The birds are back

Over the past week or so, I've been noticing a lot of loud birdsong when I go out for walks with Tasha the Sheltie, especially early in the morning. Yesterday I opened the kitchen window at about 7:00 a.m. to checke if it was raining and again was struck by how melodious all the loud chirping was. Here's a brief sample — you'll need the sound on your device or computer turned on to hear it of course. Birdsong only and some woodpecker hammering, that's all you'll hear.

As far as I know, Blogger doesn't "host" audio files, so I took a movie. Not much action, but a good bit of noise. The one bird I didn't catch on this video is the cuckoo, which has come back from Africa... more than one of them, of course. Often, there's one sitting in the top of our big cedar tree cuckoo-ing its lungs out this time of year. Here are some posts about cuckoo birds, and one includes a short video on which you can hear the cuckoo's call.

La France vue de l'autoroute

We left the gîte du Riou  in Le Puy (Auvergne) at about nine o'clock on that Saturday morning, March 9, and stopped to spend an hour or two in Brioude, which I've been blogging about for more than a week. Then we got in the car and drove the 3½ hours to Saint-Aignan on the autoroute. I was going to do a slideshow of some of the photos I took along the way, but instead I've decided to post just three images.

About 25 kilometers (15 miles) north of Brioude, and on the southern edge of the town called Issoire, we drove past the place called Le Broc. The Wikipédia article about the village says that about 700 people live there. At Le Broc, there's a hilltop medieval castle that's now in ruins, there's a medieval priory called La Commanderie de Chassaing, and there's also a prehistoric dolmen. Plus there's an airport. The priory is the tall, rectangular building you see in the foreground of my photo.

This second place is a town not far north of Le Broc, where the Couze Chambon river flows under the autoroute and into the Allier river, which is itself a tributary of the Loire. The village is called Montpeyroux and is one of the plus beaux villages de France. It's another place I'd like to see, but there are so many of those in France that, well, good luck! Maybe someday. Here's the page about Montpeyroux on the official Plus Beaux Villages web site, and it includes a short photo gallery showing the local sights.

And finally, here's a photo taken much farther north, when we were in the Berry province northeast of the Auvergne. This is the magnificent Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Bourges seen from the autoroute as we drove by at about 80 mph, at a distance of about four miles (nearly 7 km). Ignore the two water towers (châteaux d'eau), including the one that partially blocks the view of the cathedral, which soars over the town. Bourges is a small city, pop. 66,000, located about 90 minutes west east of Saint-Aignan by car. (See my comment about east vs. west below.)

Le gîte du Riou, au Puy-en-Velay en Auvergne

In early March 2019, Walt and I drove down to the Haute-Loire area, at the source of the Loire in the mountainous Auvergne region of central France, for a short stay there in a gîte rural. A gîte [zheet] is a vacation rental out in the country. Most gîtes are not really luxurious; they are usually fairly rustic and full of character. The one at Le Riou in Le Puy was one of the nicer gîtes ruraux we've ever stayed in, and we've been staying in them all around France since 1993. (Of course, we always joke that our house in Saint-Aignan is the nicest gîte we've ever stayed in — we've been here for 16 years now.)

We arrived on a Monday late in the afternoon, and we checked out on a Saturday morning, meaning we had five nights in the gîte. It cost us less than $500, and the owners welcomed us with our dog Tasha. We could cook, so we didn't go to restaurants at all (we take prepared, frozen, or easy-to-prepare food with us in a cooler). As you can see, we had a full and fully equipped kitchen and a big living room downstairs, as well as a WC (half-bath). The gîte has under-floor heating downstairs along with a wood-burning stove (wood supplied for free). There was covered parking, and a set of patio furniture was available but it wasn't warm enough in early March for us to be tempted to use it. Oh, and there was satellite TV and a fast and very stable internet connection (fibre optique!)

Upstairs there were three bedrooms, two of which we didn't need to use. One had two single beds. The full bathroom with a good shower (and another WC) was upstairs too. I liked the way two of the bedrooms had built-in closets — I think they might have been old wooden wardrobes that had been fitted into the walls. The third bedroom had a nice wardrobe too. Everything was spotlessly clean and comfortable. We never needed to use the electric radiators in the bedrooms upstairs, but we did use the towel warmer in the bathroom. We ended up not paying anything extra for electricity.

The house, we learned, was the house that the owners — a brother and sister in their 60s, I'd say — were born and grew up in, and it's attached to an old stone barn. The brother lives in the more modern house you can see across the way in one of the first photos in the slideshow. He was available to help us with things if we needed him, but we didn't, and the only time we saw him was on arrival and again on departure. The sister lived in a village a few miles away, she said. The owners don't speak English, and they were relieved to find out that we spoke decent French. In the big yard between the gîte and the one owner's house there was a flock of chickens. We enjoyed farm-fresh eggs during our stay. However, we were only about two miles from the center of the city of Le Puy-en-Velay, and close to a modern shopping area.

Au revoir, Brioude

We were back in Saint-Aignan by mid-afternoon that Saturday in March, after having spent a good part of the morning in Brioude. The weather cooperated, and we had just a little bit of rain on the 3½ hour drive on autoroutes past Clermont-Ferrand (home of Michelin tires), Monmarault (Callie's "home town" — remember Callie?), Saint-Amand-Montrond (at the geographical center of France), Bourges (fantastic cathedral), Vierzon (a railroad town), and then on east to Saint-Aignan.

Here a last couple of photos of the Basilique Saint-Julien in Brioude. They somehow never appeared in the posts I've done over the past week. I guess they are a little redundant, but here they are quand même. The tour group above is the group I followed into the church and tried to sidestep as I was taking photos.

Below is a last Brioude slideshow. The church is the star of it. Today is Sunday, after all. It's just eight photos I had left over. The first one shows that same tour group as the group entered the basilica. In other photos, you can see from the outside some of those contemporary stained-glass windows that were installed in the church in 2008.

I wouldn't mind going back to Brioude one day. There are several châteaux in the area, as well as some religious buildings including La Chaise-Dieu. But I'll probably never go back. We've been to the Auvergne three times over the past 10 years. The first trip, in 2009, was to the Cantal, which is the southwestern part of the region. We went with our friends Evelyn and Lewis, and their friend Linda. We had a great gîte, enjoyed the town of Salers, drove up to the top of a mountain, the Puy Marie (in the rain), walked out into a pasture to see the cows being milked (stepping carefully), and went to a dairy farm to see the cheese-making process. In 2018, Walt and I spent a few days in the Allier, in northeast Auvergne. And then this year the Haute-Loire, in southeast Auvergne. It has all been fun, but it's time to move on to other regions for our mini-vacations.

Une promenade à Brioude le jour du marché

We were in the Auvergne town of Brioude (pop. 6,700) on Saturday, March 9, 2019 — four weeks ago today. After finding a place to park the car, we walked around looking for the church. It wasn't visible from the part of town we were in, which was along the main north-south boulevard. We walked around and saw a lot of people who seemed to be either coming from (full shopping bags or baskets) or headed toward (empty bags or baskets) the town's open air-market. Walt said the church was bound to be near the streets or place (square) where the market was set up, so we walked with the empty-basket people toward the market. And there was the church.

This slideshow is made up of a dozen images and runs for less than one minute before looping.

After walking around the church building and taking turns going inside to see it while the other of us waited out in the street with the dog (it was windy and chilly, typical March weather), we walked over to the market to buy some cheese. We were successful, finding an excellent cheese vendor on the large, uncrowded market square, but we didn't try to walk through the narrow streets that seemed to be the center of the action — not with Tasha on her leash. There were just too many people. Oh well. It was getting to be time to hit the road for the long drive home to Saint-Aignan anyway.

Brioude : détails

This slideshow made up of some detailed and close-up photos I took in and around the church in Brioude consists of 14 images and runs for about two minutes. Brioude is a town in Auvergne, about halfway between Clermont-Ferrand to the north and Le Puy-en-Velay to the south.

Here in Saint-Aignan, we're hoping we didn't have our spring weather for the year in late February and late March. The weather has turned cold again, and a little rainy. It's getting to be time to get serious about preparing the vegetable garden for our 2019 plantings, and about repotting a lot of house plants. Walt already has seedlings coming up in little pots. It'll be interesting to see how the soil in the garden will look when we take up the tarps we spread over it last fall. Some warmer temperatures will be welcome.

I'm struggling a little with "clock lag" — or maybe it should be called "body-time lag" — since we moved our clocks ahead by an hour last Sunday. The sun comes up later, and with all the cloudy skies we've been having this week, sunrise is effectively even later now than the clock says it is. We had gotten used to seeing daylight before 7:00 a.m. Now at 8:00 some mornings it's still kind of dark outdoors.

Brioude : la lumière et les couleurs

One reason why the inside of the Basilique Saint-Julien in Brioude is so colorful and luminous is that new, brightly colored stained-glass windows (vitraux) were put in place all around the church in 2008. They replaced plain clear glass windows, changing the church's look and feel completely, I'm sure.

The new windows were designed by a Korean priest named Kim En Joong, who was selected through a competition organized by the town of Brioude. The church's old stained glass hadn't survived the 1789 French Revolution.

Different colors dominate in windows in different parts of the church, so that the light and colors inside the building change from one part of the day to to the next as the sun moves across the sky.

I only photographed a very few of the windows, but there are 37 in all. Kim En Joong has designed stained glass for churches in Tours, Angoulême, Brioude, and other towns and cities, including the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres.

You can view dozens or even hundreds of Kim En Joong's creations here.

Couleur locale à Brioude

I regret that I didn't walk into the chapelle Saint-Michel inside the church in Brioude. You can see it in the photo below. I was too focused on seeing the church the way I had seen it pictured in the Michelin Guide, in a photo looking from the western end of the church toward the east and the altar. Oh well... The wall paintings in the chapel date back to the 12th century.

Also, Walt and Tasha were outside the church waiting for me. The weather was cold and windy (though sunny). After my quick look around inside Saint-Julien, wanted to tell Walt he really should go in and look around for a few minutes too. He did, and I waited outside with the dog. I took advantage of the time to walk around the outside of the church, taking the photos I posted day before yesterday.

The pebble floors inside the Brioude church are remarkable. I read somewhere that they were first laid down in the 12th century and then either restored or extended throughout the church in the 16th. The towns of the Auvergne region are striking in part because of all the cobblestone streets everywhere, and here they even become the floor of a magnificent building.

From the Michelin Green Guide:

« L'intérieur de l'église se caractérise par une belle polychromie de pierres grises, rouges, blanches et noires qui proviennent de carrières voisines... Ils s'harmonisent avec le pavement, en galets de l'Allier noirs et blancs, aux motifs géométriques d'arabesques. »

“The interior of the church is characterized by a beautiful polychrome design using gray, red, white, and black stones that came from nearby quarries ... They are in harmony with the floors, made using black and white pebbles from the Allier river, laid down in  the geometrical patterns and arabesques.” 

The town crowds right up to the church except around the eastern end (le chevet), making it hard to get photos of the exteriors. Here's one view from the nearby streets of Brioude It shows the church's "lantern tower" — a tall structure built over the junction of the four arms of a cruciform (cross-shaped) church, with openings through which light from outside can shine down to the building. Many lantern towers are octagonal, and that shape gives an extra dimension to the decorated interior of the dome. The lantern tower was the last part of the church to be built.


I have a series of photos of interior and exterior details of the basilica that I want to post over the next few days. Maybe it's time for another slide show. We're having rainy, chilly weather now, April being cruel and all, so processing such photos to put them in a slide show will occupy my time.

La basilique Saint-Julien de Brioude, en Auvergne

That's the official name of the church in Brioude that we stopped to see on a Saturday morning, last March 9. It was a perfect day and a perfect stop. The bonus was that Saturday is market day in the town, so there were a lot of people out shopping and a lot of market stalls. Even so, parking the car and walking around the town with the dog on a leash was easy. The Brioude market is where we bought some of the local cheeses I posted about a couple of days ago.

Anyway, I really wanted to go into the big church and see the interior, after seeing a photo of it in the Michelin Guide. Construction began in the 11th century on the site of earlier church buildings. Saint Julien, a Roman soldier who had converted to Christianity and sought refuge in the Auvergne mountains, was martyred (decapitated) near Brioude in the year 304 A.D.

Three successive churches were built over the site of his tomb in Brioude, and pilgrims came  from all over France for centuries. In the 6th century, Grégoire de Tours, historian and the bishop of Tours (near Saint-Aignan), wrote about saint Julien and Brioude. The church you see today in in the polychrome Auvergne style and was built largely over the years from 1060 into the early 1200s.

On that Saturday morning a few weeks ago, I went into the church at the tail end of a big group on a guided tour, so I had to try to stay out of the way while still getting some photos. Here are three images that might give you a feel for the volume and height of the church. It's about 75 meters (250 feet) long and there are vaults as tall as 22 meters (nearly 75 feet).

La ville de Brioude et son église

The town of Brioude (pop. 6,700) is on the main road that runs between Le Puy-en-Velay and Clermont-Ferrand. Each of these larger places is at least an hour by car from Brioude, which is a town that has a history going back to Roman times. I have to admit that I had never heard of it before our recent trip to the region.

Brioude is famous for its church. It's the largest Romanesque church in all of the old Auvergne province. In 1957, it was elevated in status by Pope Pius XII and classified as a "minor basilica" — of which there are more than 150 in France — mostly because of its outstanding architecture. (The only four "major basilicas" are all in Rome.) I have to admit too that my first glimpse of the Brioude church didn't overly impress me. The west front looked very plain. Going inside and walking around the exterior of the building changed my mind.

One thing we didn't want to do during our quick, last-minute birthday trip to Auvergne was spend too much time driving around on narrow, curvy roads in the car. At age 70, long hours of driving are too tiring for me. We wanted a more relaxing vacation, and we wanted to be nice to the dog by walking her twice a day instead of keeping her strapped into the back seat of the Citroën so much of the time. Tasha enjoys riding in the car, but still...

So we had decided not do the two- or three-hour drive round-trip from Le Puy to Brioude during the week. There were other places, including Clermont, Saint-Flour, and La Chaise-Dieu, that we didn't visit because the drive was too long either because of distance or because of the kinds of twisty mountain roads we'd have to drive on. Iffy weather was also a factor.

Still, in the Michelin Guide to the Auvergne, which I didn't really have time to study until we got to our gîte in Le Puy, there was a stunning photo of the interior of the church in Brioude. I wanted to see it, and we would be driving right past it on our way back to Saint-Aignan on a Saturday morning. I told Walt I wanted to stop and take a walk around the town, weather permitting. And I definitely wanted see the interior of the church. So we stopped and did all that before continuing the drive back toward home.

Sur la route en Auvergne

When we left Le Puy-en-Velay on March 9, we drove north through the Haute-Loire (Auvergne), passing through the village of Vieille-Brioude and the town of Arvant. We covered a distance of about 70 kilometers (40 miles) that morning. Here's what the countryside looked like, in a slideshow consisting of 12 photos that runs for a little less than a minute. I thought you might enjoy the ride.



The Michelin Guide Verte describes Vieille-Brioude (pop. 1,200) as a charmant bourg très fleuri on a rock outcropping along an ancient Roman road. Until the late 19th century, when imported phylloxera insects decimated the grape vines, it was an important wine town. We made one stop on that Saturday morning, and that was in the town of Brioude (pop. 6,700) to see the beautiful church there. More about that over the next few days...

C'est le fromage !

“It's the cheese!” That was an ad campaign on TV in California many years ago. Well, California cheese can be good, but if you want a wide variety of really good cheeses you have to come to France. And the old Auvergne province is one of France's best cheese regions.

While Touraine, where we live, is a prime area for goat's milk cheeses, Auvergne is, along with Normandy, one of France's prime regions for cow's milk cheeses. Some of the most famous of those are Cantal and Salers, which are cheddar-like, along with Bleu d'Auvergne and Fourme d'Ambert, two blue cheeses made with lait de vache. (The Roquefort cheese we all know and love is made with ewe's milk.)

In general, farm-made cheeses (fromages fermiers) are considered to be more distinctive in flavor than dairy-made cheeses (fromages laitiers). One big difference between France and the U.S. when it comes to cheeses is that a lot of French cheeses are made with raw milk (lait cru) — unpasteurized milk, in other words. The cheeses are more natural and tasty when the milk that goes into them has not been "cooked" in the cheese-making process.

Here are some cheeses that we bought while we were in the Auvergne and brought home to Saint-Aignan. We're still enjoying them. One of the best-known is called Saint-Nectaire, and it's made in the town that goes by that name. It's a soft cow's milk cheese that carries the European AOP label. That stands for Appellation d'Origine Protégée, and it means that there are strict controls on the methods used in its production, including requirements that the milk used come from a specific region. Saint-Nectaire is a slightly creamy cheese with a thick, natural rind.

I don't know a lot about the other cheeses pictured here, except that they are all made with lait cru de vache, and they are mostly fromages fermiers, as you can see on the labels. The first cheese above, Le Roc Affiné, is made in the Haute Loire, near Le Puy-en-Velay. The second one, L'Artisou de Margeride, comes from the Cantal département, just to the west. The Saint-Nectaire cheese in the photo above is made in the Puy-de-Dôme département, not far south of the big city called Clermont-Ferrand.



This last cheese, called La Fourme du Forez, is a blue cheese made in the Loire département, just north of the Haute-Loire and northwest of the town of Ambert, where the well-known Fourme d'Ambert cheese comes from. It's actually a fromage laitier but made with lait cru. The Forez is a separate geographical area in the Massif Central that touches the eastern border of the Auvergne province.

Arlempdes : le village

Arlempdes (pop. 135, pronounced as Arlandes) is officially one of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France. In other words, it's one of the 158 villages that belong to that organization. This is my final post about it. There are a dozen photos in the slide show and it runs for just over a minute.

As you can see, the village, built of the local dark-colored volcanic rock, is pretty rustic. We saw decorative chickens there, but no live ones. We saw only one person, who was doing some maintenance on the exterior of the village hotel. And then that big heating oil delivery truck arrived and managed to fit itself into one of the narrowest of the streets of Arlempdes.

Here is the Google Maps satellite view showing the entire village, from the cemetery in the top left corner to the château on top of a rock in the lower right corner.

Arlempdes et sa pierre noire

Translating a description I found on an Auvergne tourism site in French:

“...People often say that Arlempdes gave the youthful Loire river its first château. However, it is in no way comparable to the magnificent Loire Valley châteaux farther downstream toward the Atlantic ocean.  Here, in the heart of the Massif Central, south central France's high country, the white stone of Touraine seems like a dream. This dark stone, the heritage of long-ago, intense volcanic activity, shapes the lanscapte. Black basalt flows from the approximately 500 extinct volcanoes of Auvergne's Devès range long ago overwhelmed the original white bedrock...”

That dark-colored stone is what was used to build the ancient village church in Arlempdes. The church, known as l’église Saint-Pierre, is older than the château that looms over it.

Again translating: “Typically Romanesque, the church dates back to the 12th century. It was built out of multi-colored volcanic stone (tuff and breccia). The bell tower, built of granite, was added later, as was the lateral granite buttress that props up the older structure... Houses are built up against the church, so you can't walk all the way around it. The beautiful front portal, with its four arches... is typical of the Velay architectural style. Two of the columns that hold up the arches are decorated with different helix patterns....”

The church was closed for the winter when we were in Arlempdes on March 6. The Auvergne tourism site describe the interior as being very plain, which is typical of local churches. Above are a few more exterior photos that I've put together as a slideshow.

Arlempdes, et la vétérinaire hier

Les Plus Beaux Villages de France — the most beautiful villages in France — is an association founded in 1982 "for the promotion of the tourist appeal of small rural villages with a rich cultural heritage." That's how Wikipedia describes it. Arlempdes in the Haute- Loire (Auvergne) is one of the villages that is a member. I'm not sure when it earned that honor.

I've been doing some research and reading about Arlempdes, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of information about the village available on the internet. It is very small, after all, with just about 135 inhabitants. And it's pretty isolated, though it's only about four miles (7 km) off a main north-south highway, the N88, and only about 25 miles south of Le Puy-en-Velay, the area's biggest town.

This is the village church's bell tower in Arlempdes. I've read that it was added on long after the church was built in the 1100s or 1200s. You can also see it in the other two photos in this post.

On another subject entirely: Yesterday I took Bertie the black cat to the veterinary clinic for his annual checkup and vaccination. The vet who saw us was the same woman who received us when our border collie, Callie, had to be put to sleep in 2017 (link to this post, and the two before it are about that terrible time too.) I wrote about the whole experience at the time, and I posted a copy of the kind sympathy letter that the vet wrote to us after Callie was gone. To my surprise, she told me yesterday that she was surfing the web not long ago and she came upon my blog post. She teared up slightly when we talked about that day nearly two years ago. I probably did too.

Le Château d'Arlempdes in Auvergne — some history

The château at Arlempdes, south of Le Puy-en-Velay and 15 miles from the source of the Loire River (which is 629 miles long), is mentioned for the first time in a bull published by the pope Clement IV in the year 1267. Building on top of the basalt "dike" continued until the 16th century. The château complex is completely integrated into the volcanic peak, so it's not a typical feudal fortress. The ramparts are extensions of the natural rock and it is almost impossible for anyone to climb to the top. Its purpose was to protect the site against invaders coming down from the north, who coveted this part of the country.

Until the 16th century, the château was owned by several different local families, including some of the most powerful families in the southern part of the Auvergne region. It became a part of the properties around France controlled by Diane de Poitiers (1500-1566) — of Chenonceau and Chaumont fame —when the daughter of a local baron married into her family. Diane's coat of arms is carved into a wall of the Arlempdes château. The family's residence, of which only one wall remains standing, was built during Diane's time. Later in the same century, during the Wars of Religion, it served as barracks for royal troops fighting the local Protestants.

Increasingly neglected by families who owned it in later centuries, the Arlempdes château was completely abandoned by the time of the 1789 French Revolution. The site was no longer strategically important. It fell into ruin, and was quarried by local people who needed stones to build houses and walls. In the 19th century, the château was sold for one symbolic franc to a Catholic charity. In 1963, descendents of some of the old families that had owned it in past centuries bought it back and undertook to restore the château.

— Thanks to the article about Arlempdes on French Wikipédia  for this information. —

Arlempdes : le premier château de la Loire

Geographically speaking, the village called Arlempdes is the site of the first château on the Loire River. It's very close to the source of the Loire, 15 miles east. Here's the first view we had of Arlempdes (pop. 134), which is less than 20 miles south of Le Puy-en-Velay in the Haute-Loire département of Auverge.

Obviously, the village cemetery is the most striking thing in this image. There was a Roman camp near here in the first century B.C. The site has been inhabited since the high Middle Ages (between the 6th and 10th centuries), and the church dates back to the 12th century.

Here's a view showing less of the cemetery. Arlempdes is, at least to me, an unusual looking word in French. It derives from an old Celtic term or expression meaning something like "sacred place." According to the article about Arlempdes in French Wikipédia and also the Michelin Green Guide, it's pronounced as if it were spelled Arlandes [ar-'lãd], with ã being the French nasal A vowel.

It's kind of hard to distinguish the ruins of the old château in the first two photos here. They blend into the rock in the background. In this third view, you can see them a little better. The château ruins are open to the public from March 15 to October 15. We were there a few days to early to be able to go in, but we did go for a walk around the village, taking advantage of the improving weather that day.

Food "interlood" 2 — the first 2019 kale crop

I harvested my winter crop of kale yesterday. It's the variety often called "dinosaur kale" because the bumpy dark green leaves made somebody think they had the texture of dinosaur skin. This variety is also called "black" Tuscan kale. I harvested six or eight plants and picked all the leaves, large and small, off the stalks yesterday morning. That took about 90 minutes I think, and the leaves filled up a 15-liter bucket. That's 1.7 pecks, or 0.43 U.S. bushels of kale leaves. I looked it up, and learned that the U.K. bushel is not exactly the same as the U.S. bushel.

The first photo, above shows just a small portion of the harvest. This second one shows all of it, blanched, filling, for overnight storage, a fairly deep 12-inch baking dish. There are a few baby collard leaves in there too. I wanted to cook the greens in my crock pot (slow-cooker) but 15 liters far exceeded its capacity. So I had to blanch the leaves in boiling water on top of the stove first. That didn't take very long because I didn't need to put a whole lot of water in the big stock pot. When it boiled, it produced enough steam to cook the kale just enough to soften the leaves and make them collapse.

I thought I really hadn't planned this harvest very well, because I didn't have any bacon grease in the refrigerator. Then I remembered that the last time I went to Intermarché I had bought a big chunk of smoked poitrine fumée (pork "belly" or "breast" a.k.a. "side meat"). That was perfect. I try to keep a piece of it on hand. It's sold vacuum-packed so it will keep for several weeks in the fridge after I buy it.

Here is the six-liter insert or liner of my slow-cooker with the blanched kale and the chunk of poitrine fumée in it. There's also about a liter of the blanching liquid in there, along with some salt and plenty of black pepper. The slow-cooker insert I have is an aluminum pot with a non-stick coating on the inside. One advantage of having a metal insert is that I can set it on a burner on the stove to pre-heat it before putting it in the slow-cooker's heating element, giving it a head start so it cooks a little more quickly.

A Tuscan kale plant looks like this. The leaves are not as curly as the leave of the curly kale I used to cook, so they are much easier to wash thoroughly. The result is no sand in the bottom of the cooking pot. I also like red Russian kale, and I have some seeds so I think I'll grow some of that is spring. Notice how the Tuscan kale leaves are a nice dark blue-green color. I'm not sure if you can buy Tuscan kale in the U.S. but I know I've never seen it on the markets or in the supermarkets here in the Loire Valley. The widely available greens here are cabbage ("white" or Savoy), Swiss chard, and of course spinach.

Six pix of chix

The house we rented near Le Puy-en-Velay is called un gîte rural — rural accommodation, a vacation rental out in the country. The first definition of gîte in one standard French dictionary is « Endroit où l'on couche, réside, temporairement ou habituellement. » — "Place where one sleeps, resides, either temporarily or habitually." The word gîte derives from the verb gésir, which means "to lie" in the since of "lie down, sleep."

The Le Puy gîte, although just a mile or so from a huge shopping center and a couple of miles from the center of the town, which probably qualifies as a small city, was certainly in a rural environment. The people who own it and rent it out to tourists and vacationers keep chickens. They were fenced in on a big plot of land right outside the gîte.

When I read about the gîte on the internet, I assumed that the owners were a couple and that they lived on the property. They had different last names on the rental contract, but that's not unusual nowadays. They also had four phone numbers — each one listed a land line and a cell phone. That wouldn't be unusual these days either. If both are professionals, it would be easy to explain so many phone numbers.

The thing I read right over in the description of the gîte on the internet was a quick mention that the house being rented was the owners' maison natale. That should have been a big clue, but it didn't dawn on me what it meant right away. On arrival, we learned that the man and woman who greeted us and showed us around the place didn't live on the property at all. They turned out to be brother and sister, each married. The brother lived across the way from the gîte, and not all that close. The sister lived in a different town, several miles away.

Very often, gîte owners do live close by their rental property, either in the same house or building, or in a separate building or house on their land. That was the case when we rented a little house on the coast, in the Vendée, last March. It wasn't a big deal, but you do feel you have less privacy when you see the owner every day, often several times a day. You don't have the impression that you really are chez vous in the gîte.

In Le Puy, the fact that there was a flock of chickens nearby certainly added to the rural atmosphere. Each time we went out the front door, the chickens would come running, clucking wildy because, I imagine, they thought we might intend give them something to eat. We never did. But they gave us something to eat. Freshly laid eggs. The owners set a basket of them on the kitchen table for us. They were delicious.

P.S. You can enlarge the pictures and stare into the chickens' beady little eyes by clicking on the images or "unpinching" them (on a tablet).

Deux villages en Auvergne : Le Monastier et Goudet

We put our recent trip to the Auvergne region together very quickly, and at the last minute. My birthday was approaching, and I suddenly felt like doing something different that week. We arrived at the gîte we'd rented at Le Puy-en-Velay armed with a Michelin Green Guide, and with internet access linking us to Wikipédia and other sites and pages.

This is the Château de Beaufort, which looms over the village of Goudet in the Haute-Loire.

One excursion I had read about in the Michelin Guide would take us south to places named Goudet, Arlempdes, and Pradelles, three villages on the banks of the Loire river headwaters. We headed south in the car on Wednesday, March 6, heading toward a little mountain town called Le Monastier-sur-Gazeille (pop. 1,800). The drive took much longer than we thought it would because the roads were so narrow and winding.

The Château de Beaufort stands as ruins on top of a big rock.

When we finally got to Le Monastier, it was gusty and rainy, the sky was leaden, and we even saw a few snowflakes. I had read on one web site that Wednesday was market day in Le Monastier, and that it was a very picturesque market that has been a weekly event since the year 1495. Also, I'd read that the Monastérois (the locals) speak a distinctive dialect that I wanted to hear in person.

Tiny Goudet is located on the tiny Loire River in the Haute-Loire département of Auvergne.

Upon arrival, we saw a big sign that said Le Monastier's open-air market sets up on Tuesdays, not Wednesdays, so we were out of luck. We didn't even get out of the car. We just drove around in the rain for a few minutes and then continued on our way. Later, the owners of the gîte where we were staying said I probably wouldn't have heard the dialect spoken anyway, because it has pretty much died out.

The mighty Loire River doesn't look quite so majestic up near its source.

The next village I wanted to see is called Goudet (pop. 59 — not a typo). One of the reasons I wanted to see it is that on of the main landmarks in Goudet is the Château de Beaufort. Since my home county in North Carolina, Carteret Country, has the town of Beaufort as its county seat, I wanted see and take pictures of Beaufort Castle on the Loire River. It was built in the 1200s, and it's now in ruins.

Goudet is a "starry village" — the street lights are turned off at night so residents and visitors can enjoy good sky views.

Here are some of those photos. If you start traveling along the Loire River from its source, heading toward Le Puy, Beaufort is the second château you see along the way, after the one at Arlempdes. More about that to come...

There's at least one hotel in Goudet if you want to spend the night there.