Sunrise, sunset

One of the nice things about living where we do is that we get good views of both sunrise and sunset every day. My friend Evelyn pointed that out to me one day, years ago. Sometimes I grab my camera and take a photo through a window from inside at those hours. Often, skies like the one on the right disappear quickly as the sun rises or wind blows the clouds away. According to the timestamp on it, I took this picture at 7:50 a.m. It was still too dark outside to start the morning walk with the dog.

At about 5:30 p.m., I happened to glance out the window and I saw this sunset. It had rained on and off all day. Hours later, I heard hard rain pelting down on the roof tiles and skylight windows as I tried to get some sleep up in the loft. It's been very windy for about 36 hours as well.

This third image shows the view through the linden tree out back a minute or so later. Today, the sun will rise here in Saint-Aignan at 8:29 a.m. and it will set at 5:06 p.m. That give us just 8½ hours of daylight, and it is dim daylight when rain is falling. It's hard for me to imagine living farther north than this. We are farther north than Quebec City, at about the same latitude as Seattle. In Aberdeen, in Scotland, for example — almost as far north as Juneau in Alaska  — the sun will rise at 8:34 this morning and will set at 3:26 p.m. That's a seven hour day. Evening starts there in mid-afternoon.

Riz cantonais

"Cantonese rice" is what Chinese-style fried rice is called in France. You can often find it ready-made in the supermarkets, but that version doesn't seem to me to have nearly enough vegetables in it. This is a short, self-explanatory slideshow. We ate the rice with frozen nems (Vietnamese spring rolls) that Walt bakes in the oven.



I like riz cantonais with diced red onion, garlic, celery, carrots, and bell peppers — and some hot red pepper flakes. Not to mention green garden peas, diced ham or bacon, and beaten and fried egg. Go light on the soy sauce and pour on some sesame oil at the table.

We decided to make fried rice because a few days ago we had cooked up a big batch of rice to have with the last of our recent lamb curry. One of the secrets when it comes to making fried rice is that you need to start with rice that has been cooked and then spread out on a tray or in a wide bowl air-dried for an hour or more so that the grains separate easily. Clumps of rice won't do. The leftover rice was perfect. The curry with rice was good too.

Une omelette pour midi

A recent lunch: une omelette au fromage, aux épinards, et aux champignons. There is no particular recipe, I guess, but there is a method. I usually make a five-egg omelet for the mid-day meal, and we usually have leftovers, which can become a nice, light supper. I cook the spinach (frozen) beforehand, seasoned with salt, pepper, and a grating of nutmeg, in the microwave, and I sauté the sliced mushrooms quickly, unsalted, in butter or a mixture of butter and oil, over high heat, so they don't poach in their own liquid.

A slightly runny, soft, tender omelet — not overcooked

One secret to making a nice puffy omelet is this: if you want to add a little liquid to the beaten eggs (les œufs battus en omelette), just add a little bit of water. Never add milk because the milk won't really blend into the eggs (a tip I learned from watching Jeff Smith, "The Frugal Gourmet"). The steam from water makes the eggs puff up slightly. When the omelet is just barely starting the brown in the pan, but the top of the omelet is still not set — not completely cooked — sprinkle on as much grated cheese as you like. Pepper the eggs but don't salt them yet. Make sure the omelet is not stuck to the bottom of the pan (non-stick coatings are great).

Thanks again to CHM for the gift of this nice set of stainless-steel serving dishes, a classic in France.

On the half of the omelet that is farthest from the handle of the frying pan, lay down the cooked spinach with the mushrooms on top it. Then tip the pan to start sliding the omelet out onto the serving dish. When about half or a little more of the omelet is out of the pan and is on the serving dish, lift up the pan to fold the "undressed" side of it over the filling ingredients. Voilà. The omelet is folded but the filling ingredients are still visible. Serve with French fries and a salad if that floats your boat.

More and more jade flowers

A couple of weeks ago, I took and then posted some photos of the biggest jade plant in our collection (I keep propagating new plants from cuttings) because I noticed it was starting to flower. I don't think I've ever seen a jade plant flower before. Here's a very short slideshow of images of its blossoms now.



Meanwhile, much of France is paralyzed right now by strikes involving transit workers and teachers. We are not really affected, since we don't commute or travel much. Most of the demonstrations and protests are taking place in the cities. It's all about government plans to reform the national retirement system.

The weather is freezing cold over much of the country, but that's supposed to change over the weekend. A big perturbation (warm front) will be moving in off the Atlantic Ocean and sweeping across the country, bringing rain and raising temperatures back into the upper 40s and low 50s in ºF. Laissez les bons temps rouler !

Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle

Here in Saint-Aignan, we seem now to have said au revoir to a three-month period of frequent soaking rains. The autumn rains arrived on the heels of three months of extreme drought, which had made the summer of 2019 the driest we've had in 16 years of living here.

The pendulum swung the other way in September, and between Sept. 1 and Nov. 30 about 425 millimeters of rain — nearly 17 inches — fell from the skies. That's about three times what we would normally expect. The rain, however, was just one aspect of the change in the weather. The other was the near constant darkness — after months of blue skies, we lived through months of gloom, even as the hours of daylight got shorter and shorter because winter was approaching.

Autumn is the season when not only rain but also leaves come falling down. In October and November, there wasn't much we could do but watch the leaves fall and accumulate. It was just too wet for us go out and get them up off the ground. A major part of living the life in Saint-Aignan is taking care of the house and garden. It's hard work for people our age, but it can be very satisfying.

Now, finally, in December, we've been able to clean up a little bit. Our house is surrounded by river-rock gravel driveways and pathways, and when leaves rot on the gravel they turn it a dark color that is almost depressing — not to mention neglected-looking.

The trees that drop the most leaves are two big maples out front, and a big linden tree out back. We got all those leaves that were on the gravel driveway and the gravel path moved yesterday. We raked them up and packed them into "garbage toters" — "wheelie bins" — and hauled them out back to dump them on our vegetable garden plot.

The leaves that are covering the grass under the linden will probably just have to stay there for the winter. Come spring, when the growing season starts up again, the lawn mower will turn them into mulch that will be good fertilizer. I'll till the leaves we dumped on the vegetable garden plot into the soil in the spring to enrich the garden for the 2020 season.

Here's what the linden tree looks like now.

Compare the photo above to how the tree looked in this photo I took on November 19. All those leaves came down all of a sudden.


P.S. I just heard on the weather report that the rains are predicted to return starting this weekend.

Des légumes et du fromage

It's very cold this morning — freezing, which is 0ºC, near the house, and that means it's probably several degrees colder out in the vineyard. It's my day to do the morning walk, and then today is the day we've picking for raking leaves. It will be frosty work. We need to get it done before the rains return.

Meanwhile, yesterday I went shopping in Saint-Aignan's newest grocery store. It's basically a big produce market stocked with local products. It also has a selection of meats, cheeses, and wines. That's my kind of place. I bought celery (stalks), flat green beans, red onions, escarole for salad, and a cucumber we'll use to make raïta yogurt sauce to have with the rest of the lamb curry at lunchtime. I also picked up some saucisses de Toulouse and some jambon blanc cut into cubes I can use like smoked pork lardons. And a couple of local cheeses, pictured here.

One of the cheeses, the square one, is a goat cheese called un pavé de Betz, and it's made with raw (unpasteurized) goat's milk. The other is called un Neuville, a cow's milk cheese (the round one) made from pasteurized milk. The goat's milk cheese has a light coating of ash, which is a common coating for goat cheeses around here. The cow's milk cheese is coated with cracked black peppercorns. Both are really good — you'll notice that I cut into them yesterday afternoon.

Both cheeses come from towns that are within 30 or 40 miles from Saint-Aignan. One, Betz-le-Château, is southwest of us, and the other, Montoire-sur-le-Loir, is to the northwest. I took close-up photos of the cheeses to show what the cheese really looks like. Above is the Neuville, and below is the pavé de Betz. Sorry you can't have tastes of each...

I would love it if somebody could tell me how Betz in pronounced locally — is it [beh]? Or [bess]? Or just like it look: [betz]? There's a town north of Paris named Betz, and it's pronounced [beh] according to one of my dictionaries. And then there's the city of Metz, where I worked as a teacher for a year way back when, and it's pronounced [mess].

The last of the lamb...

...will be lunch tomorrow. We already enjoyed part of it on Sunday. To turn the rest of our Thanksgiving lamb into a curry, first I had to take the remaining meat off the leg bones and cut it into cubes. It turned out that there was about 750 grams — 1½ lbs. — of lean meat left after I trimmed away most of the fat and skin.

Here's one way to make the curry. First, slice up a couple of onions and sauté the slices in vegetable oil until the onion starts to turn a golden brown color. At that point, take it out of the pan and let it cool. Then puree the onion using a blender or stick blender.

During that time, peel and slice a couple of garlic cloves and a couple of pieces of ginger root. Put those in a blender (or a container you can use a slick blender in) and add about half to three-quarters of a cup (120 to 180 milliliters) of tomato paste. Puree that mixture thoroughly as well.

Put the onion puree back in the pan and let it brown a little more. Then add the tomato mixture and the curry spices to your taste — a few tablespoons of garam massala along with some hot curry powder. Taste the mixture and season it with other spices as you like it (don't forget salt and pepper). I added in a couple of bay leaves.

When the curry "gravy" is tasty, add in the lamb or other meat or vegetables (I used potatoes) and let it cook until the meat is tender — an hour or so. Add water to the gravy as needed to make it as thick or thin as you want.

Since we had potatoes in the curry, we didn't eat it with rice on Sunday. We did have some of the gravy spooned over steamed broccoli alongside the lamb and potatoes. That's a corn muffin on the plate too. Tomorrow, we'll serve up the rest of the curry with some steamed rice.

Pulled duck and Scott's BBQ sauce

Our Thanksgiving weekend cooking spree has come to an end. ("Spree" is a funny word — it means "a period or outburst of extreme activity" according to one dictionary.) Anyway, la fête à la cuisine lasted five days. Pumpkin pie, roast leg of lamb, slow-cooked duck legs, broccoli and potatoes with home-made mayonnaise, corn muffins, lamb curry, and "pulled duck" barbecue were some of the results. It's what we do when lousy winter weather settles over the region.(According to Accuweather, be got nearly 160 millimeters of rain in November (about six inches, three times the average).

Here's what pulled duck (on the pulled pork model) looks like. Pulled meats are a North Carolina specialty, and in a way they are like French rillettes (potted pork) but with less grease and more spice. You eat pulled pork, turkey, or duck hot, on your plate or on a petit pain (a bun, as in "hamburger bun") as a sandwich. In France, rillettes are spread cold on French bread — a slice of baguette or pain de campagne, toasted or not.

The sauce you add as the seasoning for pulled meats, at least in eastern North Carolina, is a vinegar & hot pepper concoction. Don't get the idea that the meat ends up tasting pickled — you don't put that much on. Other concoctions based on vinegar are mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup, and of course vinaigrette. Those sauces don't taste "pickled" any more than pulled meat à la carolinienne does. The pulled meats do taste spicy, however, and they are not served dry but slightly moistened and tender.

To make our pulled duck barbecue, I put chunks of slow-cooked duck in a frying pan and sprinkled on some Scott's BBQ sauce. I mashed the lumps of meat with a wooden spatula so that they would end up shredded into strands — falling apart — and brown slightly. That way, the sauce and spicy heat spread all through the meat. The ingredients in Scott's BBQ sauce are "vinegar, water, salt, peppers, and spices" — it's a patented mixture invented by a man named Adam Scott between 1917 and 1920 in Goldsboro, North Carolina, as a seasoning for pit-cooked pork.

The late Mr. Scott's BBQ restaurant closed down some years ago, but the sauce is still made by his descendants and sold on-line in in many North Carolina supermarkets. I bring it back from my trips to N.C. That said, it's not hard to reproduce. Notice that it contains both vinegar and water. You don't want it to be too acidic. And you don't put sugar in it, as you do to make most other American BBQ sauces. (In western North Carolina, people make a BBQ sauce with ketchup, or sometimes tomato paste, in it. It's sweet and not to the eastern half of the state's taste. In South Carolina, they put sweet mustard in their barbecue sauce.)

We ate our pulled pork with some of the beans we had cooked and seasoned to have with our roast leg of lamb. I added two things to the beans — some duck fat and some peppers (sweet yellow and hot red). The beans were French flageolets and some of our garden-grown haricots verts, and they were also good with some of Adam Scott's BBQ sauce sprinkled on them. This is not fancy food, but it is full of flavor.

Le gigot de Thanksgiving : le lendemain

Most years, Walt and I cook a gigot d'agneau (leg of lamb) just once a year here in France. Back in California we did the same, and we made it into our alternative Thanksgiving dinner decades ago. Why? Just because it was an occasion for us to cook lamb the way we remembered eating it in France in the 1980s. It's the same with Easter — we cook a rabbit at Easter because we missed eating rabbit after we moved back to the States. It became "a thing" we enjoyed doing.

We enjoy the Christmas turkey or capon more when we haven't already gorged on poultry in late November. So on Thanksgiving weekend we have three or four meals of lamb prepared and served in different ways — hot, fresh out of the oven, with beans — cold the next day, with steamed broccoli, steamed potatoes, and home-made mayonnaise — and finally, cooked into a curry or a shepherd's pie to use up the leftovers. My plan is to make a lamb curry today. That will be a good way to celebrate December 1. The weather is supposed to turn cold over the next few days.

P.S. (medical update): The big toe that I jammed when I fell on our slippery wooden stairs

a couple of weeks ago is healing nicely. I'd say it's about 90% of the way there.

I can still feel the sprain, and there's still a little swelling,
but it's not really painful any more.

Like cats and dogs

Yesterday as we were eating our lunch of leftover leg of lamb, steamed potatoes, steamed broccoli, and mayonnaise, I noticed that Tasha the Sheltie and Bertie the Black Cat were sitting in front of the sliding glass doors in the dining area. They were watching, I think, birds on the feeder out on the terrace. At least Bertie probably was — Tasha might just have been waiting for somebody to walk or drive by. Luckily, nobody did, because she barks like crazy when that happends.

Julia Child, I think it was, gave this advice: "Never apologize for your food" when you have guests in for a meal. I guess the same could apply to photos. Never apologize for them after you've decided to post them on a blog. So I won't. All I could do was pick up the camera, which just happened to be on the table, and snap them.

I knew I couldn't get up and move to a better vantage point, because if I moved the dog and cat would move too. As it was, when they heard the camera click, they turned away from the show outdoors and turned to watch what I was doing. They probably hoped I might be getting ready to give them something to eat, even though we never feed them from the table.

When they realized they weren't getting any food, they seemed crest-fallen, and closed their eyes. They didn't look away, though, just in case... They seem to enjoy each other's company these days. Natasha will soon be three years old, and Bertie will turn thirteen in April.

Gleaning meat and fat from slow-cooked duck

Yesterday I wrote about cooking duck legs and thighs in the slow-cooker with the idea of making them into "pulled duck" that would resemble the pulled-pork "barbecue" that I grew up eating in my native North Carolina. Here's the rest of the process.

Taking the duck pieces out of the slow-cooker was a delicate operation. As you can see, some came out intact, but the meat on others was already falling off the bones, so they came apart as I tried to lift them out of the pot. It didn't matter, because my plan was to take all the meat off the bones anyway.

The second step was to take the skin off the legs and thighs. That was pretty easy. The pieces really fell apart at this stage, but again that was my plan anyway.

I continued pulling the lumps of duck lean muscle off the bones, and separating them from the bones, most of the fat, and some veins and other parts that I didn't really want as part of the pulled duck meat. I put the "scraps" back in the slow-cooker with the duck fat and broth and let it cook for another couple of hours, figuring that cooking would make the broth that much tastier and give me more fat. I still have to re-heat what's in the cooker, which I kept in the refrigerator overnight, and then pour everything through a sieve or strainer to filter the broth and fat.

Et voilà ! Here's the meat, which could now be turned into the French potted meat called rillettes by adding some of the filtered fat, cooking it a little longer while stirring to break the meat down into fine threads. That makes something resembling but not really the same as pâté to be spread on bread or crackers and eaten with, for example, pickles or cornichons. I admit I was slightly disappointed when I weighed the meat you see in the photo above — I got only 600 grams of lean meat from six leg-and-thigh sections that weighed about 1.5 kilograms. I expected more, but I'll console myself with thoughts of the good duck fat and broth that is a fine by-product of the cooking.

But the fact is, I can buy very good duck rillettes from charcutiers who sell them at outdoor markets or in their shops, or in supermarkets packed in plastic pots and sold at reasonable prices. The fines rillettes in this pot, according to what's printed on the label, contain no preservatives and 79% duck meat. The rest is pork, duck fat, garlic, "natural flavors", salt, and pepper. My plan for the pulled duck I've made is to season it the way pulled-pork barbecue is seasoned in eastern North Carolina, with a splash of vinegar, some herbs and spices, and a good pinch of hot red pepper flakes. Then we'll eat it hot — maybe on hamburger buns.

Doing it with duck

My car trip yesterday through Saint-Aignan and over to Faverolles-sur-Cher, across the river from the town of Montrichard, was therapeutic. It rained the whole time, and hard too. I went out for two necessities: I needed to go to the pharmacy and pick up some of my daily medications, because I was out. And I "needed" to go to see the butcher in Saint-Aignan who sells and prepares the best leg of lamb — gigot d'agneau — I've ever had. For years we've been cooking lamb for Thanksgiving, saving the holiday bird for our Christmas dinner. I have to get that gigot into the oven this morning.

But birds were on my mind too, this year. In this week's supermarket flyers, which come with Monday's mail, I noticed that a supermarket in Faverolles-sur-Cher, Carrefour Market, was advertising a special on fresh duck legs (cuisses de canard) for 3.99 €/kilogram. Neither of our Saint-Aignan area supermarkets, SuperU and Intermarché, had duck legs as an advertised special. So I decided to drive over to Faverolles (pop. 1,400), which is 10 miles downriver from Saint-Aignan (and only about five miles upriver from the Château de Chenonceau), to buy some duck.

I already had a plan for cooking the duck, and it would be an experiment. Buying the duck leg-and-thigh pieces would be a good way to get some delicious duck without a big layout of cash. At approximately  $2.50/lb., what was there to lose? I bought eight legs, weighing a total of five pounds (2.2 kg).

 Besides, going to get the duck would be a good opportunity to take a drive in the country, through fields, villages, and forests — a sure cure for cabin fever. It rained, again pretty hard, all the way there, but that was actually pretty too. The fields are green, a lot of trees are sporting gold and red autumn colors, and the villages are picturesque and sleepy-looking.

My idea for the duck legs and thighs? Well, as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing new under the sun (the question "What sun?" pops into my head). I decided I wanted to make a batch of N.C.-style "barbecue" but with duck rather than pork. "Barbecue" in North Carolina is synonymous with "pulled pork" — meat slow-cooked and then shredded and seasoned with barbecue sauce. I often make "pulled turkey" when turkey legs and thighs are on special, and it's just as good as pulled pork in my opinion. "Pulled duck" is bound to be even better.

To make "pulled" meat, I cook it in the slow-cooker (la mijoteuse) because I don't have a smokehouse on the property here. Even in N.C., a lot of the barbecue restaurants now use electricity or gas to cook meat (mostly pork, of course), and smokehouses are soon to be completely phased out because they contribute so much to air pollution. Only the few restaurant-owners who have been cooking pork in smokehouses for decades are still allowed to do so. My understanding is that those few do are not allowed to pass on the right to cook smoked meat over oak or hickory coals to their heirs or to people who might buy their restaurants from them.

Here's what the cuisses de canard look like this morning, after slow-cooking overnight. I guess they're not very appetizing yet, but just you wait. Duck makes a lot of fat when you cook it, but that's a benefit, not a negative thing. You can use the duck fat to season vegetables or for frying potatoes, for example. They say duck fat is a healthy fat. To season these duck legs before their slow-cooking, I put in onion, garlic, bay leaves, thyme, allspice, smoked paprika, and white wine. I have to get them out of the cooker, let them cool, and then chop and shred the lean meat, saving the fat for other nice treats. The meat will go into the freezer for now.

More tomorrow...

Cabin fever

It is really early — still three or four weeks from the winter solstice — to have a bad case of "cabin fever" — but that's what I think I've got right now. It is absolutely pouring rain this morning. The ground is completely saturated. I'm fully expecting the roof to start leaking. If we get more heavy rain over the next few days and weeks, water will probably start flowing into the garage. I poured an inch of water out of the rain gauge yesterday.

I should be out there raking up leaves, but they are too wet and heavy, and it's no fun working in the yard wearing rain gear.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and that holiday always makes me feel that I'm living in an alternate universe. It's not a holiday in France. The world just goes on as on any other normal weekday. And normal weekdays are very low-key these days because of constant rainfall and gray skies. It's been this way nearly all the time since I got back from North Carolina five weeks ago. Can you tell I'm trying to avoid using the D word? Depressing...

Saint-Aignan is under the small green and yellow blob just below the word France.

Look at that huge blob of rain and clouds that's will be making its way inland today.

The only other times I've ever felt so disconnected from the world as I do on Thanksgiving Day in France was when we lived in San Francisco. In summertime, the television news and morning shows would report that an extreme heat wave was causing suffering in wide areas of the U.S. I'd look outside, check the thermometer, and see that it was foggy, misty, windy, and about 55ºF. San Francisco is world unto itself in so many ways, and so is France.

Bertie the black cat is not a jolly fellow these days. At least he and Tasha are buddies, so he can spend as much time in the house as he wants. And that's most of the day and night right now. He's free to go outside whenever he wants to, and he does go out for a stroll now and then, but mostly he just sleeps. I think maybe he has got cabin fever too. That's what you get when you have to spend way too much time shut up in the house in wintertime.

La Somme, fleuve côtier ?

In the French language, a distinction is made between rivers that are tributaries of another river, and rivers that flow directly from their source to the sea. A tributary is called une rivière. A river that runs from its source all the way to the sea is called un fleuve. Where we live, outside Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher in the Loir-et-Cher département ("county" or "prefecture"), la Loire is the fleuve, and the two rivers the département is named for, le Loir and le Cher. Both flow into the Loire — the Cher directly, and the Loir indirectly.

The town in the middle of this image is Le Crotoy, with Cayeux-sur-Mer on the other side of the river.

Of course, this is all a matter of convention — it might even be seen as arbitrary — because somebody once had to decide which river is the real river and which other rivers flow into it. In other words, maybe the Cher is the river and the Loire is a branch of it that flows into the Cher. To give a U.S. example, why is the Missouri River considered to be a tributary of the Mississippi? From its source in Montana down to the Gulf of Mexico, the Missouri is longer than the Mississippi is from its source in Minnesota to the Gulf. I think Europeans declared the Mississippi to be the main river because it's the one they discovered first. It's probably that simple.

Bay? Delta?

France's Somme river, in the area where we are going to spend a week in April (if all works out), is a fleuve. In the French Wikipédia about it it's called a fleuve côtier — a coastal river. That's a fairly vague term. A river is described as "coastal" because its source is not that far from the coast. Who defines "that far"? The Somme river is just 250 kilometers long — 150 miles or so — while the Loire flows for 1,000 kilometers from source to sea — 600 miles. Many French fleuves côtiers are much shorter, and in America we might call them "tidal rivers" because they rise and fall according to the rhythm of the tides.

Slightly to the left of center in this image is the medieval town of Saint-Valery-sur-Somme (no accent on Valery [val-ree].

Anyway, the Baie de Somme is where the Somme river — and its dozens of direct and indirect tributaries — flow into the sea. It seems to me to be an estuary or delta more than it is a bay, as we commonly use the term in the U.S. I'll be curious to see how much of a bay there really is up there. It looks like more sand than water. An estuary is the mouth of a river, where the salt water of the sea mingles with the fresh water flowing down the river toward the coast. That "mingled" water is called "brackish" — saumâtre in French — "briny." The French Wikipédia article about the Somme describes it as « un fleuve peu abondant » — there's not all that much water in it. It's a lazy river that flows slowly but fairly steadily.

Saint-Valery and Le Crotoy sort of face each other across the river delta.

I've seen the Somme farther inland, thanks to my friend CHM. One branch of his family comes from this part of France, and we've driven up there several times and spent a few days exploring the area. However, the only time I've seen the Baie de Somme I was looking out the window of an airplane. I was flying out from Paris for one of my trips to North Carolina. The plane flew right over the Baie de Somme and I took these photos. It was in April 2013. For seven years now, I've been thinking it would be fun to go spend a week up there, and that will finally happen, I hope, in April 2020.

Un gîte rural dans la Somme pour nos vacances du printemps

Something to look forward to — we have reserved a vacation rental, un gîte rural, using the Gîtes de France web site,  for a week's vacation next April in the département de la Somme in Picardie (northern France). My thanks to "elgee" who comments here regularly and who actually found this gîte for us and sent me a link after I mentioned a while back that I was having trouble finding a gîte near the Baie de Somme that would let us bring our dog, Tasha, along. Here's a photo of the house.

It's located in a hamlet very near the estuary of the Somme river and only a mile from a town with a population of about 2,500 and several supermarkets and markets. The Baie de Somme, on the English Channel (la Manche), is about a five-hour drive from Saint-Aignan, where we live. As you can see from the map below,  the city of Amiens, with its fantastic cathedral, is only 35 miles away, as is the Channel port of Boulogne-sur-Mer. Dieppe in Normandie is just 30 miles down the coast. The red upside-down "tear-drop" marks the spot.

The house has two bedrooms and a WC (half-bath) upstairs, as well as another WC and a separate bathroom with tub and shower on the ground floor (just as our house in Saint-Aignan does now). Central heating is included in the rental price, as are the end-of-stay cleaning fee and Wifi for Internet access. There's a washer and dryer as well as a dishwasher and a television. The yard is large and fenced in. The owners have a little dog that they say Tasha might enjoy playing with. So it all sounds pretty nice. The price for a week's stay is about 500 euros. Here's a slideshow showing the interior of the house.



We're hoping for good weather in April and looking forward to sightseeing as well a walks on beaches and dinners of local seafood. Planning the trip and researching the area will get us through the winter.

Parmentier de choucroute au porc et au poulet

Everytime I think I've come up with some new food idea, I search after the fact and find that there are dozens of recipes on the internet for dishes that are very similar, if not identical. I guess that means my ideas are basically good, or at least not too far out. My idea this time had to do with a big batch of choucroute garnie — sauerkraut served with smoked meats and sausages, along with boiled potatoes — that we had made a few days earlier.

We had eaten the choucroute at least three times over the course of a week. Neither of us minds eating the same thing several times that way, as long as the food is appetizing and tasty. Here's is a photo of what was left of the sauerkraut and some of the meats we had served it with. I shredded and chopped the smoked meats and even added some cooked chicken to the mix.

What is a parmentier? It's a dish made with potatoes. A man named Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (b. 1737 – d. 1813) was an active promoter of the potato as a good and nutritious food for humans, not just for livestock as it had been seen before. The most common parmentier dish is what we in the anglophone world call a shepherd's pie (made with mutton or lamb) or a cottage pie (often made with beef). In France, people make such meat pies with other meats — slow-cooked, shredded duck, for example.

Since the choucroute we had been eating was served with boiled (steamed) potatoes, and I had some left over, and since the leftover sauerkraut looked like it would be good heated up with a layer of mashed potatoes over the top, I was on my way. I just mashed the potatoes with a fork and added some cream to enrich them and give them the right consistency.

Here's the result after I baked it in the oven. I had spread some grated Comté ("Swiss") cheese over the top and then browned it under the broiler (le grill) in the oven. If I had had any Munster cheese on hand, I would have used that, since it is one of the great cheeses of eastern France, where sauerkraut is a specialty. (Some of the recipes I see on the internet call for making this kind of parmentier de choucroute with ground beef, and that might be good, if the idea appeals to you.)

And here's what it looked like on the plate. It was tasty. If you make it, be careful not to salt the potatoes much (if at all), because the sauerkraut and smoked meats are already pretty salty. Serve it hot. We didn't feel the need to have a salad with it because choucroute is, after all, a leafy green vegetable (cabbage). As always, I like carrots with it — with almost anything, really.

Here's what the choucroute garnie looked like the first day we ate some. It's definitely a meat-and-potatoes dish, with sauerkraut as the supporting vegetable. Sauerkraut (the German name) is salted, fermented raw cabbage, and it is much easier on the digestive system than cooked fresh cabbage is. You have to rinse raw sauerkraut in several changes of water before you cook it with white wine or beer and spices for two or three hours. Back in the late 1970s, I worked for a year in the city of Metz, in the Lorraine region, and that's where I learned to love choucroute garnie.