Dieting

I have to go on a special diet this week. It's for medical reasons. The diet lasts only three days. I'll be able to return to my normal diet on Friday.

Here's the diet, as prescribed by my doctor:

In case you don't read French, here's the translation:

LOW-RESIDUE DIET

TO BE FOLLOWED FOR 48 HOURS BEFORE THE EXAMINATION

Allowed foods

• Grilled meats, roasts, ham, offal (liver, brain, kidneys)
• Grilled or poached fish
• Eggs other than fried
• Rice, pasta, semolina (couscous), flour, tapioca, cornstarch
• Clear broth with no added vegetables, vermicelli
• Fruit syrups, fruit juices without pulp, fruit jellies, applesauce, quince puree
• Hard cheeses (Saint Nectaire, Cantal, Gruyere)
• Melba toast, uncooked butter or oil

Foods to avoid

• Fried meats, fried fish
• Vegetables, whether raw or cooked
• Fruit, whether raw or cooked
• Milk, dairy products, soft cheeses
• Bread

As it happens, the bread lady is on vacation this coming week, so I won't have to worry about that last forbidden food. I think I'll make it through the week. I think the diet is very interesting. Any of you have a colonoscopy recently? Did you have to go on a similar diet?

Scratched

A few days ago, I realized that my camera's lens has a scratch on it. At first, I thought it was just dirty, so I cleaned it well. The scratch was still there. I can't actually see it on the lens, but I can see it in pictures I take.

When I zoomed in on these roses, they were 25 or 30 feet away from me in a neighbor's yard.

I see it especially when I focus on a solid color background like the blue sky. Fortunately, we don't have to worry much about blue skies these days. The weather report is on Télématin right now, and it looks like another lousy day for most of France. Our high temperature might be as high as 70ºF. If you are watching the coverage of the Tour de France, you know what I'm talking about.

So I took the camera out on the walk in the vineyard with Callie a day or two after I noticed the scratch and took a whole series of close-up photos of flowers, grasses, and grapes. (I'll post grape pictures later.)

Meanwhile, I had already done some research about buying a similar camera to replace the scratched one, which is only two years old. The fact is that cameras are getting to be more and more affordable.

Anyway, the test pictures came out really nice, I thought. The light was right. As always, you can click or tap on the images to see them at a larger size. I've decided I don't need a new camera right now. If I notice the scratch on an image, I can try to remove it with Photoshop.

The little pond out back has been taken over by an invasive aquatic plant, but it has also been full of croaking frogs for weeks now.

Speaking of the weather, it seemed like it was improving yesterday afternoon. The morning had been gray and it seemed like it might rain any minute. It was starting to feel cold in the house. (You can understand why people here mostly don't need to have air conditioning in their houses.)

The sun came out in the afternoon and things started to feel warmer. Then we started hearing thunder. I looked at the weather radar on the web and I saw a line of thunderstorms approaching from the northwest. It was between Le Mans and Tours, and then it was over Tours, and then it was over us.

This is a composition — mirror images stitched together.

The lightning and thunder got closer and a very hard rain started falling. Callie went wild barking. The rain didn't last long, and at least it didn't turn into hail. This morning it's just foggy and gray outside. Maybe the fog and clouds will burn off. Always the optimist...

Les Vaux de Cernay, near Versailles

Just a few miles south of Versailles is the little town of Cernay-la-Ville with its old abbey church, in ruins. L'abbaye des Vaux de Cernay (vaux is the plural of val and means "valleys") was founded by a group of monks from Savigny in Normandy back in the year 1118. In 1147, it was attached to the Cistercian order. CHM and I went to Cernay in late May.

The abbey had its highs and lows. It was thriving in the 13th century, but in decline by the 15th. It was abandoned after the 100 Years War with the English. From the 16th to the 18th centuries Les Vaux de Cernay saw a lot of activity, but financial problems put an end to that period.

During the good times, a monastery was built and the old buildings were repaired, but just before the French Revolution the property and all its furnishings were sold off.

For 75 years, until 1873, Les Vaux de Cernay was "mined" as a stone quarry.  Then it was bought by the Rothschild family and turned into a private residence. It was sold again, twice, in the mid-20th century and now it is operated as a luxury hotel and restaurant. Here's a link to the virtual tour on the Vaux de Cernay website.

“Autumn” weather and a château near Paris

That's how the weather woman on Télématin just described the weather we would have today — un temps automnal. It's raining. It's gray. It's chilly. It doesn't feel like July at all. It feels like October.

Yellow means cooler temperatures and redder means hotter.
Today would be a good day to spend on the Atlantic coast.

I'll think back to the spring, when we had warmer days and a good bit of sunshine. On May 31, for example, I was driving back to Saint-Aignan from Paris with CHM. Here's a château we saw. It has a Loire Valley connection, but it's not in the Loire Valley at all. It's just a few miles outside Paris, and not to far from Chartres and Versailles. It's a French château in the style classique, and it was built toward the end of the 1600s. It's the Château de Dampierre in the village of Dampierre-en-Yvelines.

The property, where an old manor house had stood for several centures, became the property of the Duc de Luynes in 1663. His family also owned the Château de Luynes, on the Loire River just west of Tours. Charles-Honoré d'Albert de Luynes undertook to modernize the Dampierre property and buildings, and he brought in the royal architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart to be in charge. Just around this time, king Louis IV decided to move his court out of central Paris to nearby Versailles.

The buildings have been modernized and modified several times over the past 300 years. The Duc de Luynes at the time of the French Revolution was briefly arrested by the village authorities, but he was soon allowed to return to the château and spent the rest of his years there. He was responsible for setting up an impressive library at Dampierre.

Le jardin potager en juillet 2014

Even though the weather is crummy right now, considering that we are approaching the middle of the month of July, the vegetable garden is looking beautiful. We had enough warm weather last week to spur it on, and the dampness of the weather seems to be doing the plants good. Everything is vert vert vert. Today's weather looks pretty nasty, by the way.

Le jardin vu à travers un rideau de petits artichauts — the garden throught a curtain of little artichokes

If we get a few more sunny, warm days this month and next, 2014 may be a banner year for the vegetable garden.

Tomato plants — quite a few of them, of several varieties

I don't take a lot of credit for the garden, especially this year. All I have done is the tilling. Walt has grown plants from seed, decided where to plant them, put them in the ground, and watered and weeded for weeks now. My job is just to make lunch. I hope to be cooking soon with tomatoes, eggplants, corn, beans, chard, and cucumbers that we've got growing.

Haricots verts à l'italienne

There have been major problems with the TGV in the "chunnel" since yesterday morning. An electrical problem immobilized a train in the tunnel yesterday morning. Nearly 400 people had to be evacuated through an emergency side-tunnel. Trains from Paris to London were delayed or had to be canceled.

Walt just saw a post our friend Peter left on Facebook. He and Jill left Saint-Aignan yesterday morning at 7:15, and they finally arrived in London 12 hours later — four or five hours late. But at least they made it. Meanwhile, Walt and I were resting at home after a very busy weekend. I went to three restaurants in three days, and we prepared dinners at home on Thursday (grilled chicken breasts and salade macédoine) and Saturday (raclette).

Yesterday, I needed to cook some green beans I had bought for the weekend but hadn't used. They were the wide, flat beans called haricots cocos plats in France — I think they are known as Romano beans in America. I decided to cook them Italian-style, with tomatoes and onions, since I also had a few fresh tomatoes in the kitchen.

Here's the recipe I like. It's from the book Cuisine pour toute l'année (1969) by a woman named Monique Maine. The book has been my favorite French cookbook for nearly 35 years. I'm translating:

Green Beans Italian Style

750 g (1¾ to 2 lbs.) fresh green beans

500 g (1 lb.) fresh tomatoes

4 small onions

1 clove of garlic

thyme

salt and pepper

30 g (2 Tbsp.) butter

1 Tbsp. oil

Wash and trim the green beans. Cut them into pieces if you want. Wash and trim the tomatoes

and cut them into halves or quarters. Peel and slice the onions. In a big pot, melt the butter

 with the oil and cook the tomatoes and onions for a minute or two on medium-high heat.

Add the beans to the pot with the garlic clove, salt and pepper, and some thyme.

Pour on a half cup of water. Cover the pot and let the beans cook

for about an hour on medium heat.

You can reduce the cooking time if you like the beans crunchier. I used only olive oil (3 Tbsp.) instead of part butter and I used our dried, garden-grown oregano instead of thyme this time. I also added some mushrooms we happened to have in the fridge. We'll be having half the beans for lunch today, with escalopes de dinde. The rest of the beans go into the freezer for later.

The weather here is lousy right now. It feels downright chilly this morning, and the weather woman on Télématin just said that the high temperatures today will be much lower than seasonal averages. It's raining in different places around the country, but not in Saint-Aignan for the moment. The plate of hot green beans with tomatoes and onions will be good comfort food.

A travel day and a different restaurant experience

It's a travel day for our friends Peter and Jill. I'll be taking them to the train station across the river in Noyers-sur-Cher in a few minutes. They'll be in London by mid-afternoon. We've had a good visit despite the rainy, cool weather.

It rained pretty hard from 7:00 a.m. until about 5:00 p.m. yesterday. We spent the day inside, making only a short trip to a restaurant over in Pouillé (five miles from our house) to have lunch. It's a restaurant that occupies an old wine cellar or cave — pronounced [kahv] — meaning a network of tunnels and alcoves carved into a limestone hillside by people quarrying the stone in past centuries. It's called Le Bousquet and has been in business, I understand, for 40 years now.

We're not talking about a gourmet food experience. It's really the polar opposite of a place like the Agnès Sorel restaurant in Genillé, where the atmosphere is calm and dignified. It was a case of quality vs. quantity of food. At Le Bousquet, we were in a room where every table was full and people were good-natured, relaxed, and boisterous. As we started started our meal, two musicians — an accordionist and a guitarist — starting playing to entertain the crowd.

The musicians approached each table and asked people what song they would like to hear. They obviously knew all the French classics — Piaf, Montand, Aznavour, and so on. When they came to our table, I looked at them and said: "We are a group of four Americans, so..." They had that panicked look on their faces that indicated they wondered if we would suggest a song that they actually knew how to play.

Peter and I had joked about maybe asking them to play a Janis Joplin song like "Another Little Piece of My Heart." But we didn't. I asked them to play the pre-war French standard called "Parlez-Moi d'Amour". A woman about my age at a neighboring table was watching and listening to our exchange with the musicians, and when I named the song she smiled and winked at me!

The music was so loud — they played six or eight songs in all before moving on to another part of the restaurant — that we could hardly talk to each other at all. But it was fun. The food was real "down-home" French fare. First, they brought us a pot of rillettes (potted pork), a dish of country-style pâté, and crock of cornichons (pickled gherkins). It was all-you-can-eat time.

The main courses we could choose from were entrecôte-frites (steak and fries), a chicken breast in cream sauce with fries or rice, and a salmon fillet with either fries, rice, or green beans. The fries weren't very good, and the steak, while tasty, was kind of gristly. The next course was a very nice cheese board with a dozen cow's-milk and goat's-milk cheeses. The waitress just left the board on the table and we had 10 minutes or so to serve ourselves whatever cheeses we wanted. There was also a bowl of green salad in vinaigrette to go with the cheese.

Dessert was a couple of scoops of ice cream or a cup of coffee. There were plenty of other desserts, but if you ordered those you had to pay for them separately from the set price of the meal — 20 euros. Wine was separate too, of course — we had a local rosé. I didn't take my camera. It's too dark in a cave to take pictures without a flash.

We arrived at the restaurant in a hard rain, and we left in a hard rain two hours later. We spent the afternoon watching the men's final at Wimbledon on TV. Now it's time to go to the train station, for a 7:15 departure. It's not raining... yet.

Disappointing weather

The weather this weekend has been disappointing. I was disappointed to have to cancel our trip to Bourges on Friday, even though we had a good afternoon in Genillé and Loches. Yesterday, it threatened to rain all day, and we had a few showers. The threat was enough to make us curtail our activities.

Ah, summer in the Loire Valley! In England it's even worse, from what I can gather. Here, a chilly rain is falling as I type this. And I have to take the dog out for a walk in it.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of photos of our entrées (first courses) at the Agnès Sorel restaurant when we had lunch there on Friday. Nasturtiums were one of the meal's themes; they're in season and the flowers are edible. My starter course, above, was a steamed artichoke bottom filled with what is called a faisselle de chèvre frais — a sort of cultured goat's milk concoction that has the texture of yogurt — with a lot of fresh chives on top and some salad greens and pine nuts underneath. It was delicious...

Walt ordered tête de veau, a kind of head cheese (fromage de tête in French) made of veal instead of pork. It was served warm, so that the gelatine that is a feature of head cheese had melted. You either like that gelatinous texture or you don't, and Walt said it was very good. It was served with salad greens, chives, chopped walnuts, and a nasturtium (capucine in French) blossom.

Changement de programme

Il faut savoir s'adapter... You have to be flexible. We ended up changing our plans yesterday morning because of the weather. No, we didn't have a hurricane, but we had predictions of rainy and even stormy weather all day.

It didn't make sense to drive three hours round-trip over to Bourges for lunch. The whole idea was to be able to walk around the old town in the afternoon before driving back to Saint-Aignan. We couldn't see ourselves doing that in the rain. Early in the day it was already raining — it's raining this morning too — and weather reports said it was only going to get worse over the course of the day.

My main course at the Agnès Sorel restaurant yesterday was a chicken breast in a mustardy tarragon sauce. Delicious.

At 7:30 a.m. I made an executive decision. We would go to Genillé and have lunch at the Agnès Sorel instead of driving all the way to Bourges and taking a chance on a restaurant where we've never had a meal before. Peter had expressed a desire to try the Agnès Sorel, which is only a 30-minute drive from our house, and we know the food is very good and pretty affordable.

 Jill, Peter, and Walt all had fish for lunch — a filet de daurade on a bed of diced eggplant and zucchini.

So we had a delicious lunch and then we went shopping. We bought several things but mainly we spent a lot of time just looking around and we got food for lunch today and tomorrow, which we plan to make here at home. Of course, plans can change. Peter and Jill are here today and tomorrow, and then they leave early Monday for England. We're playing it by ear.

As to hurricanes, all's well that ends well. See my comment on yesterday's blog post.

Balloon barking and storm eyes

Yesterday morning at about 7:30, Callie went wild barking. She normally stays upstairs in the loft until we go on our walk around 8:00 and sometimes she'll bark if she sees a bird in the trees just beyond the skylight windows. This was a different bark, however — it was wilder, louder, and longer-lasting. It was a hot-air balloon going over. She can hear them long before we do. I snapped a photo.

Hurricane news: The eye of the storm crossed over the coastline just east of Morehead City a few minutes ago. I've been watching it on the local NWS radar site. There was a tornado warning for the area from about 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. yesterday. I haven't see any news of tornadoes or exceptionally strong winds, so I assume all is well. When the eye of the storm to the north and east of the area, the wind shifts direction, blowing from the north. A lot of water can be pushed up toward the southern end of the shallow but expansive Pamlico sound and there is a risk of flooding in Morehead from the north side (it's on a peninsula). I'll find out more later.

It's not easy to read the town names on this map, but along the coast from southwest to northeast, you have Myrtle Beach, Wilmington, Jacksonville, Morehead City, and Cape Hatteras.

It seems that this is the earliest hurricane to affect the North Carolina coast since record-keeping began in 1851. The earliest previous hurricane hit on July 10 in 1901. Today's storm came ashore with 100 mph winds (160 kph). The big dangers for the N.C. coasts are tornadoes, flooding, and significant erosion of the Outer Banks islands. The road that runs along the strip of sandy banks often washes out in such storms. Here's a link to an article in the Raleigh News & Observer.

Our friends Jill and Peter arrived from California yesterday afternoon. The weather was hot (by Saint-Aignan standards) and we were able to sit out on the terrace until late into the evening. Walt grilled some chicken breasts on the barbecue and we had salade macédoine (mixed vegetables in a mayonnaise sauce — thanks, Martine) and taboulé (bulgur with diced cucumber, tomato, parsley, and mint with a lemon juice dressing) alongside. Then we tasted a couple of Auvergne cheeses (Cantal and Bleu d'Auvergne) before we plunged into a box of See's chocolates that J & P brought with them.

It was a pleasant evening, to say the least. This morning it's raining and I've seen lightning off in the distance. It's supposed to be stormy all day. We have reservations for lunch in Bourges at noon. Damn the rain.

Serenity

Isn't that what we all want? Peace and quiet? Maybe it's just my age. Earlier in life, I wanted hustle and bustle, excitement, and surprises. Paris and San Francisco. Now I can do without all that (though I still enjoy the occasional visit to Paris).

I keep re-assessing life. It's strange to be 65 years old and to be living in a vineyard in France. Nobody would ever have predicted this turn of events — though "the turn" happened 11 years ago. Now it seems real and permanent. Some days I feel a certain amount of restlessness, and then I realize how lucky I am, or we are, to be living here and still enjoying life day by day, calmly.

Yesterday's view of the vineyard from our house near Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher in the Loire Valley

I'm off to the hustle and bustle of Blois this morning for a medical appointment. Who would ever have thought my life would be centered on the old town called Blois? Paris, maybe, or Rouen... a big city. [BLWAH] is not a major city. Then tomorrow we'll be going over to Bourges for lunch and a stroll, weather permitting, about the old town, including a few minutes in and around the magnificent cathedral there. Lunch in Bourges... how unlikely.

Today's storm is moving north-northeast along the southeast U.S. coast, aimed at Morehead City.

Ten million people live in North Carolina, and about five million in South Carolina.

Maybe I'm thinking about serenity because today and tomorrow a hurricane is bearing down on my home town in America, which is Morehead City in North Carolina. It doesn't look like an especially destructive storm, but you can never be sure. Now I've got to get busy.

The plum pay-off

Our neighbors across the street, the ones who mainly live in Blois but spend weekends and summers down here in the country near Saint-Aignan, have always been generous about sharing their fruit harvest with us. One year they told us to go pick peaches on their property, and we came home with more than 20 lbs. of them. Another year it was quinces. Each time we made jam (or jelly).

And then there are the plums. They have several kinds, but the ones I like the best for making tarts, clafoutis, or jam are the little red ones. They ripen early — in July, not late August or in September — so they don't get lost in the fruit shuffle at the end of summer. I liked these little red plums so much that a few years ago I planted some pits saved from them and grew my own plum tree.

The shinier plums in the foreground came off the tree in our yard. These little plums are about the size of large cherries.
Plums, by the way, are prunes in French, and prunes are pruneaux.

The new tree turned out to be very different from the neighbors', but this year it is bearing similar fruit. I think its plums are a little more sour. They turn red a lot earlier than the originals. The tree is prettier, because its leaves are red, not green like the parent plant's. All in all, I'm happy with it. And I'm even happier when, as was the case yesterday, I can go over to the neighbors' and pick (gather, mostly, the ones on the ground) a quart or two of the sweet little plums in their yard as well as a few from ours.

Now the question is: a tart, a clafoutis, or jam? Probably not jam right now, because we have company coming and we're going to be busy. A clafoutis, I think. We'll see. Meanwhile, there are a lot more plums on the tree in our yard and they'll need to be picked, because we are expecting rain over the next few days. That might be today's work. Confiture next week — that's a distinct possibility.

Life revolves around...

...grapes. Here in Saint-Aignan, it does, anyway. We eat grapes and grape leaves. We drink wines made from the grapes, and we cook with wine nearly every day. We use wine vinegar in our salad dressings. And every day we go walking among the grapes and vines with the dog.

We also take pictures of vines and grapes. On that subject, I was surprised yesterday to find bunches of grapes this big out in the Renaudière vineyard. I was walking down a row I usually don't walk through. Until yesterday, in other places around the vineyard, I had seen only minuscule grapes in tiny bunches.

These grapes are, unless I'm mistaken, red wine grapes — or they will be in a couple of months. They are still aren't full grown or even close to ripe, but then it's only July 1.

And now July begins...

One day at a time. We're going into a very busy period. The garden is growing. Home improvement projects are on hold until August. Friends are coming to stay for a few days, arriving Thursday. It's time to make sure the house is ready, and the car too. There are menus to plan and reservations to make (we plan to go to Bourges for a nice restaurant meal on Friday). I also have a string of medical appointments coming up all through July, mostly in Blois but also in Saint-Aignan and down the river in Saint-Georges-sur-Cher. Sigh.

After much searching, I finally found some 2005 photos of the dolmen near Chinon that's called Le Carroir Bon Air. The dog in the photo is Collette, who came with us from California to France in 2003 and died in 2006 at age 14.

These photos are far from earth-shaking, but after spending hours searching for them, I had to post them. It's an impressive monument. The pictures are from June 2005, and the closest village to the dolmen is called Ligré.

Meanwhile, the weather seems to be settling down again. We had quite a bit of rain late last week, and Saturday our planned outdoor feast had to be moved indoors because of frequent showers. Yesterday it was almost cold in the house until late afternoon, when the sun finally managed to warm things up slightly. It's about 50ºF this morning and will be only about 70 this afternoon. At least we didn't get the severe hail storms that damaged the grape crops over near Beaune, in Burgundy, over the weekend — for the third year in a row.

Dimanche “off”

Just got home. Went to lunch with friends near Valençay and ended up spending the night over there. Whew! It was fun. Sausage and eggs for breakfast and then the drive home.

What day is it?

Silent Saturday

Plums, raspberries, grapes, etc.

We had a hard rain yesterday afternoon, for an hour or two. We probably needed it. Other than that episode, the day was warm and sunny. The rain ended just in time for my late afternoon walk.

The plums on the little tree I planted a few years back are ripening nicely.

These are some of the raspberries we picked at the farm in the Sologne a couple of days ago.

There are not really any grapes yet, but the vines are reaching skyward, waiting to be trimmed off.

Finally, here's some evidence that we could use a little more rain. We're supposed to have a rainy day tomorrow.

From dolmens to dolmas

The vines are growing really fast right now. The stems and tendrils seem to be reaching for the sky. And the leaves are getting pretty big but have not yet been hardened by overly hot, sunny weather. All that I've said applies both to the vines in the vineyard and the few table grape vines that we have in our own back yard.

Dolmas as a side dish, served hot with Greek-style spaghetti made with feta cheese, garlic, fresh tomato, dried orgeano, and capers.

So it was time to make dolmas — stuffed grape vine leaves. They are an annual treat. One advantage of using the leaves from the vines in our back yard is that we know they haven't been sprayed with pesticides or chemicals of any kind.

These on the left have been blanched in boiling water and are ready to be filled and rolled.

I've posted about making dolmas several times over the years. In 2010, for example. Or 2013. In past years, I've made a stuffing for the leaves with rice, onion, spices, and raisins.

This year I wanted to make a meat and rice stuffing, and I did, using ground beef, brown rice, and onions. I ended up making way too much stuffing so I put half of it in the freezer.

We'll use the extra beef and rice to stuff tomatoes or zucchini or eggplants later this summer, assuming that the 2014 vegetable garden is a success. It has a lot of herbs from the garden in it — chervil (cerfeuil) and mint (menthe).

I won't go into the process of rolling the dolmas up in this post. It's pretty easy and goes fast. The main thing is to blanch the grape vine leaves in boiling water to make them limp and foldable.

I had picked 35 grape vine leaves, and I blanched them a dozen or so at a time for two or three minutes in a large quantity of boiling water. Then I put them into a cold water bath to stop the cooking.

The other main ingredient in the stuffing is the juice of a lemon. After you brown the beef with a large diced-up onion in olive oil and cook a cup of rice (so you have about three cups after cooking), you mix all that together with the herbs and add the lemon juice and some more olive oil. Greek cooking uses a lot of lemon and lemon juice.

You also cook the dolmas, after rolling them up, with a lot of lemon. The ones above are ready for the oven. Pack the dolmas in an oven-proof dish with a tight-fitting lid. Slice three lemons and arrange the slices on top. Add just enough water to the panto nearly cover the dolmas and put the pan, covered, in the oven at 160ºC (325ºF) for about an hour. Add water as needed to keep the grape leaves moist. Serve the dolmas cold, warm, or hot, as you like.