Les années passent...

I went down into the village for a haircut yesterday morning. Amélie had given me an 8 a.m. appointment. Walt had had his haircut a couple of days earlier, and when he got home he said the village was sporting some nice holiday lights and decorations.

The village of Mareuil-sur-Cher before dawn on 17 Dec. 2015

I took my camera with me when I drove into the village center around 7:45. It was still dark so the photos aren't great. The weather here continues to be weirdly mild. I guess that big mass of warm air that was located over the eastern U.S. has made it's way across the Atlantic Ocean, following the Gulf Stream. It's over 11ºC this morning (low 50s), and yesterday's high temperature was 16ºC (low 60s). In Fahrenheit, that's nearly 20 degrees warmer than normal.

Amélie is the young woman who took over the salon de coiffure in the village when Mme Barbier finally threw in the towel 2 or 3 years ago. It was fun having a barber named "Mrs. Barber" and she was a very good barber, but she moved on. I've heard that she quit the business because she developed allergies to the chemicals a coiffeuse has to work with everyday. She apparently found a job at the local zoo, the Zooparc de Beauval. Good for her.

Another recent event has been the shutting down of the Garage Danger in Saint-Aignan. That's where I bought our little Peugeot 206 back in the summer 2003. The owner's name was Thierry Danger [dawn-ZHAY] (and still is I hope). The car has Garage Danger written on the hatch lid. It looks more like some kind of warning message than a car dealer's name. Now the Citroën dealer across the river in Noyers-sur-Cher is selling new Peugeots alongside his line of new and used Citroëns. The two car brands are made by the same company anyway.

Oh, and our dentist that we really liked, Dr. Christian Bigot [bee-GOH], retired a few years ago too. Plus ça change...

Cornmeal dumplings — steamed dough

Linguists and etymologists don't seem to know where the term "dumpling" came from. Some imagine that there was in some old language a word like "dump" as a noun, but don't really say what it might have meant or where it would have come from. "Dumpling" would be its diminutive form. I wonder if the word "damp" has anything to do with it. A "dampling" could be a little piece of bread dough cooked in liquid or in a steamer. I'm just speculating.

In French, there are two words for dumpling — une quenelle or une boulette. Quenelles are often dumplings made with pureed meat, poultry, or fish in the dough, and they are shaped like a rugby ball or a U.S. football. Boulettes can be meatballs (boulettes de viande) or they can be vegetable or just plain bread dumplings, like the cornmeal dumplings I made yesterday. They are often cooked in and served with greens, soups, or stews.

My mother, like most North Carolina cooks, often made cornmeal dumplings to serve with collard (or other) greens, or with coastal specialties like stewed hard crabs. I have her recipes, handed down through the family. The dumplings are made with corn "meal" or semolina, with a small amount of wheat flour if you want, plus some salt and sugar, and some baking soda or baking powder. The liquid is water.

For my dumplings, I decided to make the kind of dough that people in the U.S. South cook in deep fat to make "hushpuppies" — fried cornbread. It's about the same thing as the dumpling mixture described above, but the liquid is either milk, buttermilk, or, in my case, plain yogurt, and the dough has an egg in it, to hold it together as it steams and to enrich it slightly. The recipe is simple.

Hushpuppy dumplings

8 oz. (450 grams) cornmeal (polenta in France)

1 tsp. each of salt, sugar, and baking soda or powder

4 fl. oz. (½ cup) plain yogurt

milk or water as needed for consistency

Mix all ingredients together, adding a very small amount of water or milk as needed to produce a stiff dough. Roll pieces of dough into balls about the size of a golf or ping-pong ball, or whatever shape you like. Steam the dough over boiling water for 15 to 20 minutes, or "float" them on top of a pot of greens or a thick stew to steam through. Serve hot.

You can add herbs, grated onion, grated cheese, or black pepper or other spices, to the dumpling dough as you see fit. You can make similar dumplings using wheat semolina instead of cornmeal, I'm sure. There you have it. "Damp bread" or dumplings. They are light, tender, and bready inside.

Les Bouleaux et les terres pauvres

« Les bouleaux poussent en général sur les terres pauvres et souvent siliceuses... » — "Birches generally grow in places where the soil is poor, and often siliceous..." That means that birch trees like soil that is composed of quartz sand and flint. That describes the region we live in. Flint stone was a major industry in the Cher river valley — at Meusnes, for example, a village just seven or eight miles upriver from Saint-Aignan.

Our house has a name. It's called Les Bouleaux, and there's a sign saying that on the front of the house. The term bouleau has both Celtic and Latin origins, apparently. I don't know if giving houses a name was an affectation, or if the custom dates back to a time when the houses in our hamlet didn't have street numbers. At least three other houses in our hamlet have names, including Bella Vista, La Grange, and La Ruine. Ours is The Birches, and there are birches in our yard (and in the photos here).

« Les bouleaux sont des plantes pionnières qui constituent souvent la première formation arborée lors de la reconquête ou de la colonisation de landes par la forêt. Ils apprécient les sols plutôt acides et humides. » I'm quoting the French Wikipédia article about birches, which are described as "pioneer plants" that often are the first trees to grow when "heath" or "moor" (scrub) land is taken over by forest. "Birches like acidic, damp soils," it says.

I think grapes also like poor soils. People here describe the land all around our house as « de la terre à vignes » or "grapevine soil" that is very different from the rich river valley soils down the hill from us by just a few hundred meters. That's why we have worked hard over the past 12 years to improve the soil in our back yard garden plots by tilling a lot of compost into it every spring. Considering how poor the soil is, we've done pretty well with our vegetable gardens.

Greens in duck broth

Seafood is not the only thing you can buy at the Saint-Aignan market on Saturday mornings. There's a cheese vendor with a wide range of French cheeses, and there's a man who sells just local goat cheese, which he makes on his farm just a mile or two from us. There's a beef butcher, a poultry butcher, and a horse butcher, and there are at least two pork butchers. And there are of course several vendors selling fresh fruits and vegetables.

Meanwhile, when it comes to winter vegetables, I've laid in our supply of one leafy green that I can't otherwise find on the markets or in the supermarkets around Saint-Aignan. It's ... guess what ... collard greens. I harvested about a bushel of big dark green leaves last week. This was my third harvest of greens since summer, if I remember correctly.

I couldn't bring myself to try to make the greens into kraut because I wasn't confident I knew how to do it. I didn't want to waste my crop. So I cooked the greens the way I usually do, with a couple of differences. In the freezer, I found a liter of liquid I'd labeled as duck broth. There was also some "pot liquor" or collard broth in a smaller container. Those two finds gave me enough liquid to cook all the collards I had harvested.

And how big was the harvest? Well, after a long slow cooking — I also added some white wine to the pot, I'll admit — I ended up with about six quarts (liters) of greens. We ate some for a couple of days. Then I put the greens up in plastic containers for the freezer. (There are enough leaves left on the plants out in the garden for another harvest, by the way — if we don't have a killing freeze any time soon.)




That gave me nine pints, or 4½ quarts of greens. I put the cooked greens in the containers and then filled them with enough of the cooking liquid to fill each container. I weighed them and each container came in between 525 and 575 grams — more than a pound. Ten pounds of greens should get us through the winter. I see cornmeal dumplings in my future.

Coquillages et crustacés

Here are a few more pictures I took at the Saturday morning market in Saint-Aignan day before yesterday. It was a gray morning, but not nearly as foggy as yesterday, when thick fog stayed on the ground all day long. In the photo below, you can see Walt standing in line in the next-to-last position.

I was surprised that the market wasn't more crowded, this close to Christmas, but we were there early. Maybe more shoppers showed up later in the morning. Usually, the line at the seafood vendor's stall is much longer.

What we went to the market to buy was coques, or cockles (above). These are tiny ones, but they are delicious cooked in olive oil and white wine with onion, garlic, and fresh herbs, in the style of linguine with white clam sauce. The most important step in preparing the bivalves is to put them, live, into a bowl of cold salted water (30 grams per liter) for an hour or two to purge them of sand. Putting in a tablespoon or two of raw wheat semolina or corn meal helps. The cockles (or clams) ingest the semolina or meal and excrete any sand that might be in their digestive tract.

Above are some more of the shrimp (or prawns, if you prefer the term) that were on sale Saturday morning. Again they are sold already cooked. These are organically raised gambas from the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. I couldn't see the price, but I bet they weren't giving them away.

Bulots (above) are little sea snails, like whelks or conchs, that are sold cooked as well. People eat them cold with mayonnaise, pulling them out of their shells with little forks. They are slightly rubbery, but I like them. You usually see them, along with oysters, shrimp, crab, and other shellfish on seafood platters — plateaux de fruits de mer — in France, along with the even smaller gastropods called bigorneaux, visible at the bottom of the photo above.

Sorry for the blurry picture above, but it was the best I could do. These are langoustines, sold raw rather than cooked. They have a harder shell than shrimp or prawns, making them more like tiny lobsters. In the British Isles, they are nonetheless known as Dublin Bay prawns, and in other countries they're called by the Italian term scampi. By the way, the English word "shellfish" includes what in French are called both coquillages and crustacés.

Finally, here are some clams. They're called palourdes in French. Similar mollusks are called praires, and then there are amandes ("almonds" a.k.a. dog clams), cockles, and lavagnons, a specialty down around the Ile d'Oléron. Most of the common names of such bivalves are ambiguous, being applied to various species regionally or for culinary purposes.

“Fruits of the sea”

That describes what I saw at the open-air market in Saint-Aignan yesterday. Fruits de mer. It's the holiday season, and people's thoughts here in France turn to seafood. Crab, shrimp, prawns, gambas, oysters...

Saint-Aignan is lucky to have a seafood vendor who drives up here every Saturday and sets up a big stand on the market square to sell about the best seafood you'll find anywhere. The seafood people come from the coast near the Ile d'Oléron, about four hours south of us and an hour or so north of Bordeaux.

The big stone crabs above, sold cooked, are going for for 14 euros per kilogram — that's about 7 U.S. dollars a pound. The crab claws are selling for 26 euros a kilo, or just over $12 per pound. I bet they are both really good, but I didn't buy any.

There are also shrimp, or what you might call prawns. They're almost always sold already cooked here in France. The ones above are advertised as "wild" — in other words, not farmed. They're priced at 48 euros per kilo, or about $24 a pound in U.S. terms. Yikes! The euro is trading at about $1.10 U.S. right now.

There are different kinds of shrimp/prawns in the photo above. The big ones in the middle are, I think, farmed, and they're imported from Ecuador. You can get them for about $8/pound. On the right you see crevettes grises, or gray shrimp. They're tiny. They cost more than the aquaculture shrimp and supposedly have better flavor. I don't think I've ever tried them.

Confit de canard, and some photos for a Saturday

Here are some more of my photos from last Tuesday's morning walk around the vineyard. It was a beautiful day and weirdly warm. It's warm again this morning — about 8ºC — near 50ºF. That's at 6:30 a.m. The weather forecasts I saw yesterday said we should expect unseasonably mild weather right up until Christmas.

Vines in the Renaudière vineyard outside Saint-Aignan

Speaking of the holidays, I went shopping at SuperU yesterday. It's our biggest local supermarket. The store was a madhouse. People were crowded into the meat department, especially. It was hard to maneuver your shopping cart up and down the aisles in general. The Christmas rush is on.

A walnut tree out on the gravel road through the vines

I went looking around in the meat department too. What I found was two packages of duck leg/thigh pieces — six of them in all. I'm going to make confit de canard, which is duck pieces first salted and seasoned and then slow-cooked in duck fat. I'll take some photos and blog about it.

Vines espaliered on the stone wall of a storage shed in the vineyard

I want to make the duck confit now because it gets better if it "cures" for a few days or weeks in the duck fat you cook it in. Because it's sealed in fat and protected from the air, it just needs to be stored for that amount of time in a fairly chilly place like our cold pantry downstairs. The duck confit will be part of our New Year's Day dinner.

Winter flowers

Walt just told me that the temperature went down to 0ºC in the middle of the night. It got so cold that the boiler kicked in and the radiators warmed up for a few minutes despite our low nighttime thermostat setting. So our warm weather has ended for the time being. Yesterday's high was about 5ºC (40ºF). That's more December-like.

If you read our blogs much, you might remember that Walt took cuttings from a big hydrangea in our yard a couple of years ago and rooted them. He replanted the beds in front of the house with them. They have been a success. They're on the east side of the house and seem to like the afternoon shade.

It's nice to have some December flowers, even if they are drying now. Some of the hydrangea (or hortensia) blossoms still have color. Others are almost green. The names "hydrangea" and "hortensia" seem to be interchangeable, but I've always called them hydrangeas. Hortensia is the French name.

It's supposed to be gray and foggy today. I have a few more photos from my Tuesday morning walk that I want to post, and then I might go back to my "Decembers past" series for a few more days. We actually went to a restaurant last week, so maybe I'll post some photos from that rare event.

In preparation for the holiday season — Walt's birthday, Christmas, and New Year's Day all in a two-week span — we are doing our best these days to eat out of the garden and the freezer. Much of what we have in the big chest freezer downstairs is produce from the summer and fall vegetable garden, so garden and freezer amount to the same thing.

We plan to roast a turkey for Christmas, and then have oysters on the half-shell for New Year's Eve. I'll probably cook black-eyed peas for New Year's Day, following the Southern tradtion — maybe with some duck (confit de canard). As usual, Walt's birthday dinner will be French steak au poivre — a nice leans beefsteak cooked rare and served with a creamy black pepper sauce. This will be year 34 for that tradition.

Late fall colors

I think the weather has just barely been cold enough this autumn for the trees around us to take on their golden fall colors. A lot of the golden trees are oaks, which keep their leaves all through the winter, until new growth appears in the spring. Below you see the road that runs along the edge of the vineyard. It's typical of local roads and is about 10 feet wide. Two cars can't really pass without one or both of them driving slightly off the edge of the pavement.

Notice the deep ditch on one side of the road. That keeps driving interesting. In most locales, as below, the autumn colors are subtle, but they're accentuated by the bright green of the grass and the blues and grays of the autumn sky. That's true on days when it's not too foggy. December is fog season here. High pressure systems hold moisture close to the ground, which is not yet very cold, causing fog to form.

In many places around the vineyard, the ground is carpeted with brown, golden, or yellow leaves. Here's Callie posing. She doesn't like it. She'll stand facing away from me as I hold the camera. I have to say her name two or three times and almost beg her to look at me. She finally does.

Here's the view from the back yard out over the vineyard. It's all in contrasting greens and oranges, with a foggy or overcast sky that's often a pale gray or even white. We have had some frost and light freezes — you can see nasturtium, bell pepper, and eggplant plants in the garden that have died of frostbite.

Today is the day I've chosen to go out and pick more leaves off my collard plants. I'm trying to decide whether to try making collard kraut or just go ahead and cook the collard greens the way I usually do, with some duck fat, white wine, salt and pepper, and hot red pepper flakes. I don't think I have the right kind of salt to do kraut, so that might have to wait until later.

BTW, I took all these photos with my Canon sx700 camera, not with the Panasonic TZ60.

December present

After writing what I wrote yesterday about how dark it is on my morning walks with Callie — we watch the sun come up when we're out there between 8:30 and 9:00 — yesterday morning dawned clear and beautiful. And weirdly warm, for this time of year. It was very pleasant.

Above, Callie was watching the sun rise through the as yet untrimmed vines. People are working out there, pruning everything back for the winter, but this vineyard plot hasn't been touched so far. The photo was backlit and the foreground was totally dark, so I had to lighten it up using Photoshop. It turned out to be in black and white.

Here I'm looking toward the northeast. Toward Paris, in other words. Clouds were moving in from the west, but the sunrise was pretty for us. It rained lightly in the afternoon.

This view is looking south-southeast. In summertime, the sun comes up in the northeast here, but in winter it rises far to the south. All that is normal and we've gotten used to it, but the warm temperatures we're having this December are not what we'd normally expect.

Decembers past [2]

The darkness of December... These are the times when it's hard for me to take photos on my early morning and late afternoon walks with Callie. So I've been going back into my archives to see what images I have from all the different months of December since we've lived here. It's been nearly 13 years now.

For example, above is a view of the vineyards about a mile out behind our house. The photo's time stamp says it was taken on December 10, 2005, at 4:17 p.m. I like the golden color that the vineyards were displaying that year in December. I remember that 2005 had given us a summer at least as nice as the very warm, dry summer we had in 2015.

Going back into old photos also reminded me that the dog named Collette who came to France with us all those years ago was near the end of her life in December 2005, but we didn't know it yet. She had certainly already slowed down and was clearly a senior canine at age 14. She was active and beautiful right up to the end. She passed away in March 2006, victim of a stroke, and we brought Callie into the household in May 2007.

And then I noticed this photo of our back yard and what was left of the vegetable garden that year. It looks pretty similar to the scene out there in 2015. And guess what — that's a little collard patch in the 2005 garden. I think that was my first try at growing collard greens in France, and it was a great success. Some things just don't change. One of our main reasons for moving to this region and into this house was that we'd be able to have a big vegetable garden.

Decembers past [1]

Here's what you might expect our place to look like in December. This is a photo from 2009.

Instead, in 2015, it looks like this:

Temperatures today are supposed to be 6ºC above average — that's 10ºF — with a high in the mid-50s in degrees F. Maybe the weather will change, but this looks like it might be our third strangely mild winter in a row.

Sunday dinner

I've been up since 5:15 preparing today's main meal. It's going to be choucroute garnie — sauerkraut with smoked meat and sausages, boiled potatoes and... yes, carrots. This is not the first time I've ever made choucroute in the Alsatian style (more or less) but adapted to our tastes. Sometimes I serve it with smoked chicken, for example, instead of just smoked pork.

Choucroute simmering in the slow-cooker, with spices and herbs contained in a spice ball

If there's one thing I want to say about choucroute as it is prepared and served in France, it's that... It. Does. Not. Contain. Any. Vinegar. It might be vinegary as it is prepared in your country, but not here. French sauerkraut is "white" cabbage that has been shredded finely and cured for weeks or even months in salt and brine. It ferments and develops its special character. I like to buy it "raw" and cook it myself rather than buying it pre-cooked. (I'm actually planning to make some "collard kraut" later this week — it's something people make in North Carolina.)

Two kinds of sausage — smoked Montbéliard and saucisses de Strasbourg

The fermented vegetable is much easier to digest than fresh cabbage is, and the vitamins in the cabbage are released in forms that the human body can more easily absorb. That's the theory, at least. Once you rinse the sauerkraut thoroughly to get rid of excess salt and the smell of fermentation, you cook it in white wine (or beer, but hey... this is France) with onions and seasonings that include bay leaves, black peppercorns, and juniper berries.

Very lean carré de porc fumé (smoked pork loin) and thick slices of smoked bacon

Okay, I'll stop there for today. There is still much to do. We're going out to a marché de Noël later this morning. It's being set up at a wine cooperative in the village of Saint-Romain-sur-Cher, just 5 or 6 miles north of Saint-Aignan. We're hoping to buy snails, foie gras, goat cheeses, and, of course, wine, to enjoy over the coming holiday season. Then we'll come home and lunch on the choucroute garnie, which will be keeping warm in the slow-cooker.

Trees big and small

Yesterday I mentioned the vineyard plots down the hill to the north of our house. The lowest plot is planted in Chardonnay grapes, and the one above it in either Gamay or Cabernet Franc. (I'm not very good at identifying the different varietals.) Callie likes to walk down there, and we do so every other day.

A lot of the woods around here are made up of smallish trees. I used to think most trees in France were fairly small because we are so far north. Now I understand it's because so many of the woods are managed by the local people. Trees are harvested for firewood, or now pellets, on a regular schedule. When the oaks reach a medium size, they're cut down and sawed into logs. New ones grow up fairly quickly. I've seen the process repeated in many places around the vineyard.

The big tree above is one that got a way. It and a couple of other trees around it have grown to an impressive size, as you can see. Other enormous trees around here include pines, cedars, and other conifers. There are tall poplars, linden trees, and cottonwood trees too. One of the tallest trees in the area is the big Deodar or Himalyan cedar in our yard, which you'll see in many of our photos (here near the house, and here, on the right).

There are a lot of small fruit trees all around us too — apples, pears, plums, cherries, peaches, and figs grow in abundance. The tree in the photo above is a néflier. It grows to as tall as 6 meters, about 20 feet, and in English is called a medlar tree. The fruit is called a nèfle or medlar and is harvested after the first freeze in autumn to be eaten raw or made into jelly. Medlars have been cultivated in Asia Minor and southeastern Europe for three thousand years. I've never tasted one myself. This tree is in the neighbors' yard and the neighbors harvest the medlars as soon as there has been a cold snap in October or November.

Out walking at sunrise

Since the sun doesn't rise until nearly 8:30 these days, it's not too hard to be outside with the dog at dawn. The four photos below are displayed in chronological order. I took them over a span of about 10 minutes a few mornings ago. I'm getting ready to go out with this dog this morning, but in the opposite direction. It's still completely dark at 7:30 8:00...

Most of the Renaudière vineyard is out west of our house, but the vines in fact wrap around us on three sides. The north side is a fairly steep slope down toward a wooded ravine and a stream. Callie likes to walk down the path through those woods, but it's pretty muddy in wintertime.

For these photos, I went out into the rows of vines that are east of our house. It was between 8:15 and 8:30 a.m. The sun rises far toward the south in this season. As you might notice, our weather has been very mild so far this year.

The trees are a mixture of conifers and hardwoods. You can see quite a bit of mistletoe in some of them. Mistletoe (le gui in French) is parasitic and grows in big balls on certain tree species. It likes apple and poplar trees, among others.

Over the next three or four days, we're predicted to have weather conditions that would be more typical of spring than late autumn. We're hoping for some cold weather this winter, and even some snow and ice. The last two winters have been very mild overall, with very few if any hard freezes. It's amazing  when you think that Saint-Aignan is as far north as Quebec City in Canada or the northern part of the state of Maine.