A January sunrise

December and January sunrises can be pretty spectacular here in the Saint-Aignan area. Our house faces east, so we get full views of them, either from the front deck or from the kitchen window. I took this photo 5 days ago, but it seems appropriate for today.

Ten minutes after taking the photo above, I looked out the front window again and saw how the sunrise had changed (photo below). In January, the sun rises here between 8:30 and 9:00 a.m., by the way. I often walk the dog around the yard you see in these photos, since nobody lives in that house full-time. Walt and I keep an eye on the place for our friends who own it and live most of the time in Blois.

Gratin de poireaux au jambon

A few days ago I posted some pictures of a street market stand in Paris and in the foreground there was a pile of beautiful leeks — poireaux in French. That made me realize it had been a while since I had cooked and eaten leeks. Now is the season for them, so I bought some at the supermarket last week. Walt had a good idea about how we would cook them.

There are two sort of standard ways of preparing and serving leeks in French cooking. Or three, really, if you include leek and potato soup — soupe de poireaux et pommes de terre — which is delicious. The other two ways of serving leeks are as a salad — poireaux à la vinaigrette — or in a cheese sauce as a gratin — gratin de poireaux. In our case, we wanted make a gratin with leeks and ham similar to a gratin d'endives au jambon.

As it turned out, we made both the salad and the gratin. We had enough tender white sections of leeks that we could wrap four of them in ham and cook them in the cheese sauce. We also had enough shorter sections left over to make a salad. Either way, the trimmed leeks need to be either steamed or boiled first. I used a steamer. The leeks should be fork tender.

Roll each section of cooked leek in a slice of jambon de Paris ("boiled" or "Danish" ham). Make a cheese sauce. For four ham-wrapped leek sections, I made a béchamel ("white") sauce using 35 grams of butter (2½ Tbsp.) and 35 grams of flour (4 Tbsp.) — the quantities are approximate. Cook the flour in the butter for 3 or 3 minutes and then gradually add about two cups (50 milliliters) of milk or half-and-half, stirring constantly.

When the sauce has thickened and is silky smooth, stir in a good handful of grated cheese (cheddar or Swiss). Season the cheese sauce with salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg. Put some sauce in the bottom of a baking dish, lay on the wrapped leeks, and pour the cheese sauce over them. Sprinkle on a little more grated cheese if you want. Bake the dish at 180ºC (350ºF) until the sauce is bubbling and the top surface is browned. Serve hot with good bread.

All over Paris

Some more cafés and restaurants...

Somewhere on the Grands Boulevards, near Opéra

rue Tronchet, near la Madeleine

rue Mouffetard, in the Latin Quarter

Place de la Contrescarpe, Latin Quarter

rue de Buci, Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Façades, fenêtres et volets [2]

Here are some photos I took when we were spending a week in Paris in back in April 2006. By the way, I found out that the problem with my YouTube slideshows was a change that the people at Mozilla Firefox made. Changing a setting in that browser made everything work. Chrome continued to work, and so does the Opera browser. I have Safari for Windows and do some testing with it, but it doesn't seem to work at all when it comes to embedded YouTube videos. To each his or her own, when it comes to browsers, I guess.

It's strange that the building above was right next door to the building that the over-the-top expensive Ami Louis restaurant was and still is in. I see on Google Maps street view that it has been renovated since we stayed in the neighborhood.

I think I'm leaving Paris now — if not today, in a day or two. We'll see where I go next. Meanwhile, today is choucroute day at our house in Saint-Aignan. Choucroute garnie — sauerkraut cooked in white wine and served with smoked sausages, smoked meats, and steamed potatoes. A wintertime dinner.

Façades, fenêtres et volets [1]

In my mind I'm still in Paris. I keep thinking I should go somewhere else, but I keep finding photos I think are worth posting and preserving. Meanwhile, the YouTube slideshows I've been posting frequently for months now no longer work. I should try some more troubleshooting to see what's going on, but that's not much fun — it feels a lot like work. So I'll just post these photos of the façades, windows, and shutters of some Paris apartment buildings.

Here in Saint-Aignan, we saw a few snowflakes yesterday but the precipitation quickly changed over to rain. I had a fairly long walk with the dog around 5 p.m. and it rained the whole time. Not hard, but steadily. And the temperature was about 2ºC — that's the mid-30s in ºF.

Now what?

I am having trouble with Blogger this morning. Every time I try to do something — write and publish a comment,
upload a photo, look back at some of the slideshows I've posted over the past two weeks — Blogger's response
is something like the word you see in the shop windows above.

Maybe I've worn out the subject of Paris, at least for the time being. I've worn ruts into the sidewalks and streets of the city.
The man on the horse above is named Étienne Marcel. Do you know who he is? I know his name because the street named
for him intersects the rue Montorgueil, where I spent 3 years of my life. It's just a couple of blocks from my old apartment.
I've been reading about him but his story is too complex for me to try to tell here. I like the statue though, and the
façade of the Hôtel de Ville that is its backdrop. Étienne lived in Paris in the 1300s and defended the interests of
the growing bourgeoisie against the monarchy. Paris already had a population of about 200,000 back then.

This is the cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris in a 15-year-old photo. I wonder if it will ever look like this again?

This bank is on a side street off the Grands Boulevards on the right bank of the Seine. Evelyn, is this where you worked?

This is the Folies Bergère, which we've all heard of and which is on the same street as the BNP Parisbas bank above.
I've been reading about it too. I thought it was a place where scantily clad women did the French cancan.
It turns out that it's much more than that. The famous French singer/songwriter/guitarist Francis Cabrel —
he was born in 1953 — was supposed to be doing nightly concerts at the Folies Bergère starting now
and running through most of February. His songs are anything but frivolous and racy. Of course that
gig was canceled or at least postponed when we went on lock-down again. Right now,
the government is enforcing a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew on the whole country
because the number of new cases of Covid-19 is still too high.

Vu et lu à Paris

 

Dehillerin, Bonne-Nouvelle, et étals de marchés

Along with the La Bovida kitchen store, and even more typical of the neighborhood, is the E. Dehillerin
(the E. stands for Eugène) store on the rue Coquillière, near the old Au Pied de Cochon brasserie.
Dehillerin has been in business since 1820, according to the company's web site, and has an online store.
Below are photos of the storefront and the interior of the store, which is packed full of kitchen things and
not easy to browse around in. Be that as it may, exploring it can be very rewarding.

Here's a view of the nearby Grands Boulevards on the northern edge of central Paris.
I'm posting it partly for my friend Evelyn, who spent a summer in the neighborhood a few (!) years ago.

And here are a couple of photos of market stands in the Latin Quarter, on the rue Mouffetard.
I always love seeing these neat, tidy, and appetizing market-stall displays (étals) of fruits and vegetables.

 

Food shops and restaurants in the 2ème arrondissement

La Bovida is a big shop specializing in kitchen equipment and gadgets. There are a lot of photos on Google Maps.

Le Comptoir de la Gastronomie is a gourmet grocery store and a restaurant. Here's the restaurant menu.

The restaurant called L'Escargot Montorgueil was just down the street from where I lived. I never had lunch or dinner there. Here's the web site, which says the restaurant has been serving snails (and much more) since 1832.

Le Marivaux is a café/restaurant on the Grands Boulevards, at the corner of the boulevard des Italiens and the rue Marivaux. It serves fondues and raclettes as well as French brasserie dishes. (I plan to make a Mexican fondue next week.)

The Palais du Fruit is a produce shop on the rue Montorgueil near where I lived for three years — 40 years ago.

Tant de restaurants...

We had dinner here with a friend from California who just happened to be in Paris at the same time we were. Fleurs de Thym (thyme flowers) is a restaurant specializing in Lebanese food and cooking. I hope the restaurant will still be in business when the current confinement ends. I'd like to have lunch or dinner there again.

A few days later we had lunch at La Ravigote with an American who lived in Paris at the time and who frequently posted on an internet forum for francophiles where I was active too. He has since left Paris and moved back to Indiana, where he was from. He and his wife owned an apartment in Paris. I wonder if they still own it.

La ravigote, by the way, is a sauce made with the chopped yolks of hard-boiled eggs and condiments like chopped pickles, shallots, herbs, and capers, mixed into an oil and vinegar dressing. It can be served with poached veal or chicken. Ravigoter is a verb meaning "to re-invigorate" or "perk up".

If I remember correctly, Walt and I stopped and had a glass of wine or a coffee as we wandered around the city. It's in the 11th arrondissement and it's still in business — though all cafés and restaurants are closed for the time being and until at least February 15 because of Covid-19. Funambules are tight-rope walkers, and I don't know why the café is called that. The café has a Facebook page.

I hoped I'd be able to enlarge this photo and make the chalkboard menu readable, but no luck. There are some menus on the Facebook page I linked to above. It's not far from a well-known and innovative restaurant called Le 6 Paul Bert and also not far from the Pure Café, which was featured in the slideshow I posted yesterday.

There are a lot of Greek restaurants like this one in the 5th arrondissement (the Latin Quarter) on the left bank along the rue Mouffetard. Over the years I've had lunches and dinners in many of them. La Mouff, as the neighborhood is called, is lively and crowded on evenings when the weather is nice. I remember a nice evening in 1996 with friends from California in one of the Greek restaurants in La Mouff.

For this restaurant, I was able to enlarge the menu and have it stay readable. I just checked Google Maps for restaurants along the rue Mouffetard, and I have the impression this specific restaurant is no longer in business. Other Greek restaurants along the street have similar menus and are reasonably priced.

Les Tavernes de Maître Kanter is a chain of Alsatian-style beer halls where you can enjoy dishes like choucroute garnie — sauerkraut with smoked meats and sausages. This one used to be in the Les Halles neighborhood, but I think it's gone out of business too. There's a Taverne de Maître Kanter in "downtown" Tours and there's one in the suburbs south of Blois.