from the U.S. last year, and pan-roasted slices of gigot d'agneau (leg of lamb) with a spicy dry rub to season them. Then a green salad. We opened a bottle of Cahors wine (vin noir is one name for that Malbec vintage).

Now we have to deal with finding a new stove, to replace the broken one.

At that point, we said to hell with it. I went and watched a movie on TV, and Walt turned on tennis and spent a few hours enjoying the matches. Later in the afternoon, I went into the kitchen and made an applesauce cake, because we didn't have any other sweets in the house.

 Another upcoming project is to take everything out of these cabinets and paint the shelves and inside surface, now that we know we don't want to put the doors back on them.

The result was a pretty big mess in the basically empty kitchen, and nothing I wanted to deal with right then. So this morning I have to clean up all the dishes and then finish cleaning and moving back in. Walt too. We will get it done. We will get it done. Or go crazy trying.

(Sorry this is kind of boring. Remember, the blog is our personal record of what life is and has been like here in Saint-Aignan.)

It's moving day... moving back in, I mean

The kitchen work is finished. Circulez, il n'y a rien à voir... There's not much to look at right now. Just a bunch of pots and pans on the stove, left from cooking lunch yesterday: Italian-style Roma beans (cocos plats à la sauce tomate), with polenta and saucisses aux herbes. It was nice to be able to cook again.

It's kind of surreal to see these sunny-day pictures, after all the heavy and hard rain we had yesterday.

I planted this plum tree out in the back corner a few years ago...

...and its blossoms are pretty but it hasn't produced much fruit yet.

The perennial plant called saxifrage or Mongolian tea.

So bear with me. Enjoy these photos of back-yard flowers (cyclamen, plum blossons, saxifrage) and try not to think about us scrubbing, mopping, and wiping. We haven't decided if we're going to put everything back in the kitchen just as it was, or if we are going to make changes in the way things are laid out.

Primevères

It was again a hard rain beating against the roof tiles and skylight windows up in the loft that woke me up at 5:30 this morning. It looks like we'll end up with 200 mm of precipitation — 8 inches, and all of it rain — for the first two months of 2014. Another storm is crossing the southern part of England this morning. A heavy squall just knocked out our satellite TV signal.

The gardening guy on Télématin announced a few minutes ago that since our 2014 weather is three weeks in advance compared to the calendar, it is now Springtime. Le printemps. That doesn't mean it's particularly warm outside, but it's certainly not cold. South of us, though, in the central mountains, it's snowing.

There are flowers all around the hamlet now. Camelias. Plum and peach blossoms. Cyclamen. Forsythia. Primroses (as in these photos I took in our side yard over the course of the week). And on and on. The primroses are domesticated "escapees" — the woman who sold us this house said that whenever she had a little pot of them from the florist's, she would plant them out in the yard at the end of springtime.

The kitchen work is almost done — at least the contractor's part of it. He'll come back this morning and put a last coat of paint on the ceiling. Then our work begins. We'll spend this afternoon and a good portion of tomorrow cleaning. I guess "spring cleaning" is the right name for it.

The walls over the stove need a good wiping. All the horizontal surfaces in the room (especially the top of the refrigerator) need to be scrubbed. The tile floor needs a thorough mopping. The curtains have to go back up, and the light fixture. Then we can start moving all the stuff back into the room and resume our normal organized life.

Bertie the Black Cat, basking

On a recent sunny afternoon, Callie the collie and I were out wandering around the hamlet, just to get some exercise. We were over on the summertime neighbor's property across the street from our house. Callie started nosing around in the neighbor man's "junk" pile.

I just followed the dog over there to see what she was doing — which was munching on some fresh green grass. I looked around and was startled to see Bertie the black cat just sitting there watching us through his slitty eyes. Callie never did notice him, even though I said his name and petted him on the head.

Bert was keeping an eye on the dog, and listening carefully I'm sure, ready to run at any sudden movement. But he was also enjoying the afternoon sunshine. The warmth of it must have felt good on his head. I think he felt safe because I was there with the dog.