Modern-day hermits

A week or two ago, Susan and Simon mentioned the village of Villeloin-Coulangé on their blog, Days on the Claise, and it reminded me that I visited an old monastery near there more than 10 years ago, once with Walt and a friend of ours from California, and again with my friend CHM. It's less than 30 minutes southeast of Saint-Aignan.

Looking back through this blog, I found a mention of the monastery (called a "priory" or "hermitage") but very few photos. Then I read this 2012 article published in our regional newspaper, La Nouvelle République, and decided to translate (or adapt) and post it here, with some photos. I hope that the photos will give you an idea of what the place looks like, and that the translated text will give you the flavor of a French newspaper article.

A hermitage in a tranquil valley

Hidden from view in a quiet valley in central France, not far from Loches, Montrésor, and Saint-Aignan, the priory of Grandmont-Villiers is home to three hermit monks who've lived there for more than 30 years. It is a place where time stands still.

A fire crackles in the monumental fireplace, a silent witness to so many stories. On a stone wall, three feet thick, is a colorful representation of Christ. This is the ancient kitchen of the priory of Grandmont-Villiers, in Villeloin-Coulangé. Father Philippe-Étienne welcomes his visitors and invites them to sit down at a big dining-room table. 

First, he wants to talk — to probe the soul of this stranger who wants to shine the harsh light of the surrounding world on his monastery. Nestled in a peaceful valley, at the end of a narrow paved lane that becomes a simple dirt road, the building is hidden by trees and hedges and reveals itself only after the visitor enters its walled courtyard.

“We do not
play at
being
hermits.
We are
hermits.”

Father Philippe-Étienne begins the conversation. His love of history and, of course, religion doesn't prevent him from being well-versed in contemporary political life and its hypocrisies. He speaks, often with half-closed eyes, as if he is starting to understand the world view of his visitor more clearly.

At 65, this man has lived several lives, working for ten years in industry before embracing the contemplative and laborious existence of the hermit. 

He says that he in fact lives in only "relative solitude" because he shares the hermitage, which he heads, with two other monks, and also because the priory is open to tourists and other visitors. "We enjoy greater solitude before the hunting season begins and after it closes," he adds, with a wry smile.

Father Philippe-Étienne donned the monastic robe for the first time in 1979. With the help of troops of boy scouts, he renovated the priory. Over time, all the roofs have been repaired. He spent his first few years here alone. 

Then, in 1983, two other monks joined him. "We do not play at being hermits. We are hermits," he tells me. What are their days like? "We pray... seven times a day," he says, mentally counting the number of daily services they attend. "And we work. "

The priory sits on 15 acres of land, of which 10 acres are given over to agriculture. Two cows graze on the property, even though the monks no longer produce dairy products. Inside the building, not all parts of which are habitable, there remain four monk's "cells."

This allows the monks to welcome — once in a while and for just a few days at a time — a guest who's in need of a spiritual retreat. "We see life through sadness. People come to us when they have problems." Does that make these men feel pessimistic? "No, just realistic," Father Philippe-Étienne says. •

Relief, and a status report

First of all, let me say that I'm so glad and relieved that my old friend from California who now lives in Naples (Florida) posted on Facebook last night. I just saw her message saying she's fine. She didn't get flooded out by Hurricane Irma, and she has only minor wind damage to repair. The storm blew down a big oak tree in her yard, but it didn't fall on her house.

Finishing up with the peach saga, above is a photo of the compote that I made day before yestarday and put in plastic containers for storage. Walt and I have both eaten some, in yogurt and on toast, and it's delicious. I think one container will go into the freezer for later.

Following up with tomato progress, look at all these that were sitting out on the table on the terrace yesterday morning. The chairs are propped up like that because we were having strong gusts and wind-driven rain and we didn't want the chair seats to fill up with water. It's still raining this morning, by the way, but it's not so windy.

Walt made those tomatoes on the table into sauce yesterday. I'm not sure whether we will turn that sauce into paste, the way we did with the last batch of red tomatoes (above), or keep it as sauce. Either way, we'll enjoy it this fall and winter.

To wrap up, the grape harvest is in full swing. Many of the grapes have now been taken in. The harvester and tractor in this photo worked to bring in a couple of parcels of Sauvignon Blanc fruit yesterday. I saw the tractor and trailer go by the house a minute or two after taking this picture, and the trailer was nearly overflowing with white grapes.

Peeled, pitted, and peachy keen

Peeling those little peaches that I posted about yesterday turned out not to be a difficult task at all. I blanched them for a minute or less in boiling water in a wok. Then I plunged them into cold water. When they were cooled off, the skins just slid right off.





Peaches
poaching

Peeled
peaches

Peach

peelings

In fact it was so easy that I quickly went back outside and picked up another two or three pounds of peaches that had fallen to the ground under that same tree. In all, I ended up with nearly five pounds (2.25 kg) of them.

Peach
pits



The harder part of the job was cutting each peach all the way around so that I could pull them apart and remove the pits. The peaches were so slippery that if I wasn't careful or lucky, they would squirt right out of my hands and fly across the room!

I took as many peach halves as would fit on a tray, arranged them as you see, and set the tray in the freezer. Now I need to go put the frozen pitted peach pieces in a plastic bag for storage. They'll make good tarts or pies. With the rest of the peeled and pitted peaches I prepared compote.

La vie continue

Not much to blog about here. I'm watching storm reports on CNN, storm videos on YouTube, and weather maps and radar on Accuweather. I'm especially hoping to get good news from my friend who lives in Naples and decided to ride out the storm in her house with her two four-legged friends.

We just continue processing and eating tomatoes. Yesterday was a nice tomato salad with feta cheese and basil. And here is a photo of the latest batch of tomato paste we've made. Walt made sauce with red tomatoes, milled it, and then cooked it down in the oven to turn it into paste. Today we have to get that paste into sterilized jars, seal them, label them, and store them in the cellar for the winter. Life goes on.

Life is not a bowl of peaches for everybody right now, but around here some of the peach trees are full of them. I picked these off a tree, and up off the ground underneath it, over on the edge of the woods across the street. Nobody else is picking them. I picked them, and now I have to peel them and decide how to preserve them.

A strange fascination, and another lasagna concoction

This blog is on autopilot right now. For me, the Florida hurricane coverage on American TV channels like CNN and MSNBC is too absorbing. I did force myself to go to bed at about 9:30 last night because I knew that the puppy would have me out of bed by 5 a.m. (and she did). I've been sitting here watching the storm reports for nearly two hours at this point.

What is the irresistible pull of watching video of the big storm in Florida? I guess it's because I grew up with hurricanes in North Carolina. Somehow I feel deprived of and cut off from an important part of my life experience because I'm not in the U.S. but in France now. At the same time, the damage and destruction will be terrible. It's like watching the proverbial train wreck.

Meanwhile, here in Saint-Aignan we are continuing to prepare, cook, eat, and preserve (freezing or canning) the wealth of amazing tomatoes and summer squash our 2017 vegetable garden is giving us.

A couple of days ago I made a zucchini and spinach lasagna with ricotta, mozzarella, and emmental ("Swiss") cheese. I cut the zucchini into rounds and pre-cooked them in the microwave in a covered dish with some salt, pepper, and olive oil for about 10 minutes, until they had softened slightly. It worked really well.

I also cooked some frozen spinach in the microwave, as I usually do. Then I sauteed it with some onion and garlic in olive oil, and seasoned it with nutmeg, salt, and black pepper. All that was left to do was put the lasagna together and bake it.

I made the lasagna mostly with yellow tomato sauce from our tomatoes, adding a little bit of red sauce too. In all, I put in at least half a liter of tomato sauce, one large zucchini, a pound of frozen spinach, a container of ricotta, and as much mozzarella as you see in the photo above. Here are the layers, from bottom to top: 

1. a thin layer of tomato sauce drizzled with olive oil
2. a first layer lasagna noodles
3. partially cooked zucchini rounds
4. ricotta cheese with some tomato sauce drizzled over it
5. a second layer of lasagna noodles
6. cooked and seasoned spinach
7. mozzarella cheese with tomato sauce drizzled over it
8. a third layer of lasagna noodles
9. rounds of fresh tomato with some tomato sauce and olive oil drizzled over them
10. grated Swiss (or cheddar, etc.) cheese

Stormy weather

We're not in the eye of a hurricane, but we've had some stormy weather here in Saint-Aignan too. Yesterday was windy in the morning and then rainy, especially late in the day. Walt and Natasha had just returned home from a long afternoon walk when a  heavy rain started falling. While they were out walking, I took these photos.

When I zoomed in on the clouds, I got the photo below. The sky was quickly getting darker. The rain didn't last very long, but it was hard. Weather forecasts had predicted 28 mm (over an inch) of rain for late Friday night and early Saturday morning, but we only got a quarter of that. I'm not sure how much more we got in the gauge in the evening, because we haven't checked it yet.

A lot of the grapes out back have been harvested now. There was a scramble to get as many grapes picked Friday afternoon because of the predictions of heavy rain. It's downright cold here this morning.

I'm still tracking Hurricane Irma by watching CNN and checking Accuweather and the U.S. National Hurricane Center site. I'm worried about my old California friend and colleague who now lives near Naples in SW Florida and is riding out the storm in her house. The Google Maps screen above shows the neighborhood she lives in, called Island Walk. It's more water than land, and the square mile it covers is home to some 3,300 residents. It appears to be about five miles from the Gulf coast. I've never been there. Maybe my friend, who's in her 70s, will have changed her mind and moved to higher ground by now.

Frittata with chard, chicken, tomato, and cheese

In this year's vegetable garden, we've noticed a few "volunteer" plants and decided to let them grow. In other words, we didn't plant them but they came up all by themselves. One is a beautiful Swiss chard plant. A couple of days ago, Walt went out and cut just four leaves off them plant and we made an Italian omelet that's called a frittata. I chopped and used only the green parts of the leaves, saving the thick white ribs for later.

We had some cooked chicken in the refrigerator. In this case, it was actually a package of chicken that I bought at the supermarket, where it's sold the way the chunks of bacon called lardons are sold. After the chopped chard and some onions and garlic had cooked down in a little bit of olive oil in — and this is important — a pan that you can put in the oven, add the chicken and stir it all around with the chard. Then push the chard and chicken just slightly toward the center of the pan.

The next step was to beat six eggs with a couple of pinches of black pepper and a grating or pinch of nutmeg. Pour the eggs over the mixture of sauteed chard, chicken, onions, and garlic. Set the pan back over low to medium heat and let the eggs cook on the bottom. If you can carefully lift the edges of the omelet and let some more of the liquid egg run down under the cooked egg, do so, but it's not really required.

When the egg has set on the bottom (but not burned!), spread a good amount of coarsely chopped fresh tomato over the top of the frittata. Leave it just long enough for the tomato to get warm, and sprinkle grated cheese over all. To melt the cheese and cook the top of the omelet, put the pan under the broiler element in the oven at medium to high heat. Keep an eye on it and as soon as the cheese is melted and slightly browned, the frittata is ready.

Let the frittata cool for a few minutes and then cut it into wedges and serve with some good French bread.

Making golden tomato paste

We recently harvested a couple of dozen big yellow tomatoes. We ate what we could, but there were so many that I decided to make sauce out of them, and then cook the sauce down to make golden tomato paste. I didn't season the sauce much. Into the cut-up tomatoes went a teaspoon of salt, a bay leaf, a pinch of hot pepper powder, and about a cup of white wine. I ended up with three liters of sauce.

As the sauce cooked, I mashed the tomato wedges with a big spoon and even a potato-masher to break them down. When the sauce was cooked, I let it cool overnight and then ran it through the food mill (le moulin à légumes) using a fine blade to remove most of the tomato seeds and the tough skins. Then I had a smooth, liquid puree.

I poured the pureed tomato into a big lasagna pan. It made a layer about an inch (2.5 cm) thick. I was afraid that might be too thick to allow for the desired evaporation and thickening, but it worked out fine.

Here are the tomato seeds and skins that were filtered out of the sauce by the food mill. This seedy pulp went into the compost. (Here's a Youtube video that shows how you can use a food mill to make tomato puree.)

I took this photo just because I liked the color of the yellow tomato puree. The lasagna pan went into the upper part of the oven at a temperature of around 150ºC (300ºF) for enough time to bring the sauce to a low simmer. Then I kept turning the temperature down, ending up at about 90ºC (195ºF), and stirring the puree from time to time. After about four hours in the oven, the sauce had thickened into paste.

Cooking the paste in a slow oven gives the puree a chance to thicken by evaporation without scorching on the bottom. There was a little bit of caramelization around the edges of the pan, but that just adds good flavor when you stir it into the paste. As you can see, it really is paste. It looks a lot like pureed pumpkin or butternut squash flesh. However, it's actually tomato paste that I'll put up in sterilized jars today for storage and use over the coming winter.

Red bowl, yellow tomatoes

It's almost a shame not to eat all these yellow (golden) tomatoes raw, but there are just too many of them. I turned these into sauce yesterday. Three liters of it.

The next step will be to turn the yellow tomato sauce into concentré de tomates — tomato paste. To do that, you pour the sauce into a big lasagna pan to form a thin layer. You put the pan in the oven at low temperature and let the sauce cook and thicken until it becomes paste.

Hurricane Irma, according to this morning's forecasts, will most likely plow through the Miami area in Florida and then head up the Atlantic coast towards either Charleston SC or Cape Lookout NC. That's bad news for my home town. The destruction in places like the islands of St. Martin, St. Barts, Antigua, and Barbuda is pretty impressive (and depressive if I can coin a word) to see.

Tomates déshydratées

The weather here remains fairly dry and not too hot. These seem to be perfect conditions for the tomatoes, which are ripening slowly but surely. I've started the process of drying as many tomatoes as I can in the dehydrator we bought last year.

The tomatoes need to be cut into two or four wedges depending on their size. Right now I'm drying the smaller tomatoes coming out of the garden. Once they are dried I'll pack them in small jars that I'll keep over the winter in the cold pantry downstairs.

Yesterday I prepared enough tomatoes to fill three trays in the dehydrator. While I was working, Walt went out and picked more tomatoes. Soon we'll start making sauce again and turning it into tomato paste by heating it slowly in shallow pans in the oven.

It takes 24 to 48 hours to dry the tomato wedges in the deshydrateur at 60ºC (140ºF). The ones on the left have been drying for about 20 hours now. Dried tomatoes and tomato paste are highly space-efficient when it comes to storage. They don't need to be stored in the freezer. And both dried tomatoes and tomato paste have a very concentrated flavor that can enhance all kinds of sauces, salads, stuffings, and even savory cakes.

Hurricane alert

I'll be on the edge of my seat for the rest of the week, watching the hurricane they're calling Irma track toward the U.S. mainland. It's a category 4 storm out over the Atlantic Ocean and has winds at 140 mph (225 kph) right now. It's not yet clear what path the hurricane will take over the next week. People in the southeastern part of the U.S. from Louisiana to Virginia need to be prepared for high winds and storm surges on the coast, as well as heavy rains and flooding over a large territory. It would probably be wise to be thinking about going inland if you live near the coast.

When you've seen what just happened in Texas, you have to be nervous if you have friends and family living along the Southeast U.S. Atlantic coast, as I do. I grew up in the coastal county of Carteret in North Carolina, and my mother, sister, and other relatives still live there. Carteret County (pop. 70,000) consists of 500 square miles of low-lying land and 800 square miles of water. I've marked the location with the red dot at the top of the long red arrow on the Accuweather map above. If you live in Florida, Georgia, or the Carolinas — or have family and friends there — I'm sure you are paying attention.

La fin des haricots — match nul

C'est la fin des haricots. That's a funny expression in French. It means "that's the end of the beans" literally. The French-English dictionary says it means "that's the last straw," but that doesn't sound right to me. The last straw is the one that broke the camel's back. I think "the end of the beans" in French usually means something like "it's all over but the shouting" or "we've hit rock bottom." If you don't even have any beans left, that means there really is nothing left to eat. In this case, c'est la fin des haricots means that my bean-cooking experiment is done, and it ended in a tie. No winner. No loser.

Haricots beurre from Portugal

Well, actually, I think I'm the winner, because the beans called haricots beurre or "pink beans" that I cooked over the weekend seem nearly perfect to me. The are tender, including the skins, and they didn't break apart or turn to mush in the cooking water. I've already enjoyed eating some of them as a side dish with a grilled duck breast (filet de canard). I've put half of what was left into the freezer. Now I think I'll make Boston baked beans with the other half. Walt and I both like baked beans.

So the experiment was to cook two batches of dried beans, one in distilled water (eau déminéralisée) and the other in spring water (eau minérale). I used beans from a one-kilogram package, and I cooked 500 grams of them in one kind of water and 500 grams in the other kind. Before this, I've cooked different kinds of dried beans (white, red, pinto) in our local tap water, which is quite calcaire or "hard," and the results have been fairly mixed. As often or not, beans cooked in tap water end up having tough skins or, if cooked longer, turn to mush. The beans I've had the best luck with have been black-eyed peas.

To test the effect of the cooking water on the finished beans, I cooked two batches side by side, seasoned identically — bay leaf, carrot, onion, black pepper, garlic powder — and, most importantly, no salt. I soaked the beans in the water they were going to cook in, but only for about an hour. Then I just put them on to cook in the soaking water. I added more water during the cooking, and I was careful not to get the two kinds of water mixed up. The two batches cooked for about 4½ hours. A ce moment-là — si j'ose dire — les carottes étaient cuites...

There was virtually no difference between the two batches. I ended up just mixing them all together in the same pot and eating some, as I said, with duck. I salted the beans at the end of the cooking time and added a little bit of duck fat to give them good flavor. I could have added olive oil, butter or bacon fat, but since duck was the meat of the meal... Excellent.