Sweet and savory sauteed rabbit with peaches

We had our Easter rabbit yesterday. It was good, and it's a really simple recipe. You could make this with chicken or turkey if you can't get or don't want rabbit.



The first step is to sauté the rabbit pieces. Use a whole rabbit, cut into serving pieces, or use just the hind legs and the saddle (le râble) as we did. When it has good color, take the rabbit out of the pan.

Next, slice up a couple of onions and garlic cloves and sauté those in the same pan. Then cut 5 or 6 peach halves into wedges. Put them into the pan with the onions and let them caramelize slightly. We used peaches out of a can, since it's not peach season now.

Take the peach wedges out of the pan, leaving the onions and garlic in. Add a tablespoon of Chinese five-spice powder and one piece of star-anise and stir. Optionally add in some cayenne pepper or crushed red pepper flakes for heat.

Put the rabbit pieces back in the pan and pour in half a cup (120 ml) each of chicken broth and white wine. Also add in two tablespoons of the syrup from the can of peaches. Don't forget the salt and black pepper.

Let the rabbit cook for 30 to 40 minutes at a low simmer, covered. Toward the end of that time, take the cover off the pan so that the liquid will reduce slightly. Five minutes before serving, put the sauteed peach wedges in the pan to heat through.

Serve the braised rabbit and peaches with rice or pasta. We had both, actually, because Walt made a batch of a Lebanese rice pilaf that we like. It's the home-made version of American "Rice-a-Roni" — white rice, vermicelli or angel-hair pasta, onions, and chicken broth. Here's Martha Stewart's recipe. I can recommend it.

Garnish the rabbit dish with some chopped pistachios (Walt found these nice unsalted pistachios at the supermarket) and some chopped cilantro (if you like it) or some other fresh herb like parsley, oregano, or thyme.

Here's the finished dish. We enjoyed it with a red Pécharmant wine from the Bergerac area in southwestern France. It would also be good with a semi-dry white wine like a Vouvray.

Pâté de Pâques and a rabbit for Easter dinner

We went down to the Saturday morning market in Saint-Aignan yesterday. We were shopping for a rabbit that we will be cooking as our Easter dinner today. We wanted to buy it from our favorite poultry vendor, and we wanted some more asparagus from the man who comes down here from Contres to sell the white asparagus he grows near Soings-en-Sologne.

We also bought a big piece of what is called pâté de Pâques (Easter pâté) in the Loire Valley and the Berry regions. I don't know if the pâté is a regional specialty, or if people in other parts of France have the same thing at Easter. It's a puff-pastry shell filled with an herby meat stuffing and hard-boiled eggs.

I forgot to take my camera to the market, but I took a few photos of our purchases this morning. After a walk around the vineyard with Callie the collie, I'll come back and start cooking. By the way, a lot of people here raise rabbits for food, and rabbit (like chicken, turkey, and duck) is always available at good prices in the supermarkets and on the open-air markets.

The liver or foie...

...and the kidneys or rognons visible after the liver is removed

This year we decided to buy parts rather than a whole animal. For the two of us, it's plenty. We got a piece of what is called the râble, which is the "saddle" in English, like saddle of lamb. It's the back, with its two nice tenderloin pieces, and with the liver, and the kidneys attached. Those are good to eat too.

For good measure, we also bought two rabbit legs. The back legs are very meaty, and we chose those. As you can see, the meat is very white and lean. We'll be cooking the rabbit as a sweet-and-savory dish with onions and peaches. More about that tomorrow.

French dressing

Are you old enough to remember the bottled salad dressing that was called "French dressing" in America? I sure am. I suppose it's still available in supermarkets. It was big in the 1950s and '60s, when I was growing up. That was before I first came to France and realized that the real French salad dressing was home-made vinaigrette.

According to the Wikipedia article about French dressing, it was made with olive oil, vinegar, tomato paste, ketchup, brown sugar, paprika, and salt. Notice the ketchup and the brown sugar, both of which are not only sweet but have very strong flavors. I say: leave them out.

Recently, I've been making a dressing that I'd call vinaigrette à la tomate, or tomato vinaigrette. It turns out to be really good on salad greens. It looks like the old American "French dressing" but its taste is clean and fresh, not cloyingly sweet. The ingredients are tomato paste, Dijon mustard, white wine vinegar, salt, pepper, and salad oil (olive or other). Actually, for years I've been making tomato vinaigrette using finely chopped fresh tomato (in season), but not with tomato paste.

For the day's salad, spoon one generous tablespoon of tomato paste into a big salad bowl. Add a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, a teaspoon of white wine vinegar, salt and pepper to taste, and stir well. Once it's well mixed and the salt has dissolved, whisk in 2 or 3 tablespoons of oil. Optionally, add some onion, shallot, garlic or herbs like parsley, tarragon, or oregano. Toss salad greens in it. You'll like it. It's just a vinaigrette with tomato paste added to it.

History

Yesterday morning, I lost more than half of the photos that I had taken since about March 20. The SD card I was keeping them on, before copying them into the photo archives on my desktop computer, suddenly wouldn't work any more. It's a Kingston brand card, and this will be the fourth Kingston card or flash drive that has failed me over the past two or three years. Be warned.

This time, something happened to the card either when I stuck it in or pulled it out of the old digital camera that I use most of the time. The file system got corrupted. I spent a couple of hours trying to recover the files that had been on the disk, because I didn't really remember what all was actually on it. I recovered some photos, but finally I just had to reformat the card and take the loss. The rest of the photos are history, except of course the ones I've already posted on this blog.

Speaking of history, one of the sets of files I lost when the Kingston card got corrupted was the partially filled-out French citizenship application that I've been working on, or thinking about working on, for the past few months, ever since we had all our birth certificates (ours, our parents') and other U.S. documents translated by a court-certified translator last fall. Luckily, I had backed up the application files to the hard disk on my laptop, so they weren't actually lost. I wish I had gotten around to backing up all the photos more recently than March 21.

Later yesterday morning, I thought I might as well fill out another section of the naturalization application form. It's eight pages in all. One page asks for my parents' and siblings' birth dates and birthplaces, as well as their current addresses. My father died in 1990. My mother is still living. I have just one sister. So that page was easy. Another asks me to give the names, addresses, and other information for all my children — but I don't have any. Easier still.

The next page was the hard one. I needed to detail my professional history. I am supposed to list all the employers I've worked for in my life (I'm 68 years old now), the jobs' start and end dates, what I did at each place, and my former employers' addresses. Wow! I got my first job in about 1964. I've lived in North Carolina (2 cities), Illinois (2 cities), France (4 cities), Washington DC, and California (2 cities) over the course of my existence, so you can imagine how many different jobs I've had (not being independently wealthy...)

The interesting part of thinking back over all the places I've worked and writing it all down was that I realized that very few of the companies or even institutions I've worked for since the mid-1960s even exist any more. They are nearly all "history" now. When I told Walt about it, he said: "Wow, you've closed down a lot of companies!" LOL.

Some of the organizations I've worked for do still exist. The University of Illinois, for example — I taught French language classes there for nearly a decade — and Alma College (I ran that Michigan school's study abroad program in Paris for a couple of years in the early 1980s). The Sorbonne in Paris, where I taught American history and language for a little while, still exists, of course. And so does the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, but it's no longer located in Paris, where it was when I taught English there, but in Strasbourg.

In the early 1980s I left France and moved to Washington DC to see what kind of job I could find there. I ended up being hired by CHM (you'll know who I mean if you've been reading this blog for a while) as his assistant in the publications department of the United States Information Agency. That agency no longer exists — it was absorbed into the U.S. Department of State years ago. I don't know what address to list for USIA, now defunct. I was a translator, writer, and editor there for a few years.

Then I moved to California, and that's where I really started closing things down. In 1987, I went to work as managing editor of a computer magazine, UNIX Review, that was published by a company called Miller Freeman Publications, in San Francisco. I stayed there only about three years — didn't really like the job. And now Miller Freeman is history. Gone. Kaput.

Next I went to work for a Silicon Valley software company called SPC (Software Publishing Corporation) which was a great place to work — I was a technical editor and manager there — for about three years. The company started falling apart because the end-user software business was being taken over by Microsoft and Windows — we did DOS software back then. I moved on. SPC went out of business two decades ago.

My next gig was for Apple, in the company's Claris software subsidiary, where I was hired as an editor, soon became a manager, and ended up as one of the company's directors, reporting to the vice-president for product development. Again, it was a great place to work, and I still have many friends who were my co-workers there.

I stayed at Claris for six years (to the day, it turned out) before getting laid off when Steve Jobs made a deal with Bill Gates that required closing down the Apple software business (Microsoft didn't like the competition, and at Claris we were producing software for both Macintosh and Windows). Claris disappeared as a brand in January 1998. I had been right on the verge of resigning when the lay-offs hit, and I ended up with a nice severance package. So I took a year off.

Starting in 1999, I had a series of jobs with smaller companies, including start-ups. My heart wasn't in it any more. I went to work for a company where several ex-colleagues from SPC had found work. That company was soon bought out by an outfit called Hyperion, which was eventually acquired by Oracle. The work culture changed, and I moved on. Other friends — ex-colleagues from both SPC and Claris — were working at a start-up (Extricity) not too far from San Francisco (an easy commute for me at that point), and they took me in as an editor in 2000.

That start-up was sold to a San Diego company and no longer exists. The new owners merged us into an established software company called Remedy Corporation. Then the San Diego company fell victim to a serious accounting scandal and many of its top executives ended up in prison. It went bankrupt, and Remedy went with it. Remedy doesn't exist any more, and neither does the scandal-ridden San Diego outfit, which was called Peregrine Systems.

Okay, so I closed down Peregrine, Remedy, Extricity, Hyperion, Claris, SPC, Miller Freeman, and USIA! When I was researching all this yesterday, I discovered that one of the companies or business units I worked in was finally absorbed by Hewlett Packard, but I can't even remember which one it was. In 2002, I resigned my last job in the U.S. (I wonder how many jobs I've resigned from in my life...) and moved to France. I hope I don't end up closing this place down.

Asparagus x 2 x 2

My post title is shorthand for "two kinds of asparagus, cooked two ways" but it's probably not clear. The fact is, it's asparagus season in the Loire Valley. Walt bought a bunch of local white asparagus spears from our favorite vendor in the market on Saturday morning. Then at the supermarket on Sunday morning I noticed bunches of green asparagus spears imported from Spain for just 2€/lb. So I bought a bunch.

We trimmed up the asparagus spears — the white ones need to be peeled, but the green ones don't — and cooked them in a steamer pot. We also cooked some potatoes in the steamer, and we sauteed a couple of little fish fillets and a few big shrimp in olive oil. I made a batch of fresh mayonnaise using an egg yolk, a mixture of olive and sunflower oil, and some white wine vinegar. We had our Sunday lunch, served warm but not hot. I thought the white asparagus tasted sweeter than the green, maybe because it was grown locally and didn't have to travel.

Then, yesterday, Walt made one of his superb asparagus and ham tarts, using both green and white asparagus spears (they're the same plant, just grown differently). The spears are wrapped in ham slices (jambon de Paris), 4 to 6 spears each, and then arranged in a pre-baked pie crust. A savory egg custard containing cream and Parmesan cheese gets poured into the pie shell, and the whole thing is baked in a hot oven for about 20 minutes. Delicious.

Slow-cooker carbonade à la flamande

When I went to Intermarché, one of our local supermarkets, one day last week, I noticed that they had nice trays of what is called bœuf pour bourguignon, or stew beef, on sale for a good price. I couldn't resist, even though I hadn't planned on buying any meat.

Bœuf bourguignon, or beef Burgundy, is a red wine stew made with onions, herbs, stew beef, and mushrooms, and it's of course really good. The problem was that I had made a beef Burgundy just a couple of weeks ago, so I wanted something different. Walt and I talked about it, and somehow we came up with the idea of making a beef stew cooked in beer that's a Belgian specialty.

Or a Flemish specialty, really, because there are also recipes for the stew from the Flemish part of northern France as well as Belgium. It's called carbonade flamande or carbonade à la flamande. The main ingredients are beef and onions, and the cooking liquid is a combination of beer and either beef or veal broth.

There's also sugar in the recipe — some raw sugar (called cassonade or sucre roux), and some brown sugar (vergeoise brune) — along with bay leaves, thyme, mustard, wine vinegar, and spices including allspice and cloves. I had most of the ingredients in the house, and I made carbonade in the slow cooker. It is really good served with (it's Belgian) frites. The Belgians supposedly invented pommes de terre frites, which we in America call French-fried potatoes.

There are a lot of recipes for carbonade on the internet, of course, in French and in English. I also found one in the Larousse Gastronomique food encyclopedia. Here it is, in French. 

Carbonade à la flamande

Émincer 250 g d'oignons. Détailler en morceaux ou en tranches minces 750 g de hampe de boeuf ou de paleron, les faire colorer vivement dans une poêle avec 40 g de saindoux, puis les égoutter. Faire dorer les oignons dans la même graisse.

Disposer des couches de viande et d'oignon dans une petite cocotte en les alternant ; saler et poivrer à chaque fois. Ajouter 1bouquet garni.

Déglacer la poêle avec 600 ml de bière et 125 ml de bouillon de boeuf.

Préparer un roux brun avec 25 g de beurre et 25 g de farine, l'arroser avec le mélange à la bière, ajouter 1 c. à café de cassonade. Rectifier l'assaisonnement. Verser cette préparation dans la cocotte, couvrir et laisser mijoter 2 h 30 à feu très doux. Servir dans la cocotte de cuisson.

See the comments for my translation of the LG recipe.

I decided to sweat the onions with some of the herbs directly in the low cooker for a couple of hours on the cooker's high temperature setting, with some herbs and spices. Then I cut the meat into smaller pieces and added those to the cooker, without putting in any liquid. I let the meat cook for a couple of hours too, and it released some juices as it slowly browned.

Then I added the beer, broth, and sugar, including a squirt of molasses that I brought back from the U.S. in February — I didn't have any brown sugar but I did have cassonade (raw sugar) in the house. Molasses, called "black treacle" in the U.K., gives the flavor you want. With everything in the cooker, I let it cook for nearly 10 hours overnight on low temperature. It was just right at that point.

Introducing...

...Natasha. She's the new puppy. Yesterday, we made arrangements to go get her and bring her home two weeks from today, on April 25.

The woman we're getting her from — she lives over near Chinon, Ussé, and Azay-le-Rideau — sent us this picture yesterday. Natasha is a tricolor Shetland sheepdog ("sheltie") and she has grown a lot since we saw her the one and only time on March 13. Natasha was born on February 23.

The washing machine situation

The new Whirlpool washer we just bought is about the same size as the one we got when we moved here to Saint-Aignan in 2003. It gave us good service for nearly 14 years. But lately it had started acting up. For whatever reason, it would stop in the middle of its cycle and display an error message indicating that the wash water couldn't be pumped out of the drum.

We were able to get the old washer-dryer combo moved out from the wall and clean thoroughly behind and under it before the new machine was delivered. This is the "unfinished" utility room on the ground floor of our house.

Walt opened it up and checked the filter. It wasn't clogged. And if we changed the cycle to a simple rinse and spin, the water was pumped out normally and everything worked fine. We unplugged the machine for about 24 hours, having been told that unplugging it might reset the electronic controls on the thing. That worked for a few weeks, and then it started acting up again. I ran it with hot water and a lot of distilled vinegar in it to see if that would help by dissolving any calcium deposits that might be blocking hoses or filter. That didn't work either. It was time to act.

Here's a Google Maps street view photo of our closest laudromat, 20 miles away in Romorantin.

Here's one of the problems: There are no laundromats around here — at least not that I know of. Oh, there was one in Saint-Aignan for a few years, from about 2007 until maybe 2012. Then it closed down. I've never seen one anywhere else. So if we don't have a working washing machine, what do we do? Anyway, do I really want to have to go to a laundromat? No. I just checked: there are three laundromats (laverie automatique, or lavomatique) in Blois. That's a 50-mile round trip. There's one in Romorantin — 40 miles away, round-trip. And there's one in Amboise — again a 50-mile round-trip.

 Old Whirlpool vs. new Whirlpool

So there you go. We got a new washing machine from Darty. Free delivery, and it came just 2 or 3 days after I ordered it. The delivery guys hauled away the old machine. Not only was it acting up, but it also had started to rust out. So it's gone. The stacked dryer is also 14 years old, but since we use just a few times a year, it has held up better.

Here's the new washer with the old dryer on top of it.

I just checked to see if they make washing machines like ours for the U.S. market. It seems they do. I found this one on the Home Depot site (we paid only about half as much for the washer compared to the Home Depot price). It seems the more or less standard U.S. front-loading washer has a capacity of about 4.5 ft³. Our machine's capacity is about 2.0 ft³. That's 130 liters vs. 60 liters. And that's fine for us, because there are just two of us, and we don't work. We can run the machine every day if we need to, washing small loads. That's what we've been doing for 14 years. But the controls... well, more about that later...

Washed up

We got the new washing machine and the delivery and installation were a snap. Problem is, I can't get the machine to work the way the old one did. Whirlpool 1, user 0. European washing machines are notoriously complicated to use.

More about that later. Meanwhile, yesterday was a washing day of another sort. Walt "power-washed" our terrace for the season. We bought a little power-washing Kärcher machine a few years ago, and it has proved to be a good investment. Now we have clean tile and our summertime furniture on it out on the terrace. The summer season has begun.

And here's a view through the lean-to greenhouse out to the back yard and vegetable garden plot. Just because...

Being produc(k)tive

We've had a really productive week. Walt mowed the whole yard. I tilled the vegetable garden plot for the second time this season. We did a good amount of house cleaning. And then we bought a new washing machine. More about all that later...

We also have been cooking. We've eaten duck a couple of times this week. It's duck leg-and-thigh pieces cooked as confit, which means it's slow cooked in duck fat as they do it in southwestern France.

This is a photo of a cuisse de canard confite that has been taken out of the duck fat it was cooked in and lightly browned in a hot oven.

The whole southwest of France is known for duck and goose dishes.

In northern France, cooking is based on dairy products including butter and cream. In southeastern France — Provence and the Nice area — the cooking is based on olive oil. And in the southwest — centered on Toulouse — it's all about duck and goose fat.

Yesterday I made pommes de terre sarladaises to go with the duck. Sarlat is one of the main towns in the Périgord region, four or five hours south of here by car. It's also one of the most beautiful, though it can be overrun with tourists. The potatoes in my photo are sauteed in duck fat after having been cooked whole in a steamer pot and then sliced. We had some garden-grown kale as a side dish, as you can see above. And the parsley comes from the greenhouse.

The other common accompaniment for duck or goose in southwestern France is white beans. The beans of choice are called lingots blancs, which are very similar to, or even exactly the same bean, as Italian cannellini beans. These cost 1.10€ per 500-gram box, so 2.20€ per kilo, at Intermarché.

Earlier in the week, I cooked a kilogram of dried lingot blanc beans in the slow-cooker. I soaked them briefly (three or four hours) in the crockpot the then turned it on and let the beans cook in the soaking liquid for 10 hours on the low temperature setting. I seasoned them with black pepper, thyme, onion, garlic, and a few allspice berries, but no salt until they were fully cooked to keep them tender.

The beans came out exceedingly tender and with the texture they call fondant in French — melt-in-your-mouth good. I put some of them in a baking dish, laid two duck legs on top, and covered the dish with some bread crumbs before putting it in the oven for 30 or 40 minutes to make a quick cassoulet.

Springtime report

One of the places I like to walk to in the afternoon, when I go out with Callie the collie, is down this fairly steep hill to the lower northeast corner of the Renaudière vineyard. At the very bottom is a field that's often planted in wheat or colza. Down there is the bottom land of the river valley. Our house and the vineyard is on the heights.

Of course, one of the requirements for walking down there is a willingness to walk back up to the house afterwards! Callie doesn't mind, and I don't either. At my age, it's very good exercise.

Along the edge of the vineyard, there is that little orchard where the neighbor posted his hand-made Propriété Privée sign (see yesterday's post). The tree above is a peach tree. It needs to be a very hot summer for the peaches here to ripen before pests get into them, but sometimes there are some to pick in August or September.

The new greenhouse we had put up last November is proving to be both a huge improvement to our house and a boon to our gardening efforts. It's still far too early to set plants out in the vegetable garden plot, but the seedlings are sprouting in the greenhouse. The view above is what people walking or driving by on the road can see of the greenhouse if they look. By the way, it's cold this morning — +6ºC, which is just barely above 40ºF.

Quiet

When we first came to live in the Saint-Aignan area 14 years ago, the lack of noise here was amazing. We had been living in densely populated, high-traffic San Francisco for nearly 20 years. Our neighborhood there was quiet, but the houses were packed together, so neighbor noise was noticeable. And the I-280 freeway, 8 or 10 lanes packed with cars and trucks nearly 24 hours a day, was only a few blocks away. The noise from that traffic was a constant, low, but perceptible roar that your ears got used to filtering out.

The railroad tracks and the new autoroute are over on the other side of the Cher River valley from where we live.

Out here on the edge of the Touraine vineyards, the silence was deafening. First of all, we live at the end of the road where the pavement ends. Traffic on that road is minimal, except for cars driven by a few vineyard workers or our 4 or 5 close-by neighbors, plus the occasional tractor. About the only other noise was the sound of a train passing on the tracks across the river from us, at least 3 miles distant. And we only heard trains when the wind was blowing in a certain direction and there was low cloud cover to hold the noise close to the ground. Sometimes, too, we hear loud, low-flying fighter jets on training exercises, because there are several military bases in the area.

A lot of trees around the hamlet are in full flower right now.

Several of the men who worked in the vineyard back then (we got here in 2003) and pruned the grapevines in wintertime burned all the trimmings in improvised contraptions that were basically big oil barrels on wheels. I think the heat of the fire kept them warm — vine-pruning is a winter activity — and I know that the process made no noise at all. Now, the burning of trimmings has been stopped and tractors pulling grinders make passes up and down the vines to pulverize clippings that pruners have left on the ground. That work takes a week or two in early spring.

April skies over the vineyard

For a while, we had some neighbors who kept chickens, and we got used to the year-round clucking and the early morning crowing of a rooster. Sometimes our neighbors would have a couple of loud, late-night parties in July or August, but we were often invited to attend so the noise didn't bother us. There's a lot more car traffic around the area now than there was 8 or 10 years ago. That's because the local Beauval zoo has become a major tourist attraction, with its growing collection of exotic animals, including a couple of giant pandas.

A neighbor recently cleaned up his little orchard near our house and put up a hand-made sign.

Also, a major highway (une autoroute), the equivalent of an interstate highway, was built and opened  to traffic nearby a few years after we got here. Now we sometimes vaguely hear the noise of big trucks off in the distance. But we don't hear the trains as much as we used to, because the railroad now uses electric-powered rather than diesel locomotive. About the noisiest time around here is when a hot-air balloon floats over the hamlet and all the local dogs go wild barking. That happens maybe half a dozen times a year, in summertime.

Yard and garden

We have half an acre of land here, just 2 miles (3 km) outside Saint-Aignan. That's more than enough land, actually. It gives us a sense of privacy, but it also requires a good amount of maintenance work. Right now, most of the outdoor work involves preparing the soil for the 2017 vegetable garden. And, of course, mowing, to keep the yard under control. The yard and garden are our main preoccupations right now. We have to keep up with the work and the seasons.

The tilling season is fairly short. It's hard work, however, because the rototiller is a heavy piece of equipment. And because the soil is mostly clay, which is very heavy when wet and almost like concrete when very dry. Right now, it's not too bad— it's just wet enough, not soggy — and yesterday morning I was able to do a second tilling pass on the garden plot. I'll till it two or three more times before we plant the garden in May or early June, to keep the weeds down and the soil loosened up.

Above is a photo of the garden plot from a little farther back, putting it into perspective. Half an acre is about 2000 m² (20,000 sq. ft.) The garden plot takes up only 100 m², or 1/20th of the yard. Our house has approximately that same 100 m² "footprint" on the ground (but it includes three levels — a ground-floor "basement", the main living space over that, and the finished attic space).

Finally, here's a shot from just outside our back fence, looking across the yard and vegetable garden plot toward the house. You can see that there is a feeling of spaciousness. It takes Walt two or three hours to mow all the grass, and how many times he has to mow it between March and November depends entirely on how much rain falls over the course of the season. Some years, mowing is a weekly or bi-weekly chore, but in dry years the grass needs cutting only once every 4 to 6 weeks.

Contrasts

April is a month of contrasts. Colors are very dark or very bright. One minute, it feels like springtime. Then the sky suddenly blackens and a cold rain starts falling. If you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes.

I took the first and third photos here in the space of 10 minutes a couple of days ago, while I was out walking around the hamlet with the dog late in the afternoon. The one in the middle — raindrops falling on our terrace — was taken a couple of hours earlier, when I thought rain might spoil the rest of the day. It turned out to be just an April shower.

Fluff

Can you tell what this white fluffy stuff is?

I took the picture on our gravel path out in the back yard.

Here's a clue.

It's a plant we've had growing out back for many years now.

A drink and a sniff

We had showery weather yesterday. There were frequent giboulées — sudden downpours — during most of the afternoon. At least one of them included a lot of ice pellets. Luckily, by 5:30, when it was time for our walk, the sun was shining brilliantly, though the sky was filled with puffy clouds.

Callie enjoys the walks and she likes nothing better than getting a good drink of rainwater. She also is always on the lookout — or should I say "smellout"? — for interesting odors. I wonder what she detected this time. Maybe there was a deer out in the vineyard, upwind. At age 10, smelling and seeing deer is one of her greatest pleasures in life.