Vegetables en conserve

When it comes to vegetables, en conserve means canned. I do use canned vegetables. Beans, for example. Green peas, called petits pois in French. Tomatoes. Certain vegetables keep a good taste and texture after undergoing the canning process.

Petits pois, for example. Fresh peas are not available year-round. People buy them in cans or jars, already cooked and sometimes seasoned. Peas and carrots. Peas and mushrooms. I bought a six-pack of canned peas a few weeks ago because they were a well-known brand on sale at a good price and we can have them all winter, cooked with either fresh carrots or fresh mushrooms, which are available year-round.

It helps if the peas are treated nicely by the companies that process and pack them. For example, the peas I bought don't contain any chemical additives, just salt and sugar. And the instructions on the can say that they should be drained before being cooked and served (à égoutter avant utilisation). Rinsing them is a good idea too, to remove extra salt and sugar used in the canning process. Then you can put in fresh water or your own broth when you cook them. With some butter too, of course, and a lettuce leaf or two.

A few years ago, I was talking with a British friend — the woman who left Bertie the black cat with us when she moved back to England seven years ago — and she tossed off a comment about French food that I remember. "The peas you get in France are very good," she said. "Even the ones in tins are delicious." I had always thought the same thing. An Englishwoman should know. When I was growing up in North Carolina, we called green garden peas "English" peas, to distinguish them from our local "field" peas like black-eyed peas.

Pumpkin “pie” — pizza pie

I have some more to say about canned food in France, but first, here's a pizza topped with spicy pumpkin purée, smoked chicken, bell peppers, and alpine cheese. It was Walt's idea, and he made it while I was out shopping yesterday morning. We both enjoyed eating it.

I'm saying pumpkin but what Walt used on the pizza was actually the puréed flesh of a roasted sucrine du Berry, which resembles a butternut squash. He seasoned it with hot pepper powder, onion, garlic, and dried herbs. It replaced the tomato sauce you would usually put on a pizza, with the other toppings spread over it.

The smoked chicken was one that I bought at Intermarché a few days ago to have with a batch of choucroute garnie (sauerkraut). We had half of it left, so I de-boned the breast filet and shredded/chopped the meat. The bell peppers came frozen from the Picard store over in Romorantin, and are a mix of red, green, and yellow peppers. They're an excellent product. Walt said he sauteed them with just a little bit of honey to caramelize the strips of pepper.

Just open a can...

I've been eating a lot of food out of cans over the past two or three weeks. Strange, isn't it? I love to cook, but I also like to try foods in a lot of different forms and packages to see if they're good. It's a kind of a sanity check to see how your own from-scratch cooking compares.

Of course, one of the foods I've bought in cans (or tins, if you prefer) is slow-cooked duck legs packed in southwestern France. They are kind of a luxury item — not on the scale of duck foie gras (fattened liver), but not cheap either. I showed a photo of the duck legs in my blog post yesterday. Above is the can our New Year's Day duck came in. Below is another brand I bought to have later, in the spring.

One reason I've bought duck legs in cans is because I haven't found them lately in the shrink-wrap (sous-vide) packaging they often are sold in here in France. What's the difference, really, between canned products and the trendy sous-vide packs? I have to admit that I've also been attracted to the big cans of canard confit because they've been on sale at about half-price (seven to eight euros for a can containing four or five nice plump duck leg-and-thigh pieces).

And look at the ingredients. There's nothing added, if you can believe the label. No additives, I mean. It's just duck legs, duck fat, and salt.

Here's the label in English. It also gives cooking instructions. You can use the duck legs in cassoulet (with white beans, etc.) or serve them with lentils. Or with Sarlat-style potatoes, which are cooked in duck fat. Or other ways — all delicious, I'm sure.

I made my "fusion" cassoulet-style Jan. 1, 2017, dinner using black-eyed peas and duck legs. There are cultural reasons for that — superstitions about what will bring good luck for the new year — but also personal preferences. I would be unhappy with a black-eyed-pea-free diet. I guess it's partly what you grew up with. But if you want to go all the way in France, you can just buy your cassoulet in a can (above). It can be very good (and not cheap) if you buy the real thing, cooked and canned in SW France and containing white beans (think of Italian cannellini beans — white kidney beans), duck confit, and Toulouse sausages.

This year, I cooked my black-eyes with smoked duck lardons. Normally, lardons are chunks of what is called lard in France, which has not much to do with American lard (saindoux). French lard would go by the names bacon or pork belly in the U.S. But lardons are a concept nowadays as much as a specific product in France. They are little chunks of meat, often smoked or brined, that go into vegetable dishes, stews, omelets, or quiches as a flavor ingredient. There are chicken, turkey, and duck lardons on the shelves of the supermarkets here in France.

Pantouflards

Your pantoufles are your bedroom slippers. If you are pantouflard, you are somebody who wears pantoufles more hours every day than any other kind of footwear. Another, less "familiar" (informal) adjective meaning the same thing is casanier (describing a person qui aime à rester au logis, according to the dictionary). In American English, we might call such a person a "homebody." (Or maybe a hermit!)

Iciness

That describes me and Walt, I guess, especially in the wintertime. If it's not freezing cold outside, the landscape is probably enveloped in thick fog. Or it's raining. (Actually, snow showers are predicted for the coming weekend.) Our sorties dehors are limited to walks with the dog or quick trips to the supermarket. It's just enough to keep us from suffering too much from "cabin fever."

Confit de canard : Duck legs cooked and packed in duck fat, taken out of a can and browned in a hot oven

Cooking and doing wintertime jobs like converting all my movies on DVDs into MP4s occupy a lot of my time right now. In past years, I've converted our thousands of recipes from an obsolete format into either HTML files or PDFs, to make sure we can continue to view them when we want to. Another year, I did our whole music collection, "ripping" some 500 CDs to tranform the tracks into MP3s. It keeps me busy, and feeling productive.

Black-eyed peas with smoked duck lardons, leeks, and a couple of Toulouse sausages

Vivement le printemps ! as we say — I can't wait for springtime to get here. I know, winter just started... Right now it's time for me to go out walking with the dog. It rained overnight, but I think it has stopped raining now. Or I hope so, anyway.

Campagnes TV — et un gratin d'endives

There's a French TV channel called Campagnes TV that we started receiving on our CanalSat satellite system last year. We watch it during the day as we are busy on our computers, slowly making lunch, doing housecleaning... whatever. The shows on Campagnes TV are about rural life in France, which is what we are living.

Every once in a while a segment about cheese-making, cooking, or farming will catch our attention. Since the channel plays the same shows over and over again all week, we don't miss anything if we get too busy. And if we see a report or a whole show that turns out to be fascinating, we can always record it later and see it again.

Cooking endives in chicken broth with slices of whole lemon

One of the shows I enjoy the most is called Du Champ au Fourneau — "From the Field to the Stove." (You can see that the word fourneau is related to the English word "furnace." Je suis aux fourneaux ce soir means "I'll be doing the cooking tonight.") There's a really interesting show about raising ducks for foie gras, confit, and magrets (breast filets) on YouTube, plus a lot of other Du Champ au Fourneau episodes. Another source is the Campagnes TV site itself. I don't know if you can play the videos on the Campagnes TV "replay" page — if you try viewing them outside France, let me know if they work or not. Please try it.

The finished product — gratin d'endives au jambon with a cream sauce

The other day I really enjoyed a show about making un gratin d'endives au jambon, which is one of my standards — what we Americans call "Belgian endives" first cooked, then wrapped in a slice of ham, and finally baked in the oven in a cheese sauce. The show included segments on raising pigs for pork, making ham, and then growing endives on a commercial scale.

Endives and grated cheese wrapped in ham and bacon

In it, I learned a new way to make the endive dish. It doesn't involve a cheese sauce, and the endives are cooked not in white wine with butter but in chicken broth. I had just bought a kilo bag of endives at Intermarché (for the princely sum of €1.29), so I was off like a shot to make it. Instead of a cheese sauce, it uses sliced or grated cheese in the "endive roll" and then calls for wrapping them in ham and bacon before cooking them in the oven.

Endives « Perle du Nord » from near Soissons in northern France

As it happened, the endive processing facility featured on the show was the one that packed the brand of endives I had bought. The recipe was demonstrated by a chef who either owns (or works in) a restaurant in Paris called Le Pavillon Montsouris and located on the edge of the Parc Montsouris, near the Cité Universitaire. The restaurant is on my list now... I'll see if I can find or download the segment of the show where he makes it.

La galette des rois... façon Walt

I'm watching yesterday evening's CBS news right now. The British Sky News channel, which we receive on our CanalSat system, sometimes shows the U.S. news on Sunday mornings at 6:30. They just showed reports about the weekend's terrible weather on both the east and west coasts of North America. Snow and ice from North Carolina up into New York and New England. A foot of warm rain falling in California, melting the deep snow on top of mountains and threatening major flooding and landslides. It all makes our weather here in Saint-Aignan seem ridiculously mild and pleasant.

Meanwhile, we've been enjoying our annual galette des rois, the traditional "king cake" made and eaten in France to mark the holiday called the Epiphany — the 12th day of Christmas. It falls on January 6 and in some countries and cultures, is celebrated as Christmas. On North Carolina's Outer Banks, it was called Old Christmas and people there used to observe it instead of December 25. I imagine that's ancient history these days. According to legend (and St. Matthew), the three Wise Men, les Rois-mages in French, followed a star and arrived in Bethlehem bearing gifts for the new-born Christ Child on January 6.

The galette des rois is a cake made of puff pastry (pâte feuilletée, also called "flaky pastry" and used to make croissants) filled with almond cream (made with butter, almond powder, and an egg). You can see the illustrated recipe in this 2009 blog post. Walt makes it all from scratch, and it's an all-day process because the dough has to rest in the refrigerator for 30 minutes between each of half a dozen foldings and rollings to make the pastry's characteristic layers and crunch.

Brrr

This is the coldest morning of the winter so far here in the Saint-Aignan area. The temperature on our outdoor thermometer reads –3.5ºC. That's about +26ºF. Our outdoor thermometer is in a relatively protected spot on the north side of the house and reads a little high most mornings compared to reports we get on different weather sites on the Internet. I think this qualifies as a "hard freeze" — une forte gelée. Tomorrow the morning low temperature is supposed to be back above freezing, however.

One of the weather sites we consult lets people post the current conditions where they live. It's météociel.fr, and right now somebody in Blois, 25 miles north of Saint-Aignan, is reporting a temperature of –4ºC, and somebody over in Romorantin, 20 miles east of us, is reporting –9ºC (+16ºF). I don't know why it is often so much colder over in Romo, but it is. Other observers say it's –8ºC up in the Orleans area, 60 miles northwest of here.

The temperature in our recently built greenhouse is +3.3ºC (38ºF), with no extra heater on down there. The plants look fine. With the door between the greenhouse and the utility room open, the utility room is colder than it would be otherwise, but the greenhouse is warmer. It works for us. Outdoors, it's cold, but the Tuscan black "dinosaur" kale (above) doesn't seem to be much bothered by the freeze.

Cauliflower, according to Jacques Pépin

If you are American, you probably know who Jacques Pépin is and you have probably watched his cooking shows on television. In addition, he has published many books over the past 40 or 50 years. Pépin is French from the Bourg-en-Bresse area north of Lyon, but he has lived in the U.S. for many decades now. If you live in France, England, or Australia, you might never have heard of him. It's fun to listen to him speak English, I think.

I mentioned a few days ago that I was going to make what in French is called a gratin de chou-fleur. In America, we'd call it cauliflower au gratin. If you're from some other English-speaking country, you might have a different name for it. Jacques Pépin's version is simple and quick, the instructions straight-forward, as are all of his recipes. There's nothing fussy about his cooking.

So I often go to Pépin's books and videos, of which I have quite a few, and which are available on the web, for recipes and ideas. I have an autographed copy of his Fast Food My Way book, thanks to blog reader Nadège who lives and works in Hollywood. She met him a few years ago and was nice enough to ask him to sign a copy of his book for me and Walt.

The only time I've ever seen Pépin in person, I believe, was one day when I was waiting at San Francisco Internation Airport, getting ready to fly to France I believe, sometime in the 1990s. I was sitting in a café having a glass of wine when he came strolling — no, almost running — by, probably in a hurry to catch a plane. I was tempted to go say hello to him, but it wasn't the right situation.

The photos here show the gratin de chou-fleur that I made on December 30. I basically follow Jacques Pépin's recipe — I've done so for years. I added lardons to the cauliflower because I had some in the fridge that needed to be used. Besides, lardons improve almost any recipe. And if you like the white dish I cooked the cauliflower in, let me tell you that I bought it recently at Intermarché for 1.50 €. I don't know if other supermarkets do the same, but both our local SuperU and Intermarché often sell the dishes that they use for pâtés and terrines at very good prices.

Walt and I started watching his cooking shows on television back in the early 1980s, when we lived in Washington DC and were homesick for France and French food. When we came back from Paris in 1982 and set up an apartment in DC, we were both busy working and didn't have a lot of time for travel. We didn't come back to France for a vacation until 1988. I was working in French in DC (with CHM and other francophones) so I wasn't completely cut off, but those six years were my longest period without a visit to France since I first came here as a student in 1970.

If for some reason the video above doesn't work on your device, you can find it on the KQED Essential Pépin site here. It seems to require Adobe Flash, but it works on my Android tablet. You can find the cauliflower recipe here, and you can see the many Essential Pépin videos and recipes by nosing around on his site. And there's a very good video interview with him here.

Shrimp, following package instructions

About two weeks ago, around Christmas, I went to SuperU to do some shopping. On the store's main aisle they often set up displays of items that are en promotion — advertised specials. There I saw a refrigerated case of foie gras of all kinds — in jars, in shrink wrap, whole livers, pâtés called blocs, and so on.

There was also a freezer case and what was in it caught my eye. It was gambas, also known as shrimp or prawns. And they were not pre-cooked. Shrimp are almost always sold pre-cooked in France, and that limits what you can do with them, in my opinion.

There they were — heads, tails, legs, shells and all. About two dozen per box, weighing nearly a pound (400 grams). And they were on special for 2.99 € a kilogram. Raw!

I picked up two packages. On the back of the package there were two recipes. One of them was Shrimp with pineapple. Hmmm. Walt said, let's make that.

The photo with the recipe on the back of the package (see below) showed the shrimp split in half with their heads still attached. I tried doing that but it was a lot of trouble to cut them that way, so I (be)headed them and then split them. You can boil the heads to make a good shrimp broth.

The recipe said to baste them with herb-infused olive oil. I decided that sesame oil infused with ginger, cayenne pepper, and Kaffir lime leaves would be better.

First I had oiled a baking pan with the mixture of sesame oil and a neutral vegetable oil (sunflower). It only required about a quarter of a cup of oil. The shrimp first went cut-side-down on the pan and then got broiled at high heat, close to the stove's heating element, for three minutes. Then we turned them all over and broiled them again for about two minutes, cut-side up. The shrimp were done.

Meanwhile, Walt opened a can of pineapple slices. He poured the syrup they were packed in into a frying pan and reduced it over high heat until it started to caramelize. In went the pineapple slices and a big chunk of butter. The pineapple started to glaze and brown in the pan. All it needed was a sprinkle of pepper — both cayenne and black pepper, to taste. It was ready too.

The result is above. We squeezed on some lime juice and served it with a good amount of steamed Thai jasmine rice. Some more sesame oil and a little bit of soy sauce at the table rounded it all out. We ate the shrimp with our fingers...

There's the recipe on the left. It's pretty simple.

Frosty branches and needles, etc.

Here are a few more photos that I took last weekend, before all our frost melted. I say that, but the temperature is again below freezing this morning, so the trees and vines might be frosty white again this morning. At 6:30 a.m., it's too dark outside for me to be able to tell yet.

Yesterday I got my monthly check from my retirement pension provider. With the current exchange rate, for each $1000 U.S. dollars I received about 963 euros. Compare that to the situation just a five years ago, when $1000 was coming in at something less than 665 euros. It's not hard to understand how much easier it is to live here now. Let's hope the dollar doesn't take another dive. About 95% of my income is in U.S. dollars.

Another subject: I've been digitizing my movie collection. Well, it was already digital, I guess, but the movies were in DVD format and saved on recordable DVDs. I'm converting them to MP4 format so that I can copy them to SD cards or USB flash drives and play them directly on my television set, computer, or touch-screen tablet. The MP4s take up between 400MB and 1.5 GB each, and each DVD movie uses more than 4.25GB of space, so it's quite a saving in disk space.

In the conversion process, I've come to realize that I have a collection of more than 150 French movies. I've bought some of them on DVDs, and others I have recorded on our satellite TV decoder and then transferred to my computer in DVD format. I'm preparing for the day when DVD players will go obsolete, and when desktop and laptop computer will no longer have optical drives. There are French films that I watch on a fairly regular basis — say once or twice a year — just because I enjoy the atmosphere they project and I love listening to the language. They remind me of the life I lived in Paris and Normandy back in the 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, I started recording a lot of French movies back when the dollar was so low, and I thought we might one day have to move back to the U.S. I'd always have Paris, I thought to myself, at least on DVDs...

Le passé et le présent

December 28, 2005

December 30, 2016

January 1, 2017

I'm still finding it hard to type 2017. My fingers will get used to it.

Snow? No — fog.

When you look at the photo below, which I took from an upstairs window yesterday morning, you might think it had snowed. It had not. You can see that when you look at the ground in our back yard and, especially, the green trimmed top of our laurel hedge. The little white truck parked next to the maison de vigneron belongs to a man named Roland who lives in the village and was out hunting yesterday afternoon.

January 1, 2017 — just before noon in the Renaudière vineyard outside Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher

The frosty vineyard and woods are all white because it's been foggy for three or four days, with temperatures below freezing for much of that time. Until yesterday afternoon, that is. Around 3 p.m. a little westerly breeze came up and all the frost started melting. By the time I went out with the dog at 4:30, the white was nearly all gone and water was dripping out of all the trees around the edge of the vineyard. The weather report on Télématin says there's snow, changing over to freezing rain, north of the Loire Valley, including in Normandy and the Paris area, this morning.

Cuisses de canard confites, slow-cooked and packed by the Jean Larnaudie company in Figeac (southwestern France)

Meanwhile, yesterday I mentioned the confit de canard we would be having for lunch with our New Year's Day black-eyed peas. It came out of a large tin (6 inches in diameter and 3½ inches tall). I thought the four duck leg-and-thigh pieces were beautiful, and then they were delicious at lunchtime. Earlier, I had opened the can and warmed it up in the oven for a few minutes so that I could get the duck pieces out unbroken.

Meilleurs vœux pour 2017...

...and Happy New Year. It's another frosty morning here. Yesterday the temperature might have hit freezing, but I think it stayed slightly below. The landscape got whiter and whiter.

I was going to post some more photos of the frost, but I left the SD card the photos are on upstairs, plugged into the TV. Rather than stumble around in the dark and make noise to wake Callie and Walt up, I just went in the kitchen and snapped these photos of our New Year's Day good-luck meal.

It's black-eyed peas cooked with carrots, a leek, an onion, some chicken broth, and a big spoonful of duck fat. Where I come from (North Carolina in the U.S.), eating black-eyed peas on January 1 is considered to be a smart thing to do. As with most superstitions, there probably isn't much to it, but it can't hurt to eat black-eyes anyway — especially if you like them. And I do. They cooked overnight in the slow-cooker, and I think they look beautiful.

But to add a French touch to the feast, I'll be opening a can of confit de canard — duck legs slow-cooked in duck fat — to eat with the beans. Duck and beans are a classic, and what I'm making is a sort of Franco-American cassoulet. I hope you eat your black-eyed peas today, or whatever food you enjoy and believe will bring you good fortune. I wish you peace and prosperity, health and happiness in 2017, wherever you are, and I thank you for participating in my blog for another year (number 12).

Fog and frost

When I went out for the walk with Callie yesterday afternoon, I took my camera with me. I wasn't optimistic about any photos I might take because it was so gloomy outdoors, and it was freezing cold. But it was worth a try. As always, you can click or tap on the images to open them at full size.

I didn't go out into the main part of the vineyard. I just walked around the hamlet, which is often my afternoon route. Part of the walk is through our neighbors' yard, because they are in Blois most of the time in winter.

Their big plot of land drops off steeply toward the south, and the downward slope is fairly thickly wooded. After the dog and I walk around there, we go back out onto the road and then turn off to the left to walk around the two parcels of vines that lie to the east and north of our property.

My fingers didn't freeze, and I took about 100 pictures! A lot of them turned out blurry, and some were so out of focus that I just deleted them immediately when I looked at them on my computer last night.

So here I am posting just 5, or 6 really, since one is a composite. Maybe they will give you an idea of what our freezing fog looks like as it settles on plants all around the are.

In a few minutes I'll be going out again — Callie needs her walk. I'll go out into the main vineyard. But it will be too dark for photography. We go as early as we can, at daybreak, and on recent mornings we've walked for 30 to 35 minutes and are back at home before the sun even comes up. The temperature is well below freezing right now, and I imagine it's still foggy.