Panko-fried seafood morsels

The last time we went to Tours we found bags of Japanese "panko" breadcrumbs at the Asian supermarket. On Friday we made fried fish and shrimp, with French-fried potatoes. The fried food was comforting on a chilly spring day.

Pat dry the fish fillets and shrimp with a clean towel or paper toweling. Dust them with flour, and shake off any excess. Beat an egg with a tablespoon of cold water and dip each piece of floured seafood into it. Then dredge the pieces in panko (or other breadcrumbs). Let them dry on a rack for five minutes before frying them in vegetable oil at 350ºF / 180ºC until golden brown and just cooked through. It doesn't take long.

We cooked filets de merlan (Atlantic whiting fillets) along with shrimp — prawns, if you prefer — imported from India and labeled queues de crevettes crues. Both were good. When you don't eat much fried seafood (unlike in the States, where it is ubiquitous), it's a treat once in a while.

Bleu, blanc, rouge

A chilly “bridge” day

So today is the actual pont between our Thursday holiday and the regular weekend. Of course, if you're retired like we are, every day is a holiday and every other day is a bridge day. Here are a few recent photos taken around the vineyard. It's what I do.

Dewy leaves

Spring colors

Fleurs de sureau — Elderberry flowers

Wildflower with vineyard shed

Tree “cotton” along the road

Today is supposed to be our chilliest day of the current weather cycle. We ended up getting very little rain yesterday, and we even had a few rays of sunshine in the afternoon. Vivement que le beau temps revienne.

Le « pont » de l'Ascension

Today is yet another public holiday in France. It's Ascension Day, a Christian holiday marking the day that Jesus ascended into Heaven, after 40 days of walking the Earth following his resurrection on Easter Monday. It always falls on a Thursday here, and a lot of people in France make a four-day weekend of it. That's called a pont — taking the Friday off to make a "bridge" between the Thursday holiday and the weekend. May 1 (Labor Day) and May 8 (VE Day) are also public holidays in France — both fell on Fridays this year.

We've had another spell of fine weather this week. This vigneron was out working in his grapes a couple of days ago. I took the photo using a very long zoom.

I bought a pot of basil at the supermarket a few days ago. I hope the coming summer will be hot enough to keep it going. I'm an optimist by nature, I guess. If the weather turns damp and chilly, I can always grow the basil under a cold frame. The bricks are ones we found here when we moved in 12 years ago and were made in Saint-Aignan.

Callie's walks start earlier and earlier every morning in this season. Right now the sun rises at 6:20 a.m. and sets at 9:20 p.m. The days are long, and we still have more than a month to go before they start getting shorter again. It's supposed to rain today, unfortunately.

Last year I planted some perennial bellflowers (Campanulaceae) in the holes in an old cinder block to see if they would survive and bloom there. So far so good.

One of the things I like about the kind of weather we've been having this month is that I can dry the laundry on the line outdoors. Not many people in France actually have a clothes dryer. We have one but seldom use it.

Some of my favorite plants

For decades I've kept a lot of plants in pots around the house and yard. In San Francisco, where the low temperature seldom went below 40ºF (+5ºC) — and where the high temperature was seldom above 70ºF (20ºC) — most of my plants could stay outside year-round.

Here in Saint-Aignan it's more complicated, because I have to bring a lot of plants inside in November and keep them in until April or May. Including the one on the right, Portulacaria afra, variously known as Elephant Bush, Pork Bush, or Small-Leaf Jade.

Or, to CHM and me, le jade du désert, because it grew from cuttings that CHM brought here from Southern California. There's another photo of it just below, along with a cactus plant that CHM brought here from Virginia as cuttings at least ten years ago.

I've managed to keep these plants going for a decade now. The cactus doesn't actually have to be brought inside in wintertime unless we are going to have a very hard freeze. I have some of it planted in a bed on the south side of the house, where it is protected from the coldest weather. The potted ones can spend the winter outside under a cold frame.

Above is a yellow jasmine plant that grew from cuttings that CHM took from a plant in his back garden in Paris. He's lucky to have a garden in Paris — I'm sure there aren't that many left any more. The yellow jasmine or jasmin d'hiver flowers in wintertime. This one is only a year old, and it already produced a few flowers last January. I'm hoping for a more robust flowering next winter.

Finally, CHM also gave me some cuttings from a very old Aucuba japonica plant that grows in his Paris garden. I've heard it called Gold Dust Plant, or Spotted Laurel. It hasn't been easy to get it growing here in our yard near Saint-Aignan — I don't know why. This past winter, mild and damp, seems to have been kind to it. Some is growing in the ground and one plant is still in a pot.

I have a lot of other potted plants, but these are some of the ones that I am enjoying the most this spring.

The seasonal chore...

...is more than halfway done. We'll have two more warm sunny days before the rain comes back, according to weather forecasts. I'll finish the tilling today and tomorrow morning I'll need to go out and run errands. Getting the garden ready one more time is a huge milestone in this life we lead here in the Loire Valley.

Back in 2004, we tried to prepare our first vegetable garden using just shovels, hoes, and elbow grease. We realized then that we would never be able to get it done by brute force. We went out and bought a rototiller that spring. It's given us good service for 12 seasons now. Yesterday, I tilled around the western, northern, and eastern edges of the newly enlarged garden plot.

Walt spent a lot of time repotting seedlings yesterday, so that they'll grow a little bigger before we set them out in the garden. I bet we have four dozen tomato plants at this point! Oh well, you can never have too many tomatoes in summertime. Or in the freezer for wintertime enjoyment.

I'm tilling around a couple of rogue rhubarb plants that came up after Walt dug up, divided, and transplanted all the others to a make a new rhubarb patch. He harvested rhubarb from these two stray plants yesterday by cutting all the biggest stems and leaves. He'll move them later this year to the new patch.

Last week, I harvested Swiss chard. I pulled out the plants, trimmed and cleaned the leaves and ribs, and cooked them in duck fat, white wine, and seasonings. I ended up with three liters — six one-pint containers — of cooked chard. Four of them went into the freezer, and two of them went into us over the past week.

Mais où la glace est-elle passée ?

This is the period in France and other parts of Europe that's called Les Saints de Glace, or the Ice Saints. Traditionally, the weather turns cold around May 10 for three or four days, making it a better idea to wait until May 15 to set out delicate, frost-sensitive garden plants like tomatoes. That's the conventional wisdom.

I need to dig up and transplant this little red maple tree, a volunteer... put it on the list.

In 2015, however, we're having a heat wave during the time when we should be shivering around the fireplace. Yesterday afternoon, we put on shorts for the first time and went and sat out back in the sun. I didn't stay out there too long because I didn't want to end up with a coup de soleil. The temperature is supposed to hit 28ºC today — that's 82 or 83ºF, which qualifies as scorching weather here.

In the round posts are some little collard plants that over-wintered under a cold frame. Into the garden plot they will go.

Today is tilling day, or at least tilling morning — probably the last one of the year. I did the first tilling exactly a month ago, and it's a good thing I did. In between, we've had a lot of wet weather. Some grasses and weeds are starting to come up in the newly enlarged garden plot out back. Now's the time to work the soil again and cut their growth short. Walt dumped and scattered around a few bags of horse manure out there yesterday afternoon.

The rhubarb that Walt dug up, divided, and transplanted is doing really well.

It looks like we'll get some more rain toward the end of the week, so Wednesday and Thursday might be good days to set out the first plants. We have, as usual, a lot of tomato seedlings that are about ready to be put in the ground. Not to mention a variety of squash, cabbage, and other plants. Maybe 2015 will be a year of bumper crops.

I wish this plant and the pot were mine, but they belong to a neighbor.

Meantime, I see lots of undesirables — especially brambles (ronces) — coming up in the hedges and in the big juniper clump just off the front deck. It'll soon be time to get out there with clippers and trim all that back. Walt will be mowing the yard on a regular basis. The hazy days of summer won't really be lazy, I'm afraid.

Another stove, and an anniversary

Today is our third wedding anniversary. We were married in Albany, New York, on May 10, 2012. As Walt says, it's been three years but it seems like 30! Explanation: on June 1, we will celebrate the 32nd anniversary of our vie commune. We spent the first three of those years in Washington DC, then 17 years in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and now 12 years (and counting) in Saint-Aignan in France. We first met each other and became friends in Paris in 1981.

Walt went out shopping yesterday and stopped in at the Saint-Aignan Bricorama store. There he saw a stove that we're interested in. It's made by Supra, which the mom-and-pop outfit in town could install. We're not convinced that they are the right installers for us, but maybe we'll find somebody else. There's a plumber I need to call.

Here's what the stove looks like. It's not that different from the one we already have, but it is significantly larger and slightly hotter. Stoves are measured in kilowatts. The old one is 8 kW and the new one would be 9 kW. So it would throw off slightly more heat, but not too much for the size of the space we have to heat.

Because the stove is wider and taller, it might look better in our fireplace. Below is a mockup I did, using my photo of the old stove in the fireplace but enlarging the size of the stove in Photoshop, to give us a better idea of how it would look. I like it. One part of getting the new stove will be a good cleaning of the bricks inside the fireplace to remove old soot and freshen everything up.

Now we need to see if it can be installed without ripping out our existing insulation (in the top of the fireplace) and the stainless steel chimney liner (which isn't inexpensive in itself). Meanwhile, we are signing a devis (accepting a bid) today, and sending in a check for part of the total cost, to have the room behind the fireplace redone. It's where Walt has his office and computer, and it's going to look good. Expect photos in June.

The stove saga

Here's what's happening with the process of getting a new wood stove. As I said earlier, we were disappointed that the Invicta people wanted to rip out the insulation and the stainless steel chimney liner in our fireplace and put it all back new before they would put in a new stove. It seemed to us that the fee for doing all that, 2,500 € was slightly over the top. The current fittings are not that old and the chimney liner has been swept annually.

Earlier this week, we went to see a local wood-stove specialist here in Saint-Aignan. He and his wife/office manager (they seem to be a mom-and-pop operation) had nothing good to say about Invicta stoves — calling them shoddy merchandise, basically. I think they just want to sell the brands and models that they want to sell. They deal in Supra stoves, which compete directly with Invicta's and seem to be comparable in features and quality. Both are sold by the major hardware and building-supply stores here in France.

Problem is, the Supra stoves that we like are slightly too big to fit inside our fireplace. And we don't want to have the fireplace torn out, as both the Invicta and Supra people have proposed as part of the deal. We like the look of our tufa-stone cheminée. It was one of the things we found attractive about the house when we bought it 12 years ago, and when you start tearing things out in an old house you never know what extra problems and expenses you might be signing up for.

After we ruled out removing the fireplace, the Supra installer proposed putting in a fireplace insert and closing in the big fireplace opening completely. The insert he wants to sell us has a built-in electric fan, so that would mean running wires to it across the ceiling of the utility room downstairs and up through the tile floor or brick fireplace floor. We don't want an electric "turbo" fan. We had one in our fireplace insert in San Francisco but we couldn't use it because it made way too much noise. Been there, done that. Anyway, the Supra installer's stock answer to every suggestion we made about the job was: « Ah, ça ne serait pas beau ! » In whose opinion, I want to know, would it not be pretty?

Left to right, the current fireplace; the Supra installer's suggestion; and my idea of painting the fireplace front to match the walls.

Besides, the insert he recommends costs nearly 2,000 € all by itself, and the work to install it, including the electricity and the fireplace enclosure (habillage, he called it, or "dressing it up") will probably cost at least another 2,000 € — probably more. That's way over budget. I did a couple of rough mockups in Photoshop to try to get a better idea of what the fireplace might look like, and I'm not happy it. The Supra man wants to sell us a Cadillac solution, when what we want and need is a Toyota. (No offense intended to anyone who drives a Toyota, which is of course a good, comfortable, reliable vehicle. Remember I drive a Peugeot and a Citroën!)

At this point, we are leaning toward just keeping our old stove for another year. We will try to buy logs cut to fit it. That means we can focus on other home-improvement projects this year and think about the stove again at a later date. It's not our primary source of heat for the house, and nowadays we don't even spend evenings by the fire the way we used to, before we had the loft space finished in 2010 and made it into our TV and computer family room.

Meanwhile, we have one more stove installer coming on the 19th to give us a third opinion on the stove and fireplace. We'll see if he can change our minds about postponing the job for another year.

I tossed in a couple of flower pictures to dress this post up. Habillage !

A+, Sancerre

What does A+ mean? It's internet and text message usage to say à plus tard — see you later. (Pronounce the -s of plus.) We only spent a few hours in the Sancerre vineyards but I enjoyed the time. I might have to take the Citroën out of the garage and drive back over there this summer — maybe with CHM when he visits in June.

As you drive west from Sancerre toward the Sologne and the Cher River valley, the land flattens out. The Sologne forest is especially level, and the roads are straight and narrow. The main traffic you have to watch out for is a deer or a boar crossing the highway.

The village just west of Sancerre is Bué, and it's also in one of the prime Sancerre vineyard areas. Drive just a little ways further and you are in the vineyards of Menetou-Salon, where Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir are also the two main varietals grown. The city of Bourges is just 25 miles to the southwest. This is pretty much the geographical center of France

The road toward Henrichemont, Vierzon, Romorantin, and Saint-Aignan seems to disappear into the Sologne forest land pretty soon. I mentioned deer and boars as traffic hazards, but I should also mention tractors. The first one we encountered, coming up behind it and moving much faster that it was moving, was a tractor pulling a load of firewood on a trailer.

This Sologne style tractor-trailer rig didn't slow us down much. As you can see, it was easy to pass it on such a straight, flat highway with no other cars, trucks, or tractors coming the other way. A+, le tracteur.

Sancerre's landscapes and wines

“It might well surprise the vignerons [grape-growers who produce wine] of Sancerre and Pouilly, the uppermost of the mainstream Loire Vineyards, to learn what a profound influence their produce has had on forming modern tastes in white wine. It is an area of generally small and unsophisticated properties...” I'm quoting from Hugh Johnson's 1983 Modern Encyclopedia of Wine, a book that Walt gave me as a Christmas present in 1985.

Nevertheless, Johnson continues, the Sancerre-Pouilly wine area “...has an easily recognizable style of wine, pungent and cutting, with the smell and acidity of Sauvignon Blanc grown in a cool climate.” While far more Sauvignon Blanc is grown in the more southerly, warmer Bordeaux vineyards, down there “its wine never smelt and tasted so powerfully characteristic” as does the wine from the same grape grown on the upper Loire River. In Bordeaux, the tradition is to blend Savuvignon Blanc with the smoother and more neutral wine made from Sémillon gapes.

In fact, the world really only discovered how good Sauvignon Blanc was through the efforts of the vignerons of Sancerre and Pouilly, Johnson says. “Successful Sancerres and Pouilly Fumés have an attractive smell and taste of blackcurrents, leaves and all, and a natural high acidity which makes them distinctively bracing.” Because of their high acidity, Sancerre wines can benefit from two or three years aging in the bottle.

Sancerre wines only became really popular in Paris in the 1960s and 1970s, with the opening of the café-restaurant called Le Sancerre in the eastern part of the city (the 12th). (There is another restaurant called Le Sancerre on the other side of the city, near the Eiffel Tower.) Like most of France's vineyards, Sancerre and Pouilly had been wiped out by the phylloxera epidemic, caused by an insect imported from North America, in the late 19th century. It took decades for the vines to recover.

Sancerre's white wines earned the AOC label in the 1930s. The area also makes reds and rosés (less than 20% of total production) from the Pinot Noir grape, which is more often associated with Burgundy wines. Those earned the AOC later, and are still not much known outside the Sancerre region. Sauvignon Blanc is now grown extensively around the world, from California to New Zealand, and from Italy to Chile. Good Sauvignon Blanc aims to have the taste of Sancerre, not the milder taste of Bordeaux whites.

Sancerre and other things, like stoves

Here are a few more photos of the Sancerre area, two hours east of Saint-Aignan and two hours south of Paris by car. We drove through there last October and spent some time looking at the scenery. The Sancerre vineyards and villages don't look that much different from the Loire Valley (Touraine) vineyards, except for one thing: it's much hillier over there.

As I've mentioned, Sancerre's white wines are the standard for fine Sauvignon Blanc wines in France and even worldwide. A lot of Sauvignon grapes are grown around the eastern Loire Valley (Touraine) and a lot of good Sauvignon Blanc wine is made here. If you order a white wine in a Paris café, you'll probably get a  Sauvignon made in Touraine. And the standard for what that should taste like is Sancerre wine.

But don't get the idea that Sancerre (or Touraine, or even Champagne) is a prettied-up, pristine environment. Grape-growing and wine-making are rural activities, and the atmosphere in wine regions might be more rural than you think. It's farming. Expect to see scenes like the one below. And also scenes like the others shown in this post. It's pretty but real.

The little town of Sancerre sits on a hilltop (below), with views over the surrounding vineyards and countryside. We didn't go up into the town this time, because we were on our way home and eager to get here. We've been to Sancerre several times before — once 25 years ago, and again about 15 years ago. And as I said, the area, which is on the banks of the Loire River but not really in what is called Le Val de Loire, where the châteaux are, isn't all that different from where we live except for the hilly terrain.

Oh, about stoves — yesterday we visited two places that sell and install wood stoves, one in Saint-Aignan and the other across the river in Noyers-sur-Cher. The first place is sending out a man to examine our current stove and chimney, and to measure the house, to see what stove he might recommend for our situation. I predict that his estimate of the cost will match or exceed the 2,500 € estimate we got from Invicta.

Maybe a stove like this one would be nice in our fireplace.

Or this one.

By the way, when we asked if this vendor deals in Invicta stoves, the answer was « Surtout pas ! » — "God no!" They are cheap stoves made with very thin cast iron that is manufactured in and imported from China, the woman said with a certain amount of disdain. Invicta stoves are of poor quality even though they are assembled in France, and they don't give off a lot of heat. So there.

The second shop we went to is the one where we bought our first stove back in 2006 and paid, yes, 2,500 € for, all included. Clés en main, as they say. The question we asked there is if they think we need to tear out the existing insulation and chimney liner. No, we were told. The existing 9-year-old insulation and liner should be just fine. They'll send somebody out to examine the installation and the house before the end of May and work up a bid.

Zipping through Sancerre

Sancerre is only about 130 km (80 miles) from Saint-Aignan, but it's not that easy to get there. The mapping sites usually send you on long detours, sticking to main roads either through Bourges to the south or Orléans to the north. Meanwhile, the most direct route goes on narrow lanes through the forested Sologne region from one tiny village to another — Mennetou-sur-Cher, Theillay, Neuvy-sur-Barangeon, Méry-ès-Bois, Henrichemont, etc. — all of which feel remote, rural, and lost in time. It's easy to take a wrong turn.

It's worth the trip though. Last October, on our way back from Burgundy, we drove through the Sancerre vineyards. A blog reader in America had told Walt that he'd bought a bottle of fine Sancerre wine, and we thought we'd go find the winery where it was made. We did find it, after much searching — enjoying the scenery — but it was noontime and the place was closed. We drove on, stopping in a supermarket just below Sancerre itself to buy sandwiches for a roadside picnic and a few bottles of the local wine to take home.

The most famous wines of Sancerre are very dry, steely Sauvignon Blanc whites. It's just across the river from Pouilly-sur-Loire. At this point, the Loire is flowing north before taking the big bend that puts it on its course westward through Orléans, Blois, Tours, Saumur, and Nantes. Pouilly also makes Sauvignon Blanc. "Its character is often described as gunflint...", Hugh Johnson writes of both wines in his Worldwide Atlas of Wine, "...it is smoky, sightly green, slightly spicy and appeals to most people intensely at first with its summery style." The vignerons of Sancerre also make red and rosé wines from the Pinot Noir grape. Our local Touraine wine-makers work hard to make white wines that have the excellent qualities of Sancerre and Pouilly Fumé whites.

The photo above shows the main intersection in the village called Sury-en-Vaux, just north of the town of Sancerre (pop. 1,500 — not a typo). Sury is in the center of one of the prime local grape-growing areas. The word vaux in its name means "valleys" and you can see them in a couple of my photos.

Yesterday I read a blog written by a woman from Boston who recently spent a few weeks at a language school in Sancerre. Here's a link to her blog, Truffles and Tribulations.

Two local landmarks

When you see the Château de Saint-Aignan from behind, as in the banner photo of it with the town's church as well, you'd never guess that it might look like this on the other side. It's not open to the public, though you can go up to the terrace and have a look around. (You can enlarge the photo by clicking or tapping on it.)

Just a few minutes' drive southeast of Saint-Aignan is the village of Châteauvieux, which is picturesque. It's know for its wines. The château there is occupied by a retirement home.

I reached back nine years to find these photos. We had a rainy day yesterday, and it's not supposed to be much better today. Planting the garden has to be postponed until the ground can dry out again. This happens a lot of years.