Le déshydrateur

C'est l'appareil qui fait la déshydratation. I decided it was time to try one, and I found one on Amazon.fr for about 45 euros ($50). I'm not sure how much we will use it, but I'm sure we'll at least use it during tomato season each year. I also have a huge crate of walnuts in the garage that I'll try to crack open and dehydrate this winter.

Loaded up and ready to go

Yesterday I prepared enough tomatoes to fill three dehydrator trays. I used mostly small Juliet tomatoes, which are like mini-Romas. All I had to do was to cut each tomato in half and cut out the core. That took a while, but it's a kind of work I don't mind doing.

I had three full trays and one partial tray of tomatoes like this for our trial run.

I had some room left over inside the machine, so I sliced up a couple of zucchinis and an eggplant, just to see how well they would dehydrate. I turned the dehydrator on at about 11 a.m. and let it run for 10 hours at a temperature of 60ºC / 140ºF.

Here's how the tomatoes looked this morning after 10 hours of drying and 10 hours of resting overnight.

Because it's a new machine and because we want to watch the progress of the vegetables we're drying this first time, I turned the machine off at bedtime and just let it sit there, all loaded up, overnight. This morning, I can see that one tray of tomatoes is much dryer than the other two. The thinner slices of eggplant and zucchini are pretty much ready, but some thicker slices will take more time.

These thin slices of eggplant and zucchini are almost ready to take out and pack for storage.

The book that came with the dehydrator says to remove the vegetables that look sufficiently dried out as you go, leaving the others in the machine for a longer time. You want the vegetables to be completely dried out but not crispy. I haven't yet decided how I'll pack the tomatoes for storage when they're done. The easiest thing to do would be to freeze them, but I might put them up in jars the way I did the oven-dried tomatoes I made a few days ago.

Here's how it looked when I inspected the dehydrator this morning and turned it back on.

The dehydrator itself gets good customer reviews on Amazon.fr. The main criticism is that the plastic trays seem pretty fragile, so you have to handle them carefully. Noted.... The dehydrator can be set to run at different temperatures, from 35º to 70ºC (95º to 160ºF). It doesn't have an on/off timer, but I can use a lamp timer to add that option.

Sweating it out

The grapes and I are still waiting. On the news I hear that southern England experienced its hottest September day yesterday since 1911. The temperature topped out at 34ºC, which is about 93 or 94 in ºF. At our house near Saint-Aignan, it didn't get quite that hot, but it did hit 90. Humidity was low.

Not all the wine grapes grown around here are destined to become red wine, of course.

The local white wine varietals, mainly Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc, but also some Chardonnay, look ripe now too.

Dry leaves and fat grapes out in the Renaudière vineyard

Walt keeps bringing in buckets of ripe tomatoes every morning. I'll be drying more of them today, but not in the oven. I took commenter Tim's advice and bought a dehydrator. It was delivered yesterday, and we'll find out this afternoon and evening how well it works. More about that tomorrow...

Change of season?

Today may well be the last summer-like day of 2016 here in Saint-Aignan. The temperature is supposed to hit 90ºF, and maybe 95, according to the weather sites we keep track of. Looking at historical averages, we would expect a temperature in the low 70s on this date. We can't complain. We have had a fantastic season, with only a few days that were unbearably hot. Mostly it's been pleasant since mid-June — dry and sunny.

We are expecting rain starting tomorrow and much cooler weather here at La Renaudière, in the vineyards outside Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher. It doesn't show in my photo above, but the grass is parched and brown all around. The grapevines, hedges, and trees stay green because they have deep roots. That's our house, surrounded by tall trees, in the middle of the picture (with a neighbor's to the right) and the river valley as a backdrop.

I'm looking forward to the change in the weather and the advent of a new season. The vegetable garden, except for the kale and the winter squash plants, is winding down now. Walt made six liters of tomato sauce yesterday, and he pulled out the three rows of green bean plants that have been so productive and threw them on the compost pile. I harvested and cooked kale. Signs of change... but still no sign that the grape harvest has begun.

Something simple

I've been blogging a lot recently about preparing tomatoes for long-term storage, and this morning we have about 6 liters of tomato sauce bubbling away on the stove. But sometimes when nature and hard work give you bumper crops of tomatoes, zucchini, and eggplants, you just want to eat them fresh.

Besides tomato salads and caviar de courgettes (zucchini "caviar" as a dip), what about a kind of salsa fresca as a pasta sauce? Roughy chopped tomatoes, zucchini, and eggplant, just barely cooked with onion, herbs, and maybe a splash of white or rosé wine, to have with penne pasta...

This morning my project is to go cut some lacinato kale leaves and get them washed and trimmed for lunch. We'll have the kale blanched and then sautéed with garlic and spices, alongside a helping of pulled pork that I made a week or two ago and put in the freezer. The temperature this afternoon is supposed to approach 90ºF (30+ in ºC).

A summer Saturday

Thursday afternoon we had a very pleasant surprise. Walt was out walking Callie in the vineyard, and I decided to get a basket of laundry together and take it down to load the washing machine so we could let it run overnight. (Night rates are cheaper than day rates for electricity.) As I walked down the stairs, I heard a clang that sounded like the bell on our front gate.

We weren't expecting anybody, and it's rare that anybody comes and rings the bell out of the blue. What a surprise it was when I discovered that it was our old friend S. It was almost a shock, but a good shock. S. is English, and moved back to England four years ago after living here in the Saint-Aignan area for several decades. Her French partner, who was a friend of ours for several years before S. even met him, died suddenly back in 2009.

So yesterday S. came over for lunch. We sat outside on the terrace, taking advantage of our still-summery afternoon weather, and ate garden tomatoes and green beans, among other things. We talked about her life in England, which is a country that Walt and I have little familiarity with except through conversations with English ex-pats we encounter here in France. We talked about how life is changing in Saint-Aignan and the Loire Valley. We exchanged news of mutual friends who live around here.

I'm decorating this post with a few photos of late-summer flowers and grapes.

S.'s trip was last-minute and very short — she was only here for three days! She traveled over by car with an Irish friend who owns a house here, near Montrichard, but is spending more and more of her time in England these days. The friend's house is on the market, if you are interested. The two women drove down to the English port town of Newhaven, south of London, and took the car ferry across the Channel to Dieppe, in Normandy. It's a four-hour boat ride, and then a five-hour drive from Dieppe to Saint-Aignan. They left to go back this morning.

S. said that while she misses the life she had in France and her many friends here, she is glad she went back to the U.K. to live, especially in light of the recent Brexit vote. She has a retirement pension that is paid in British pounds, and it's not a huge amount each month. Since Brexit, the pound sterling has dropped significantly in value against the euro. Walt and I know what that's like, because for the first 5 or 6 years we lived over here we watched the value of the U.S. dollar fall steadily against the euro.

We skimped and scrimped, and we did our best to keep expenses down. We didn't know how low the dollar might go. At the dollar's low point, one euro was worth $1.60, compared to the $1.06 the euro was worth when we put the down payment on our house here in December 2002. In other words, our dollars had lost about 50% of their value is a very short time.

It was scary to see our resources dwindle as a result of all that. Nowadays the euro is worth only $1.12, approximately. And since we are now both collecting our American retirement pensions, we are feeling fairly flush, at least compared to our situation five or six years ago — though it's all relative. Our situation could change for the worse again very quickly, depending on economic conditions and political events in the U.S. or in Europe.

So S. says she has no plan to try to return to France now that the British have voted to pull out of the European Union. It would be too risky for her, on her budget and given the political situation. The British pound may not recover quickly — nobody knows what will happen. Living in one country on income derived from another country, and paid in a different currency is — as they say about old age — "not for sissies." You are subject to forces and events that are completely out of your control.

Anticipation

Not only are tomatoes ripening all around, but so are grapes. We are anticipating the beginning of the harvest any day now. Walt already saw a group of people harvesting grapes by hand (vendanges manuelles) in one vineyard plot a few days ago.

Most of the harvesting done around here is "mechanical" — it's done not by crews of vineyard workers but by machine, the way corn and other crops are harvested.

Grape-growers are not free to start harvesting any time they want to. They wait for local and national authorities to give the go-ahead. Weather has a lot to do with fixing the date for lifting the "ban" on harvesting every year.

The big mechanical harvesters will be out there soon, and the harvest will take only a few days. Some grape varieties are taken in earlier than others. I'm sure the growers are anxious to get started, because we are seeing predictions of rain for the middle of next week.

Tomates confites

The main differences between oven-dried tomatoes and tomates confites (slow-roasted tomatoes) are seasonings and cooking time. They stay in the oven less that half the time compared to dried tomatoes.

You prepare the tomatoes for roasting the same way as for drying. Cut small tomatoes in half or slightly larger ones into four pieces. Optionally, you can remove the seeds and juice from each tomato. The ones in the photo above are seasoned, and the ones below have also been tossed in olive oil.

And then, still before cooking them, you season them. Put them in a big bowl and sprinkle salt, pepper, and herbs over them. Some garlic is good too. Toss them to distribute all the seasonings. I used dried oregano and dried thyme, along with a little bit of cayenne pepper. Let the tomatoes macerate in the oil, spices, and herbs for two to four hours.

Tomates confites are seasoned and then slowly roasted in the oven at low temperature for three hours.

Then pour on some olive oil and toss the tomatoes again. You don't need a lot, but any extra that you find in the bottom of the bowl, along with the juice from the tomatoes, can be used as a flavorful salad dressing. The tomatoes in the photo above have been roasted and are ready to serve and eat.

Take the seasoned and oiled tomato pieces out of the bowl with a slotted spoon or your fingers and arrange them on baking pans or dishes as you would if you were drying them. It's a little messier because of the olive oil.

Put them in the oven at 200ºF (95ºC) for three hours. They'll collapse slightly but they won't dry out. Yesterday I made a batch out of the little tomatoes in the plastic tray above. Include them in salads or eat them as a snack or side dish with other foods. They go pretty fast.

Tomates farcies au riz

The other day I cooked some garden green beans according to a recipe called Haricots verts à l'albigeoise — Green Beans Albi-Style. (Albi is a town in SW France, near Toulouse and the Pyrenees mountains.) Anyway, the green beans are cooked with shallots, mushrooms, and smoked-pork lardons (chunks of bacon). More about that later.

We enjoyed the green beans, and then we talked about making tomates farcies, or stuffed tomatoes, with some of the biggest tomatoes we have gotten from our garden for the time being. Walt said it might be a good idea to make a stuffing with the Albi green beans. It was a good idea, as it turned out.

I warmed up the leftover beans and poured the mixture through a colander to get the liquid, which I wanted to cook rice in. I added some chicken broth to stretch it a little and I cooked some riz rond, or short-grain rice, in it. I added a few more leftover ingredients — some diced, cooked carrot and zucchini, for example. Then I mixed the green beans, mushrooms, and lardons into the rice. That made a good stuffing for tomatoes.

The next step is to cut the tops off a few big tomatoes. Save them. Then you scoop out the tomato pulp, seeds, and juice, leaving just a shell of tomato that you can fill with the rice stuffing. I use a grapefruit knife first, and then a spoon to scoop everything out. Sprinkle some salt inside each tomato shell and turn them upside-down on a plate to let them release their excess liquid. They'll roast better after that.

Don't throw the pulp away! Remove any tough green parts and cook the rest of it with some onion in a frying pan. Add some zucchini or eggplant pulp if you have any, and toss in a small handful of rice. Let all that cook down for a minute until it starts to thicken, and then use it as a sauce in the baking dish you plan to cook the stuffed tomatoes in. It will keep the tomatoes from rolling around in the dish, and it will make a nice sauce to spoon over the rice stuffing at the table.

Spoon in the rice stuffing. Cover each tomato with its top and drizzle some olive oil over them. Cook the tomatoes in a moderate oven for 30 to 45 minutes, until they are slightly shriveled but not collapsing. Serve them hot right out of the baking dish. You can also stuff tomatoes this way with sausage meat, or ground beef, chicken, or turkey.

Four little jars

So you take 40 little Juliet tomatoes, cut them in half, and dry them in the oven for 10 hours, not including letting them stay in the warm over overnight. What do you get? (See my post yesterday for the method. And here's an even more interesting method — dry them on the dashboard of your car!)

You get four very little jars of dried tomatoes. It doesn't seem like much, but it's 10 tomatoes per jar. And it certainly is a space-efficient way to store home-grown tomatoes for wintertime enjoyment. If you re-constitute them in hot water, one jar at a time, you get a really nicely flavored tomato liquid as well as the tasty tomatoes themselves. You can also just put them into a soup or a sauce and let them re-hydrate that way. By the way, I've never seen sun- or otherwise-dried tomatoes in our supermarkets here in Saint-Aignan, so I make my own.

Above is another oven-baked ratatouille that I made a few days ago. I put a layer of sliced tri-color bell peppers on the bottom of the baking dish and then arranged standing rows of tomato, zucchini, and eggplant over the top of them. Here's a link to a photo. The ratty-tat-too got baked for an hour or more in a slow oven. Walt told me yesterday that he's going to have to pick a lot more eggplants this week...

A long, slow drying-out

I warn you, this is taking a while. I put sliced tomatoes in the oven yesterday morning at 9:30, to dry them. I finally turned off the oven eight hours later, and I left the two trays of tomatoes in the oven overnight.

I had the oven on at 90ºC (195ºF), bottom heat only, fan on. Maybe I should have turned it up a little bit more. As I described yesterday, the little tomatoes were just sliced in half, core removed, and arranged on oven pans on parchment paper (papier de cuisson). I didn't season them. No oil.

There they are above, in the process of drying in the oven. You can see that they aren't cooking, but just getting dehydrated. I didn't turn on top heat because I didn't want those on the upper rack to scorch on top.

When I opened the cold oven this morning, Here's what I found.. And they weren't yet sufficiently dry. Still soft. Kind of sticky to the touch. Not "leathery" enough. I was able to consolidate the two pans and put all the tomatoes on only one. Back into the oven they went.

This time, I turned the oven on top and bottom heat, at the same temperature, with the convection fan going. Now the tomatoes are all on the bottom rack, so they shouldn't get scorched. I think the reason they weren't totally dehydrated this morning is that our weather is so warm and humid right now. Walt said the relative humidity yesterday morning was 99%. That's unheard of here. This morning the weather is warm and fairly muggy. I'll just have to keep an eye on the tomatoes and make a decision about them later. Dried enough? Not dried enough?

Ripening

Here's a grape picture that I meant to post on Saturday, but somehow it got deleted from my post. The grapes are bathed in early morning sunlight.

And here's a long tall photo showing a long string — you can't really call it a cluster or a bunch — of little elongated tomatoes that are mostly still getting ready to ripen.

I think I'll make oven-dried tomatoes with these. They just need to be cut in half from top to bottom and put in a very slow oven (90ºC or 200ºF) for a long time.

What you want is for the tomato to dry out without actually cooking. If the water in the tomato halves starts to boil, it won't work. It just needs to evaporate. Drying them might take 6 or 8 hours.

After they're dried, I pack them in small jars with screw-top lids, close the lids without tightening them, and set the jars in the oven at that same temperature. When they are good and hot, I take them out and tighten down the lids one by one.

Then they seal and they can spend months down in the cold cellar without going bad. And they can be cooked and eaten over the course of the winter, of course.

The nature of gardening

A successful vegetable garden requires a lot of work over a period of months, and also a lot of waiting. Then all of a sudden you feel overwhelmed with all that the garden has given you. Look at all these tomatoes!

Above is only a small part of the tomatoes we've picked so far. We've already eaten quite a few, including as part of a pasta dish we had for lunch yesterday, with eggplant, zucchini, bell peppers, onion, and garlic. Walt picked a lot more tomatoes yesterday morning. See below.

Friday morning, I was out looking around in our 2016 vegetable garden and noticed the cluster of tomatoes in the next photo.

All these — and many more — will ripen over the coming weeks. We'll be making tomato sauce for freezing or canning; oven-dried tomatoes; tomates confites... and eating tomatoes in salads daily. No complaints. I need to look back through the blog and see what other tomato ideas I can find from past summers.

September grapes

Here are a few close-up photos of different varieties of grapes that I took yesterday morning in the Renaudière vineyard, on the outskirts of Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher.

I took the first photo at about 7:40 a.m. and the last one at 8:10 a.m.

Growing and ripening conditions are nearly perfect for grapes right now.

We're having cool nights and mornings and very warm, sunny afternoons. Everything is very dry.

The vendanges or grape harvest should start in a week or two. You can click or tap on the photos to see them at full size.

Roasted summer vegetables

When you think of roasted vegetables, you usually think of winter vegetables — turnips, potatoes, brussels sprouts, onions, celery root, and so on. Summer vegetables can be roasted too, to make what is called ratatouille, but baked in the oven. It's a gratin of eggplant, zucchini, and tomatoes, with onions, bell peppers, garlic, herbs, and olive oil.

Slice an onion or two and line the bottom of a baking dish with the slices. Also slice up a couple of eggplants (aubergines), and couple of zucchini (courgettes), and several smallish tomatoes (tomates).

Arrange the vegetables like this in the dish, on top of the onions. In this one, the vegetable slices are arranged, standing up, more or less randomly.

It never hurts to have fresh tomatoes from the garden. Ratatouille is definitely a summertime treat. If you end up with extra vegetable slices after filling up a baking dish or two, you can always cook them as a classic ratataouille, in a pot on top of the stove.

In this taller dish, I used bigger slices of vegetables and arranged them row by row: a row of zucchini, a row of eggplant, and a row of tomato. Instead of sliced onion, I put sliced bell peppers in the bottom of the dish. Sprinkle on dried herbs, salt, pepper, a few hot red pepper flakes, and a good amount of olive oil.

Cook the gratin in a slow oven (160ºC, 325ºF) as long as you like to tenderize the vegetables. I left this one for at least an hour, adding a little water to the dish from time to time so the vegetables would steam through and end up confits and moelleux. And slightly singed.

Bois de chauffage

This morning we are receiving a delivery of firewood. We found a company — a family-owned and family-operated business, I assume — that delivers logs cut into lengths (33 cm, or about a foot) that will fit into our little wood-burning stove. Below is a photo of the wood we have left from last season. It's not much — maybe one stère.

We got a delivery of three stères in May 2015, from the same supplier, who is located in Vallières-les-Grandes, up near Chaumont-sur-Loire. We already had one cubic meter of logs on hand. This time we have ordered four cubic meters of logs — that's four stères — because the person I talked to on the phone a couple of days ago said that was the minimum they could deliver now.

So despite having had a new oil-fired boiler installed last year, greatly improving our central-heating system, we're still burning between three and four stères — more or less a cord — of oak logs over the course of the winter. For several years, we had a lot of trouble finding firewood. Several vendors told us they weren't taking on new customers. And we never found logs cut to order until last year. What a relief. I hope the price — 66 euros per stère — hasn't gone up too much since last year.

These last two photos are ones I took about three weeks ago when I saw one of our neighbors hauling wood from a pile he keeps out on the edge of the vineyard to, presumably, his house. I doubt our wood supplier will arrive on a tractor, but you never know. And he will surely, like last time, just dump the load of wood in the driveway, meaning we'll have to stack it. It's a good thing my shoulder is hurting less now than it was a week ago.