Cuisses de canard aux navets

The most interesting thing about this version of canard aux navets — duck served with turnips — is the way I cooked the turnips. The duck consists of a couple of leg-and-thigh sections (cuisses). That's one per person. The package I bought contained two such pieces plus four wing pieces, and a little packet of dried thyme. I'm saving the wing pieces for later.

So for the duck legs, you just brown them skin-side down in a hot frying pan. You can put some oil or butter in the pan if you want, but it's not required. When the skin has turned a golden brown color, it will have released enough fat for the fleshy side of the legs to cook without sticking to the pan. You can put in some chopped onion, celery, and herbs at this point. (Substitute chicken or turkey if you can't easily get duck.)

After browning the duck pieces on both sides, add some liquid to the pan — water, white or red wine, broth, or a combination — and let the legs cook, covered, either on top of the stove or in the oven until they are well-cooked and to your taste. Season them with salt and pepper, of course. Long, slow cooking is best, I think.

If you want turnips with the duck, which is a classic combination, cook them this way: peel them and cut them into thick slices — say 2 centimeters (¾ inch). Put them in a pan in one layer and pour in just enough water to come up to the top of the slices without really covering them.

Dot the turnips with a tablespoon or two of butter cut into little cubes. Season them with salt and pepper. Add a tablespoon or two of honey. Turn on the heat to medium high. Leave the pan uncovered. By the time the water evaporates, the turnip slices will be cooked to a fairly tender stage. Check them for doneness with a skewer or the point of a small knife.

Leave them in the pan, and the slices will start to brown — caramelize — and turn a golden color. The slices will be glazed and sweet... almost candied. Turn them over to brown both sides. At this point, turn the heat off as soon as they are nicely browned. You can serve them immediately or leave them in the pan and just reheat them when the duck pieces are ready to be taken to the table.

Endings

Monday! Good things about this one: it's not supposed to rain, and the tile contractor is supposed to come by today with the tiles to do our new shower. I hope the jinx has been lifted. First we got blue tiles, and then we got beige ones. Jamais deux sans trois, they say, but I'm hoping the green tiles we want will show up today. Maybe "the third time's the charm" will be the operative expression.

Above you see the last of summer's flowers growing in a window box on the front of our house. It's time to pull them out. A lot of plants — tomatoes, squash — also need to be pulled out of the garden. If it doesn't rain today and tomorrow, maybe we'll get that done. Who knows, we might even rake up some autumn leaves — but probably not.

This second photo is of a barn or storage shed just a few steps down the street from us. The people with the house next to it come to spend a few days in the hamlet every summer, but very few. Last year and this year, they managed to cut back a lot of ivy and other vegetation that was growing over the old structure, nearly hiding it from view. I don't know if we should consider it rescued or condemned.

Saturday sunrise

I guess today could qualify as a serene Sunday. Saturday, however, was busy because I decided to go to the supermarket. SuperU was a SuperZoo, because this is a holiday weekend. A lot of zoo-goers are in the area, and hundreds of them were shopping, blocking the aisles in a store they are not familiar with. Checkout lines were as long as I've ever seen them. I'm not sure I'm happy about the increased traffic and the bustle, even though it must be good for the local economy.

At the supermarket I bought some duck legs and wings, and a veal roast. Today I'll make a blanquette de veau — something I've posted about on this blog many times. I also bought some turnips, so one day soon we'll have canard aux navets, another classic French recipe, for our mid-day meal. It will be a more traditional version than the one I made last month using a duck breast or magret.

Anyway, the sunrise yesterday was, well, picturesque. The hamlet is quiet. The nine houses here are occupied right now by nine people — though at least four of the houses are empty this weekend. There's no traffic up here, just two or three kilometers from the crowded zoo, except for the hunters we expect to see  and hear — bang, bang! — spending the day in the vineyard.

The shower so far

Just to finish this pair posts about the shower work we're having done, here are three photos that I took yesterday. Since it was a holiday — November 11, Armistice Day (in the U.S. called Veterans Day) — no work got done. Besides, the tiles for the two walls in the shower stall haven't come in yet. The right tiles, I mean, of the color we've planned.

We're keeping the rest of the tile in the bathroom, as well as the floor. It's old-fashioned looking, but it's clean and in excellent shape. For the shower, we've chosen a dark green tile that we think will go well with the green in the existing tile. The shower pan or tray is in place, and the green on the walls right now is some kind of moisture barrier to seal the plaster wall.

So two walls will be glass. Facing the door that opens into the bathroom we've ordered a frosted-glass panel. When you walk or look into the room, you won't be staring into the shower stall. On the left side of the photo below there will be a folding door made of clear glass, leaving a view of the vineyard through the window on the other side of the room, and letting in a lot of light.

The bench in the stall has a seat made of the same "stone resin" material as the shower pan itself. It's a Corian-type product and won't be as cold as tile to sit on, and it will be easier to keep clean. The shower pan (or tray — le receveur in French) measures one meter by one meter (39 in. x 39 in.) and the bench is 26 cm (10 in.) deep. So the area inside the shower will be just more than 13 sq. ft, compared to less than 8 sq. ft. for the old shower unit.

Notre salle de bain

Walt and I both keep mentioning on our blogs that we are having a new tiled-in shower built in our bathroom. Here are some photos of the bathroom as it was just a few weeks ago. This room is one of the features that attracted us to the house when we first saw it in 2002, because it was so much bigger than any other bathroom we had ever seen and used in France over the years.

The shower stall we are replacing is not very old — we had it put in 11 years ago. There's a second, small shower stall down in the utility room, and we bathed down there for the first two years we lived here. The problem was that the utility room is not heated, and it was pretty cold in wintertime. While the work is being done, we are showering down there again. Seems like old times...

The plumber who did a lot of work for us a dozen or so years ago, fixing leaks and replacing the faucets on nearly all the kitchen and bathroom fixtures, recommended this pre-fabricated shower stall as a good solution, since we had room for it. He said it would be as good as a tile shower. The corner of the bathroom where it stands was empty when we moved in. Now the time has come to replace it — recently the plastic started developing cracks. And I've never found the shower to be quite big enough. I'm all the time banging my elbows on the glass or the built-in shelves in there.

In 2005, when he installed the shower unit, the plumber (now retired) said we might also consider having the bathtub taken out. He said that's what local people were doing more and more. We decided to keep it, and we are keeping it still, even though we never use it for its intended purpose. I do use it however, as a good place to wash down and water big potted plants when they get dusty and dry. I also use it to wash bushels of collard and kale leaves when I get a big harvest. So it comes in handy. Someday I might want to take a bath in it.

Like the bathtub, the sink and the bidet are staying. Both were here when we moved in 13 years ago. I assume they were installed in the late 1960s, when the house was built, but I'm not sure. Maybe the bathroom was completed later. I'm not even sure the house had running water back then. The place was never occupied full-time, or if it was, it was for a very brief period. The couple who had it built were involved in a terrible car accident in 1976 or so, and the woman was killed. The man lived here alone for a while, I think, but when he remarried 10 years after the accident he and his new wife moved into an apartment in Saint-Aignan, three miles distant. This house was their place in the country, where they spent a month or two every summer, until he died in 2001 and his widow sold it to us.

Here's the bidet, and we're keeping it too. It serves as a second sink in the bathroom, and it's so French that we don't want to give it up. The plumber has now put new hardware on it — new robinets (would you call this a faucet?) and a new drain plug so that it now holds water.

If I haven't mentioned the toilet, that's because it's not in the bathroom. It's in a room all to itself. That room is what we'd call a half-bath in the U.S., with the commode and a small sink.

Transatlantic

Yesterday I got up at 3:30 a.m. to watch the election coverage from the U.S. That's 9:30 p.m. on the East Coast, and the vote count had begun. I stayed up all day, making a batch of fig jam and 4 dozen candied figs (figues confites). Overnight I had cooked 9 lbs. of pork shoulder to make pulled pork, so I processed all that and put it into the freezer. In other words, life goes on.

By about 8 p.m., I was pretty tired, so I hit the sack and slept until about 5:30 this morning. Ever since heure d'été ("summer time") ended and we moved the clocks back an hour, that's been my regular time to get up and get moving. Now I'm sitting here in front of CNN again. Am I in France or in the U.S.? Sometime I feel like I don't know.

The plumber called yesterday evening. He'll be back this morning to do some more work, including cleaning out our wood stove and sweeping the chimney. The tile guy sent Walt an e-mail to say he'd be back this morning too. So maybe the wait is over. Five days have gone by since the two of them have been able to do any work on our projects. The job of getting the greenhouse finished and moving in some plants has kept us busy.

Gravillons

Yesterday we hauled about a ton — I'm exaggerating — of gravel, called gravillons, from a building supply store on the other side of the river. It's what I call "river-rock" gravel — small smooth pebbles, not crushed rock or concrete. I actually have no idea how much it weighed. We hauled it home in our little 16-year-old Peugeot.

Why were we hauling gravel? Well, we needed it to cover the dirt floor of our new greenhouse (below). We made two trips to the store, bringing home about a quarter of a cubic meter (250 liters) of the fine gravel in containers that would (1) fit in the car and (2) not be too heavy for us to lift out of the car and carry to the back side of the house when we got home.

Now we have a greenhouse floor that isn't just dirt, which that sticks to our shoes and the dog's paws, and then gets tracked in. Besides, it's better-looking. The greenhouse is attached to the back wall of the house, and we have to walk through it to enter the house through the back door.

Once we had the gravel moved in and spread around, we could start moving plants into the greenhouse. I hope the plants will tolerate cold-but-above-freezing temperatures this winter. This is an experiment. Time will tell.

I got up at 3:30 this morning to watch the U.S. presidential election results on CNN. I don't usually watch CNN, but it's our best source for American news in situations like this — at least on TV. So far, the results have been surprising, to say the least.

The chicken + pumpkin tajine recipe

The Moroccan seasoning mix for tajine and couscous dishes is called « ras el hanout ». There is no standard recipe for it (but there are recipes here and here). It can be made up of any number of powdered spices — cinnamon, cumin, nutmeg, fenugreek, carraway, cayenne pepper, turmeric, coriander seeds, sweet or hot paprika — and is the cook's or grocer's special blend. It seems that the main difference between the Moroccan spice and Indian curry powder is that the Indian blend includes mustard powder, which gives it a different flavor. The Moroccan blend is sweeter and works better with sweet-savory dishes.

Moroccan tajine of chicken with winter squash

1 chicken (or the equivalent in chicken parts)

2 Tbsp. olive oil

1 Tbsp. powdered spices (or more to taste)

3 medium onions

2 cloves of garlic

½ cup raisins (or more)

1 cup chicken broth (or water)

1 Tbsp. honey

2 lbs. of winter squash cut into cubes

2 Tbsp. butter

1 small can of chickpeas *

salt and pepper to taste

 
Cut up the whole chicken or use chicken parts like thighs and drumsticks (I used four of each). Brown the pieces of chicken on all sides in olive oil. Slice the onions and garlic and add them in with the chicken. Add the spices, raisins, and honey and continue cooking for 5 to 10 minutes so that the flavor ingredients are cooked and the spices are fragrant.

Then pour a cup or so of chicken broth (or water) into the pan, season with salt and pepper, and let the chicken and other ingredients cook together slowly until the chicken is starting to fall off the bone — 45 minutes to an hour is not too long — at low temperature. Most of the liquid should evaporate, leaving you with a spicy-sweet, syrupy sauce.

Cut up the winter squash (pumpkin, butternut, acorn squash) into large cubes, peeled. Brown these in butter with salt and pepper, covering the pan toward the end so that they will cook through. Test the chunks of squash for tenderness by piercing them with a knife or skewer.

When the chicken and the squash are done to your liking, turn off the heat under one or the other until both are ready. Finally, add the cooked squash to the chicken along with the chickpeas and gently stir to combine everything. Leave the pot on low heat for 5 minutes before serving.

* Instead of putting chickpeas in the tajine, you can use toasted almonds or macadamia nuts, adding them at the last minute, or even at the table as a garnish.

The ideal accompaniment to this tajine is couscous "grain" cooked according to package directions. If you want to see the French recipe this tajine is adapted from, it's here. It calls for saffron instead of other spices.

A Moroccan tajine of chicken with winter squash

One of the best ways to prepare pumpkins and winter squashes, I'm convinced, is to cook them in what is called un tajine [tah-ZHEEN], a Moroccan specialty that's a spicy sauté or stew. In French it could be called un plat sucré-salé (sweet and savory) and it's seasoned with a blend of spices including nutmeg, cinnamon, turmeric, fenugreek, cumin, and hot red pepper, plus a tablespoon or two of sugar or honey.

Yesterday I made a chicken and winter squash tajine using onions, garlic, spices, raisins, and a sucrine du Berry squash. The sucrine resembles a butternut squash. Here's what it looks like on the outside and on the inside. Cooking with winter squashes and pumpkins is like bringing fall colors into the house.

One of the things I like about this recipe is that you cook the chicken with onions, garlic, raisins, and spices in one pot, and then you cook the squash, cut into cubes, in a separate pot or pan. That way, you can control the cooking time for each component so that both are just right before you combine everything and take it to the table. I'll post a recipe tomorrow.

Les feuilles mortes... pas encore ramassées

We are waiting for the rest of the leaves to fall before we start raking up the ones that are already on the ground. The maples, the birches, and the linden tree are all dropping leaves with abandon.

Above are the maple leaves on the driveway out front. Below are the linden leaves on and next to the path out back. Getting them all picked up is a big job.

We are glad not to have to rake up all the grape leaves in the vineyard plots outside our back gate and behind our neighbor's house. They're pretty right now but they too are rapidly falling to the ground.

Orange and red leaves dominate on one side of the road through the vineyard, and bright yellow ones beautify the other side. Callie likes them all.

The dog loves to run up and down the rows of vines. She ducks under the trellis wires and explores one row after another as she goes, detecting a lot of good and interesting smells I think.

A camera switch

We've had a number of bright sunny — but quite frosty — mornings these last few days. With no fog and better light, I've gone out a couple of times for walks with Callie and with my camera. It's best to take advantage of the clear mornings, because the winter rains are starting. It rained for several hours overnight, actually.

France went back on what is called "winter time" last weekend, so we can go out walking an hour earlier now. That means heading out at 7:30 or so instead of 8:30. It's chilly but pleasant at that hour. Of course, the flip side is that it gets dark a lot earlier in the evening.

This is mushroom season, but the weather has been so dry since July that there aren't as many champignons as usual. The plumber doing our shower work told me yesterday that he knows the vineyard out back very well, because he grew up in Saint-Aignan and his grandmother lived not more than a mile or two from our house. He said there used to be a lot of the black mushrooms called trompettes de la mort in the woods here. Don't let the name scare you — those are good eating, and are also known as the "horn of plenty" (corne d'abondance) mushroom.

When I say I've been taking my camera on my morning walks, I don't mean the same camera. I've started using the "new new" Panasonic Lumix TZ60 (known as the ZS40 in North America) again, instead of the "new old" Panasonic TZ18 (ZS8). I think I've found the TZ60 settings that work for me, and I'm glad to be using the "new" camera again. The photos here haven't been processed except for cropping. You can click or tap on the images to see them at a larger size.

Sucrines et potirons

The winter squash called la sucrine du Berry resembles an extra-large butternut squash — inside and out. We grew some this year for the first time in years. Back in 2005, in one of our first vegetable gardens, we had a good crop, and it's the same in 2016.

Yesterday, I went out and harvested the 12 sucrines that were still growing out in the garden. We originally had 13, but we gave one to friends. Anybody else want one?

Since we have it now, all finished, I put the squashes on shelves in the greenhouse to dry out and take advantage of any sunlight we have over the next day or two and ripen a little more.

We also got three pumpkins this year. The one above is a potiron (sugar pumpkin, I think is the American term, or pie pumpkin) even though it might not look like one. It stayed green on the outside. This one was growing upside down and I haven't yet had a chance to clean the dirt off of it. Here's a photo of the other pumpkin of this variety we got this year. We have eaten it now.

We also have a more classic-looking pumpkin called a rouge vif d'Etampes. It's also a potiron, and not a citrouille, which is what a decorative or jack-o'-lantern pumpkin is called in French. The Larousse Gastronomique says: En cuisine, le potiron est parfois appelé « citrouille », alors que la véritable citrouille, jaunâtre parfois panaché de vert, est un aliment de bétail.

Above and below are two more photos of the sucrines du Berry. I hope they will last long enough — without starting to rot — for us to enjoy eating them this winter.

Being able to have a vegetable garden was an important feature we were looking for in a house when we decided to leave the city (San Francisco) and move to the country (in France) 14 years ago. We planted our first garden here in 2004.

Le laid et le beau (ou vice-versa)

I couldn't decide whether to post these three photos in zooming-out or zooming-in order. I finally decided on zooming-out. These are the maple trees off our front porch in full sunlight.

And two other subjects: I just went down to see what was happening with the new greenhouse and I found all the glass completely frosted over. It's colder this morning than was predicted.

Finally, here's what our bathroom looks like this morning. The plumber worked all day yesterday getting it ready for the new shower to be tiled in. We are keeping the sink, bidet, and old tile.

Oranges, reds, and greens

These are the fall colors in the Loire Valley. Or at least around Saint-Aignan, which is actually in the Cher river valley, at the extreme eastern end of what used to be called La Touraine. The first photo is the view early in the morning on Hallowe'en day from one of the back windows of our house. It shows a part of the Renaudière vineyard.

Here's the front of the house later in the day, when the sun was setting. Walt had already rolled down the shutter on the kitchen window. The two big red maple trees just off the terrace have been magnificent for the past week or two, with their leaves gradually changing from deep a deep burgundy color to a bright orange.

The good news here at La Renaudière is that the new greenhouse is finished. It's a lean-to structure over the back door, and all the glass is now in place (but not in the photo above, which I took on Monday, also at sundown).

The father-son team that did the work of assembling and glazing the greenhouse spent three full days getting the job done. Now we need to go buy some gravel to spread on the dirt floor of the greenhouse, and then we can start moving in some potted plants. We've put a thermometer inside so we can get an idea of the low and high temperatures they will have to withstand this winter.