Brouillard

We never got to see the sun at all yesterday — or much of anything else, for that matter. The temperature stayed cold as thick fog — un brouillard épais — enveloped the area. The first picture shows the view from our kitchen window yesterday afternoon.

Walt went to the open-air Saint-Aignan market in the morning to order our bird for Christmas — un chapon de pintade — and he reported that the atmosphere was even murkier down in the river valley. We live on the heights, up a steep hill far above river level. Meanwhile, in the afternoon our back yard looked like this.

I'm not sure we'll see the sun today either. I'm going to make a Spanish-style tortilla for lunch, with a green salad. The Spanish tortilla is a potato omelet — not at all like a Mexican tortilla. I might have to go down into the village to see what the fog's like down there, and to pick up some fresh bread.

December 17 over the years

On December 17, 2005, we had a nice pink sunset.

And on December 17, 2008, the Christmas cactus was blooming.

It hasn't yet bloomed in 2016.

The dog in the photo is Collette, who passed away in 2006 at the age of 14.

By mid-afternoon on December 17, 2009, we had this much snow on the ground.
We had snow again on the same day in 2010. But none this year...

December 16, 2003

We'd been here about six months. As you can see, the house was in good shape when we bought it. But in a few months, we would have to replace all the windows on the back (west) side because they were far from airtight and not even watertight.

Still, it was pretty nice. We had had the deck tiled in September, and who cared if the fireplace didn't work? We were experiencing our first winter in the Saint-Aignan area. We remarked that the landscapes — woods, fields, vineyards — were pretty here even in winter.

We enjoyed the sunrises and the sunsets. We had (and still have) clear views of both from the windows. We were just getting used to how short the hours of daylight were in December. It's hard to believe that this is our 14th winter here. Time flies...

Sweeping up leaves in December 2005

When we came to live here in 2003, one of the gardening tools we found out in the shed was this lawn- or leaf-sweeper. I think it's called a balai-ramasseur in French — balai meaning broom, and ramasser being the verb for gathering or picking up things up off the ground. The device is like a non-motorized carpet-sweeper, but for outdoor use. We still have it, but we haven't used it this year. Too lazy, I guess. Or, no, let's blame the weather.

These photos date back to December 15, 2005, when we had been here for just 2½ years. Now it's been 13½. In fact, the first time we ever saw the place was  in mid-December 2002, and we moved here from California 6 months later. It was a good move, in both senses of the expression.

We had our first vegetable garden in 2004, so we already had the perfect spot where we could dump all the autumn leaves that we raked and swept up. Back then, we could burn them with impunity. People still burn leaves and other yard trimmings around Saint-Aignan, but they are officially discouraged from doing so, for air-quality reasons. The fires always started out hot, with high flames, but quickly turned into big plumes of smoke because the leaves were always damp.

Before coming here, we had always lived in cities — Paris, Washington DC, San Francisco — and mostly in apartments. The last two places we lived in were houses, one in Silicon Valley and the other in SF. Both had small yards, but nothing like what we have here. Doing yard work was a novelty back in 2005. Not so much any more... But it's nice to have a vegetable garden and a winter "collard patch," as you can see above.

Alignement d'arbres

This is one of those emblematic features of the French countryside — roads lined with tall trees for long distances. They are impressive when they're all green in summertime, and when they are bare in wintertime. This road runs along the Loire River from the town of Amboise toward the city of Tours.

It's a photo I took on December 14, 2004 — 12 years ago today. I don't know where we were going. Maybe to Vouvray to buy some bubbly wine for our Christmas festivities. This phase of our life began in Vouvray in the year 2000, when we first came to the Loire Valley on vacation. Before long we had bought a house here and left California behind. Just reminiscing...

Chicken fricassee with carrots (2)

In yesterday's post, I described the first part of the process of making a fricassée de poulet à la berrichonne, which is chicken and carrots in a cream sauce. This is a recipe I found in the Larousse Gastronomique food and cooking encyclopedia last week and decided to make.

I left you yesterday at the point when the chicken and carrots are cooked, but the sauce is not yet complete. Back to the recipe...

The next step is to take the chicken and carrots (above) out of the broth it has cooked in. Remember, long and slow cooking is best, to make sure that the chicken is well cooked and not dry, and the carrots are tender. Set the chicken and carrots in a warm oven while you finish the sauce.

Then pour the cooking broth into a pot and reduce it on fairly high heat until a third or even a half of it has boiled away. At that point, pour one-half to three-quarters cup of heavy cream (crème fraîche) and again let it boil gently until the sauce has reduced by a third to a half. 

If you want, you can thicken the sauce using egg yolks (a perilous operation), a roux (flour cooked in melted butter), or beurre manié (a tablespoon of flour worked into a tablespoon of soft butter). Just think of the sauce as a white gravy. Add a teaspoon or two of good white wine vinegar or fresh lemon juice at the last minute, just to perk the sauce up a little and give it some acidity (you do the same with blanquette de veau, which is a kind of fricassee of veal in a cream sauce).

Pour some or all of the sauce over the cooked chicken and carrots in a serving bowl. The most refined way to serve the dish is to just coat the chicken and carrots with some sauce and then take the rest of the sauce to the table in a bowl or gravy boat. I just poured all the sauce over the other ingredients back in the dish they had cooked in. We decided to have the fricasseed chicken and carrots accompanied by green garden peas cooked with mushrooms. Those are good with the cream sauce too.

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Here's the recipe for fricassée de poulet à la berrichonne that I got out of the Larousse Gastronomique and adapted slightly. « Berrichonne » is the adjective based on the name of the old Berry province of central France. It is centered more or less on the city of Bourges, and includes Sancerre on the east and the area around Selles-sur-Cher and Saint-Aignan on the west.

Fricassée de poulet aux carottes
« à la berrichonne »
 

1 poulet coupé en morceaux
300 g de carottes

400 ml d’eau bouillante ou de consomeé blanc
1 bouquet garni
sel et poivre
20 cl de crème
beurre
sucre
vinaigre

Faites revenir au beurre des carottes nouvelles, entières si elles sont petites, coupées en quartiers si elles sont grosses.

Dès que les carottes sont bien dorées, les enlever du sautoir et, dans le beurre où elles ont rissolé, mettre à revenir un poulet, détaillé par membres.

Quand les morceaux de poulet sont un peu dorés, mouillez de 400 ml d'eau bouillante ou de consommé blanc ; ajoutez les carottes et un bouquet garni. Assaisonnez et laissez cuire à couvert 45 minutes.

Retirez le poulet et les carottes du bouillon. Ajoutez la crème au bouillon ainsi que 2 jaunes d'oeufs et une faible pincée de sucre en poudre. Bien mélangez et versez sur le poulet. Ajoutez une cuillerée de vinaigre. Faites chauffer mais ne laissez pas bouillir.

Chicken fricassee with carrots, from the old Berry province (1)

Finally, a blanquette with carrots in it! Because that's what this recipe for fricasseed chicken from the Berry seems to be. Here's the first part of the recipe for the Berry-style chicken fricassee. It's like most classic French dishes — it contains very few ingredients because the idea is to appreciate each ingredient and not overwhelm the palate.

Fricassée de poulet à la berrichonne
Chicken fricassee with carrots and cream

1 chicken, cut into 10 pieces

300 g (10 oz.) carrots

2 or 3 Tbsp. butter

400 ml (1¾ cups) chicken broth

(1 bouquet garni)

salt and pepper

20 cl (¾ cup) cream

1 pinch sugar

1 tsp. vinegar (or lemon juice)

Brown the carrots in butter. Use them whole if they are small, or cut into pieces if they are large.

As soon as the carrots are well browned, remove them from the pan and, in the butter where they have browned, cook the chicken pieces.

When the chicken pieces are just slightly golden, pour in the boiling-hot broth or water.

If you're using well-seasoned broth, there's no need for a bouquet garni, but if you're using water, add a bouquet garni now.

Add the carrots. Season with salt, pepper, and a pinch of sugar (or teaspoon of honey). Cook for 45 minutes in the oven at about 325ºF (160ºC).

Here is a link to the rest of the recipe...





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To be continued tomorrow. No time this morning. We're headed over to Tours to do some furniture shopping...

Winter sunrise

Early last week, during the spell of dry, cold weather we've been having, I took these photos from our kitchen window. The sun rises just after 8:30 a.m. at this time of year, and goes back down at 5:00 p.m.

I think I first took the middle photo, and then a few close-ups of the scene. It's been a treat to see so much sunshine in December this year. Today it is predicted to be cloudy and gray, but there's still little or no rain in the 10-day forecast.

Cooking the coq au riesling

Well, it's not a coq, so it's not really coq au vin — at least the way I made it. It's a Guinea hen (une pintade). And it's more like coq au vin than like a classic fricassée. It's a recipe from Alsace, with elements of the two standard French recipes. It's made with white wine, and there's cream in the sauce. Coq au vin is made with red wine, and has no cream in it.

A classic fricassée of poultry, lamb, veal, or rabbit is a white stew. The fricassée sauce contains cream, as does this coq au riesling sauce. But for the fricassée, the poultry or meat is not browned first. The Larousse Gastronomique says it just should be "stiffened" (raidi) in a pan on low heat. For coq au vin or pintade au riesling, the pieces of poultry are first browned well in butter or vegetable oil.

Along with onions, or shallots, one of the main flavor ingredients in coq au vin is chunks of smoked pork belly, or lardons fumés. In this recipe, the pieces of coq, chicken, or pintade are browned first, taken out of the pan or pot, and set in a warming oven to wait. Then onions or shallots and garlic are sautéed with smoked lardons in the same pan. You can cut the lardons large or small. A splash of cognac or armagnac in the pan at this point can't hurt, whether you actually flambez it or not.

And there are mushrooms in it too, as in both fricassée and coq au vin. After the lardons and onions are cooked, you put the poultry pieces back in the pan or pot with them. You pour on, say, half a bottle of riesling wine (it's an off-dry white wine) and then enough water or broth to barely cover the poultry. Spread the mushrooms on top, push them into the liquid a little, cover the pan, and set it in the oven on medium-low heat for at least 40 minutes — or longer.

After an hour or so, take the pan out of the oven. Use tongs or a slotted spoon to lift out the poultry pieces and lardons, which again get set aside in a warm oven. Strain the mushrooms and onions out of the cooking liquid, pouring the liquid into a pot. Set the pot on medium-high heat and let the liquid reduce by about half. Then pour in a cup of cream and let it reduce again, until you like the consistency. Put the mushrooms and shallots back in. Don't waste anything.

Above are the cooked pintade and lardons waiting to be coated with the cream sauce, which you can thicken or not — your choice. Serve any extra sauce at the table, and accompany the coq au riesling with steamed or boiled potatoes, rice, or pasta.

Here's the recipe. If you want a translation, I can post one, or you can let Google translate it. You could also read Nigella Lawson's recipe that was published in the New York Times.

Coq au riesling
 

1 volaille de 1,5 kg

50 g de beurre

200 g de lardons fumés

3 échalotes

1 gousse d’ail

5 cl de cognac

40 cl de riesling

200 g de champignons

20 cl de crème fraîche

Sel et poivre

Découper la volaille (poulet, coq, poularde, pintade…).

Faire chauffer le beurre dans une cocotte. Faire revenir les morceaux

de volaille. Saler et poivrer. Réserver les morceaux de volaille au chaud.

Ajouter dans la cocotte les lardons, les échalotes, et l’ail hachés.

Flamber avec le cognac. Remettre la volaille. Déposer les champignons.

Rectifier l’assaisonnement. Laisser cuire 40 minutes à feu doux.

Retirer les morceaux de volaille et les déposer sur un plat de service.

Laisser réduire le jus de cuisson et ajouter la crème en remuant.

Verser la sauce sur la viande. Servir aussitôt.

Un coq... ou pintade... au riesling

Yesterday I made one of the recipes from the Cuisine Alsacienne book that I mentioned here recently. It was the one for Coq au riesling, which turns out to be the same thing, basically, as the Burgundian classic Coq au vin, but cooked with Alsatian white wine rather than Burgundy red.

Getting riesling wine here in the Loire Valley is not a problem. It's widely available in the supermarkets and is usually inexpensive at 4 or 5 euros a bottle. Mushrooms, smoked pork belly cut into lardons... those are easy-to-find standard ingredients too. But the recipe called for cooking a 1.5 kg coq. That's just 3 lbs. and I've never seen a rooster/cockerel that small in the markets or supermarkets around here. The coqs I've cooked in the past weighed in at 7 to 8 lbs.

I could have bought a 3 lb. chicken, but then I noticed that one of the supermarkets had nice farm-raised, free-range Guinea hens on sale at a good price. In French, that's called « une pintade » or, if it's a young bird, « un pintadeau ». It's an African bird that's related to the chicken and the pheasant, and some still live wild in in the countries south of the Saharan Desert. France is the world's biggest producer of domesticated Guinea fowl, according to the Larousse Gastronomique food encyclopedia.

Thighs, drumsticks, wings, and trimmings

The pintade I got weighed in at l.65 kilos, which was about perfect for what I wanted to do. Very young pintades are good oven-roasted like a chicken, but the older, bigger birds are better fricasseed or stewed, and Coq au vin is a variant of the classic fricassée. So therefore is Coq au riesling, with its white wine sauce. (By the way, I remember that my grandfather's sister kept Guinea fowl on her farm in South Carolina back in the 1960s, so I was familiar with the species.)

The Guinea hen breast cut into four pieces

I was a little nervous about being able to cut the Guinea hen up into serving portions, which is what the fricassee recipe calls for. You cut it up just as you would a chicken, but I had a memory of trying to do that in the past but with difficulty. The bones were harder than chicken bones (especially the breast bone), and the wing, leg, and thigh joints were harder to find and cut into. I shouldn't have worried, though. It all turned out to be pretty easy. You can see that the flesh of the Guinea fowl is all more or less "dark meat" — even the breast. It's delicious — firm and meaty.

More about cooking it tomorrow...

The Peugeot passed... inspection

We passed the test! It's a big relief, and it means that the 16-year-old Peugeot 206 is good for at least another two years. I took it to the inspection station — le centre de contrôle technique —  yesterday morning and got the good news. Inspection stations in France do only that — they inspect. They don't do repairs. You have to go to a mechanic for those. That means there is no conflict of interest.

When the man who checked the car out was giving me the paperwork, he commented on how low the Peugeot's kilométrage is. The odometer reads about 127,250 kilometers, but that's not the true figure, because the instrument cluster had to be changed out a few years ago. I gave the man the real "mileage" — it's more like 181,300 km, which is about 112,500 miles — and he said even that wasn't much on a car with a good diesel engine like the Peugeot's.

Fact is, we've put only about three thousand miles on the car since its last inspection, two years ago. By the way, more than 8.3 million Peugeot 206 cars have rolled off the assembly lines in France and other countries over the years. No other Peugeot model has ever been produced in such numbers, and more Peugeot 206 cars have been sold than any other French car model in history, surpassing the legendary Renault 4 — I had one of those 30 years ago. However, if you live in the U.S. you might never have heard of the Peugeot 206 or the Renault 4 before, because neither has ever been sold there.

Oui... mais du Berry

Yes, they looked like clams or some other mollusk, but those were lentils in my photos yesterday. I had bought and was cooking a 500 gram bag of lentilles vertes du Berry. They are produced by the Association Lentilles Vertes du Berry in Saint-Georges-sur-Arnon, just outside the town of Chârost, near Issoudun, in the old Berry province.

Lentils are easy to prepare because you don't need to soak them before cooking them, and they take only 20 to 30 minutes to cook.

I made what is called une brunoise — aromatic vegetables cut into tiny dice — to cook with the beans. It was onions, garlic, and carrots.

I "sweated" the brunoise in a little bit of duck fat before adding the lentils to the pot and tossing them with the fat and vegetables. Then I added water and a little bit of stock.

I also had some meats left from the choucroute garnie that I cooked a few days ago, so I diced those up and put them in the pot with the lentils and vegetables. They included some smoked ham hock, part of a smoked saucisse de Montbéliard, and most of a saucisse de Francfort. In France lentils are often cooked and served with the salt-cured pork called petit salé, but smoked pork is also good with them.

That made a nice lunch, with a green salad and some good bread and wine. I can't remember eating very many lentils in the U.S. Maybe they are more popular here in France. And in India and other parts of Asia, they are made into what is called dal and eaten with flatbreads or rice.

Close up

Can you tell what these are?

Maybe this slightly longer view will help.

C'est tout pour aujourd'hui.

Winter...

The temperature is well above freezing this morning, for the first time in several days. It's at least 10ºF "warmer" than it has been on recent mornings. It's still winter though, according to meteorologists. And it's been very foggy. I went for a drive in the Peugeot yesterday morning, over to Luçay-le-Mâle and Valençay, where visibility was severely limited.

Winter greens

Winter wisteria

Winter vines

So far in late November and now December, we've had quite a bit of frost but no snow. On many mornings, the kale and chard plants out in the garden have drooped drastically, affected by the cold. But they bounce back. I think the wisteria leaves will fall pretty soon. And the grapevines are now bare, with pruning well under way.

Cherchez l'erreur...

I made a big batch of choucroute garnie a few days ago. I know, it's a lot of meat. We eat it over a period of days, and some of it can go into the freezer when we're tired of eating it. The sauerkraut itself is delicious and très digeste. The only other thing you eat alongside the choucroute garnie is some steamed potatoes.

I've posted about cooking choucroute many times over the past 10 years. Here's a link to some of those posts. The meats here, clockwise from the top, are jarret de porc fumé (smoked ham hock), saucisse de Strasbourg, poitrine de porc fumée (smoked pork belly), saucisson à l'ail (garlic sausage), saucisse de Montbéliard, and saucisse de Francfort.

Yesterday morning I spent some time reading a little book called La Cuisine Alsacienne that I received as a gift a few years ago (thanks, Martine). Now I have a whole list of Alsatian dishes that I want to try my hand at: kougelhopf salé, kougelhopf sucré, tarte flambée, tarte à l'oignon, pommes de terre fumées, coq au riesling, spätzle, galettes aux asperges...

The tajine of lamb and pumpkin recipe

Tajine of Lamb and Honey-Glazed Pumpkin

1½ lbs. lamb shoulder or leg meat, cut into cubes

1½ lbs. pumpkin, cut into cubes or thick slices

2 or 3 medium onions

1 or 2 cloves garlic

½ cup raisins

3 or 4 Tbsp. olive oil

1 Tbsp. ras el hanout spice mix (or more to taste)

2 or 3 Tbsp. butter

2 Tbsp. honey

1 small can chickpeas
salt and pepper to taste

fresh herbs (cilantro, parsley...)

Preheat the oven to 160ºC (325ºF). Cut the lamb into 1-inch cubes. Peel and slice the onions and garlic. Cut the pumpkin into thick slices and peel them. Optionally, cut the slices into 1-in cubes.

Put the lamb cubes into a bowl and season them with the ras el hanout spices and salt. In a frying pan, sauté the lamb cubes in olive oil until they are well browned. Take them out of the pan and set them aside. Sauté the onion, garlic, and raisins in the same pan, adding more olive oil as needed.

Combine the browned lamb cubes and sautéed onion mixture together in an oven-proof dish with a lid. Pour in enough water to barely cover the lamb and onions. Put the dish in the oven, covered, and let it cook for an hour. Add more water as needed during the cooking process.

In a clean frying pan, melt the butter. Brown the pumpkin cubes or slices on medium-high heat, turning them carefully to brown them on all sides, as possible. Spoon the honey over the pumpkin and give it a few minutes on the heat to thicken and caramelize.

Put the glazed pumpkin on top of the lamb mixture in the baking dish and put the cover back on. Add the chickpeas. Let everything cook for another 15 or 20 minutes on low heat.

Serve with chopped fresh herbs and either rice, millet, or couscous grain.

How to make — and cook with — the tajine spice blend

I found a post on Epicurious this morning that explains how you can make your own version of the North African spice blend called ras el hanout. Here's a link. The ingredients are all standard spices you can find nearly anywhere: cumin, ground ginger, salt, black pepper, cinnamon, ground coriander seeds, cayenne pepper, ground allspice, and ground cloves. You can customize the list and the blend as you see fit.

For the lamb and pumpkin tajine I made recently, the first step was to "marinate" the chunks of lamb in the spices. (By the way, I noticed a jar of ras el hanout among the spices at our local SuperU store the other day.) Use the spices as a dry rub on the meat before you brown it in olive oil in a hot frying pan or wok.

Then take the meat out of the pan, set it aside, and sauté some sliced onions and garlic in the same pan, along with a handful of raisins, in a little more oil as needed. When the onions have softened, put the meat back into the pan (or transfer everything to a tajine or other oven-proof dish). Add a cup or two of water or broth — just enough to barely cover the meat — and put the dish in a slow oven (160ºC or 325ºF) for an hour.

All that's left to do, after the pumpkin is glazed and the meat is cooked, is to put the pumpkin on top of the meat, put the lid back on, and let it all cook slowly for 15 or 20 more minutes. Stir it only gently so that you don't mush up the pumpkin too much.

This kind of recipe is infinitely adaptable. Use chunks of chicken or turkey or even veal instead of lamb. Soak some prunes or dried apricots in water while the meat is cooking and put them in the tajine in the place of the glazed pumpkin. (Turkey, duck, or veal will work very well with prunes.) Vary the spice blend. Add as much cayenne or other hot pepper as you like. Serve the tajine with couscous grain, rice, or millet.

This was the third in an uninterrupted series on the lamb and pumpkin tajine.

Potiron caramélisé

The lamb and pumpkin tajine I've been writing about calls for caramelized cubes of pumpkin. In other words, it's a sweet-and-savory dish. The lamb is cooked with Moroccan spices including cinnamon, nutmeg, cumin, and cayenne pepper, and with onions.

For the caramelized pumpkin (or other winter squash like butternut), you cut the pumpkin in half or quarters, remove the pulp and seeds from the center, and then cut thick slices that you can peel with a knife or vegetable peeler. You can cut the thick slices into cubes, the way I did, or you can caramelize the thick slices themselves, whole.

Melt plenty of butter in a non-stick frying pan. Put the chunks or slices in the pan and let them brown on one side. It takes a few minutes. Then carefully turn all the pieces of pumpkin over, or toss them around in the pan, to try to get them brown on another side. It can be a fairly delicate operation once the pumpkin starts to cook and soften.

When the browning is done, pour a couple of tablespoons of honey into the pan and stir everything around gently. The honey will start to thicken. Put a lid on the pan for a few minutes until the pumpkin pieces are tender. Set them aside until you're ready to combine them with the braised meat you're using — lamb, turkey, or chicken, for example.

Definitely cook the meat with onions and spices. Adding tajine spices to the pan of caramelized pumpkin cubes or slices is optional. Actually, the meat is optional too. The little Tajines (Hachette 2005) cookbook I have includes a recipe for a vegetarian pumpkin tajine cooked with sauteed onions, raisins, spices, butter, and honey. The caramelized pumpkin could also make a good dessert, with pound cake or rice pudding, for example.