A day in the kitchen

The weather report on Télématin says today will be another rainy day — even wetter than yesterday. I'll be spending it in the kitchen. I have a cooking project. What I want to make is a specialty of the Burgundy region (especially its main city, Dijon) and is called jambon persillé de Bourgogne. It's a terrine made with ham and a good amount of chopped parsley. A a slice of it is supposed to look like what you see pictured below.

Below are two photos of the room I'll be spending a lot of time in today. Notre cuisine.

    

Cheese sauce for lunch

Oops! I meant to say endives for lunch, with ham. It was a gray day, with sprinkles of rain. Walt built a fire in the wood stove. Meanwhile, I slaved over the kitchen stove, cooking endives in butter and lemon juice and making a sauce mornay, which is béchamel with cheese melted in it.

Comté cheese. Jambon de Paris. Belgian endives. I've posted about making gratin d'endives so many times.

     You wouldn't be wrong to think that the main reason for making this gratin is the opportunity to mop up and enjoy eating all that cheese sauce with some really good French bread.

Dessert, and my old car

A couple of days ago I made a crème renversée a.k.a. crème caramel for dessert. It's a custard made with eggs, milk, and sugar that's cooked in a baking dish that has been coated inside with caramel. For extra flavor, you can put in some vanilla or rum. I chose rum. To serve it, you let in cool in the refrigerator for a few hours and then you carefully turn it over so that the custard falls out of the baking dish onto a serving plate. The caramel is then on top of and all around the cooked custard.

    

    

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Yesterday I took my old Peugeot 206 to the mechanic's for a pre-inspection inspection. I bought the car (used) when we moved here in 2003, so next summer I will have had it for 20 years — if it's still running. Actually, it's running great right now. I wanted the mechanic to do an oil change and then check everything out to see if, for example, the brakes needed work or the tires needed replacing. Also, several light bulbs (a tail light, a parking light, etc.) were burned out, and they are a lot of trouble to change. Better to have the mechanic do it than me.

My year 2000 Peugeot 206 is one of the best cars I've ever owned. I bought it used in August 2003 and over the years have driven it to Paris and to Normandy many times, to Madrid, to France's  Atlantic coast, and to Burgundy.

The Peugeot has nearly 120 thousand miles on the odometer (200 thousand kilometers). The body has some dings and scrapes, but if you don't examine it too closely, it looks like a new car. The interior is in perfect condition. These days, we only drive it around town, or to neighboring towns within a 10 or 15 mile radius. The car is a year 2000 model, so it's already 22 years old. Inspection by a government-licensed shop is required every two years for cars over four years old, and it's pretty thorough. It costs about 75 euros. The mechanic charged me 125 euros and discovered one issue that needs to be addressed before inspection. The car needs two new shock absorbers, and that will cost as much as 250 euros.

Sometimes I wonder whether it's wise to be spending that much money on a vehicle that is almost an antique. But having a second vehicle is such a convenience (the other one is a bigger, slightly newer Citroën). Buying a newer used car would cost a lot more than keeping the Peugeot going, and it is a lot of trouble to find and always risky to buy somebody else's used car. We only drive the Peugeot for short distances, and we don't often both go out in it together. We have a cell phone so that if the car breaks down, the one of us who's driving it can call the one who's at home to come rescue him. These days, we put only about two thousand kilometers a year on the Peugeot — that's about 100 miles a month.

I'm happy the mechanic didn't find major issues with the little runabout. It's more fun to drive on our narrow, curvy country roads, and it's easier to park than the wider, longer Citroën.

Risotto au poulet et aux légumes

I made another risotto on Monday, after having made the curried version for lunch one day last week. This one was a standard risotto made not with Italian arborio rice, but with riz rond that I bought at our local Super U market, and with grated cheese. I wanted to see if there would be a big difference between the two rice varieties cooked this way. There was — the arborio was definitely better, but it's hard to find here. Buying it requires a trip to Blois.

    
The vegetables for this risotto are a frozen product we got at Super U. It's mixed vegetables — carrots, turnips, green beans, garden peas, and flageolet beans that are called macédoine de légumes in France. For flavor, I chopped up and cooked an onion, a couple of garlic cloves, a stalk of celery, and a chicken breast cut into small cubes.

I find cooking dishes like this risotto, Asian-style stir-fried dishes, sautés and stews like bœuf bourguignon, and many other foods and dishes really easy in big stainless steel woks like the one above. I ordered a couple of them from Amazon.fr a few months ago. They have a thick, flat metal bottom for good heat transfer, and they have high sides that keep spatters on the stove top to a minimum. They also have glass lids. They're also good serving dishes because they don't have log handles that would get in the way at the table.

    
For the risotto, I again used 1½ cups of rice and between 4 and 5 cups of broth (chicken broth made with aromatics and some white wine added). The cheese was finely grated Italian peccorino. When the rice was close to being tender and creamy, I put the pre-cooked vegetables and chicken back into the wok, stirred them in, sprinkled on grated cheese, and continued the cooking for a few more minutes to bring everything up to temperature and make sure the rice was perfectly tender. We had more grated cheese to sprinkle on at the table.

Big bloomin' mushrooms around the yard

I took these photos in our yard yesterday morning. I believe these mushrooms are members of the bolete family, some of which are highly prized for their taste, some of which are toxic, and some of which are edible but don't taste good to most people.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert. I have little knowledge of wild mushrooms, in fact. Take what I've written here with a huge grain of salt. Don't eat wild mushrooms unless you have the assurance of an expert — in France, a pharmacist, for example — that the ones you've found are edible and not poisonous.

     This mushroom, with a cap that's four or five inches in diameter, seems to be one that most people find too bitter to eat. Others find them palatable, and they are not toxic. It's called le bolet amer in French — the bitter bolete — if indeed this is one. Don't take my word for it. According to its Wikipedia article, the bitter bolete's cap greatly resembles the cap of the king bolete (porcino, pl. porcini to Americans), known in France as the cèpe de Bordeaux, one of the finest edible mushrooms. "The pore surface" — the underside of the cap — "is initially white before turning pinkish with age," Wikipedia says.

I don't know what this is. It's enormous. To me it looks like two boletes mating. Or conjoined-twin boletes. Ha ha.

    
I think this one might not only be edible but might also taste good. It might be a cèpe de Bordeaux, but I think it's more likely a bolet bai (bay bolete), which is almost as tasty but not quite. Actually, some people can't taste the difference. I'm not going to eat it, that's for sure. Anyway, enjoy the pictures but don't put much stock in what I've written here. Maybe somebody can correct my errors.

A big mushroom bloom

There are mushrooms everywhere in the vineyard and in our back yard right now. I don't think I've ever seen so many. It must have to do with this year's weather, which was very dry and often really hot until September and October. Actually we're in another dry spell right now. The mushrooms in these photos are pretty little things.

         

October vineyard scenes and colors

The mornings are chilly and dark now. The heat is on.
The house is warm enough. The nice thing is that we're having sunny afternoons...

     Reds and yellows decorate the hamlet and vineyard.

Somebody's got firewood for the coming winter.

     Oak leaves on the left. On the right, the new neighbors' garden shed.

Risotto au curry et aux crevettes

If you know how to make the Italian dish called risotto, then this is an easy variation on the theme. Lightly brown some arborio rice in oil or butter. Don't rinse the rice before you start cooking it; you want the starch in the risotto as a thickener. Start pouring in hot broth a cup or less at a time, stirring each time until the broth is absorbed by the rice. Keep adding broth little by little — four cups of shrimp broth, in this case — and keep stirring until the rice is cooked and creamy. It takes about half an hour.

    

About halfway through the cooking process, spoon in a couple of tablespoons of curry power. For this risotto, I used a curry powder called colombo, which comes from the French-speaking islands in the Caribbean. When the rice is nearly done, stir in a blanched green vegetable (I used okra for added creaminess) and let it finish cooking in the rice. When the rice is cooked and creamy, top it with pre-cooked shrimp and add some basil leaves as a garnish.

I put a tablespoon or so of tomato paste in for sweetness and color. I also added some spicy-hot smoked paprika. I plan to make this with green beans, chicken, and chicken broth soon. As you might notice, we served it with potstickers that we bought at an Asian grocery store... and with hot sauce (Portuguese piri-piri) at the table.

Le vignoble de la Renaudière

As Walt wrote yesterday, the owners of the vineyard out back are in the process of renewing their plantings. Over the past year, they have torn out the old vines on a huge plot of land — about nine acres — and plowed up the ground. This week they burned all the vine trunks and branches, which they had stacked into five or six neat piles. Now they'll plow again, and next year they'll plant new vines.They have replanted two or three other plots over the past two or three years.

     We've come to know this little white van pretty well over the past 20 years. It's out in the vineyard most days. I wonder how old it actually is. Above right and below left, you can see parts of the plot that will be replanted next year, probably with Sauvignon Blanc grapes that go into making AOP Touraine Chenonceaux wines.

     Next year, I've learned, the vineyard owners intend to pull up the vines growing on another plot — about 4 acres — a little farther out on the road. In total they hold more than 30 hectares — about 80 acres — of vines in the area. The current owners/operators of the vineyard are the third and fourth generations of their family growing grapes and making wine here. Here's a link to their website including an interview with the fourth-generation winemaker and some aerial views of the Renaudière vineyard.

Notre « village »

In our village, which is officially un hameau (a hamlet), there are nine houses. Our house is one of three that are located at the end of a paved road and on the edge of the Renaudière vineyard, which has a dirt road running through it. Two of these three houses date back, I think, to the 18th century and have been extensively remodeled over the past 50 years. Our house was built in the late 1960s and is the one with the darker brown roof. We've lived here for almost 20 years now. In the last photo that's Walt looking out of one of our back windows.

    

    

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I just saw a report on Télématin, the French morning show, about the energy crisis and its effect on two of the châteaux in our region. One of them is the Château de Cheverny, which is privately owned and open to the public. Its owners will pay 62 thousand euros over the coming year for heat and lights. The utility bill at the nearby government-owned Château de Chambord will double over the same period, climbing to 215 thousand euros. The people faced with those bills are looking for ways to keep costs down. More modest light displays for the end-of-year holidays? Installation of solar panels? Burning more wood in the buildings' big fireplaces?

Porc au vin rouge

I've seen recipes for pork cooked in red wine on the 'net under the titles bourguignon de porc and civet de porc. Bourguignon is normally made with beef. Civet is most famously made with a hare (un lièvre). Making this dish with pork shoulder was an experiment for me — a successful one. I cooked the sautéed pork in red wine from Cahors, which is made from Malbec grapes and known as vin noir.

    

    

Things I saw in the back yard

Minimal typing is the key. At the same time, I can tell that my injured finger is getting better.
Yesterday afternoon I took photos in the back yard and out in the vineyard as I walked around with Tasha.

     You can tell we've been having some rain when you see mushrooms all around.

     Also, as Walt has mentioned, a lot of apples have been raining down. The rains come with wind.
And bring us October flowers.