A French Banana cream pie

Tarte sablée aux bananes

• 4 grosses bananes mûres

• 3 œufs

• 1 pâte (sablée, brisée, ou feuilletée)

• 60 g de sucre

• 20 cl de crème fraîche

• 1 yaourt nature

• 1 c. à soupe de rhum

Préchauffez le four à 180°C.

Disposez un fond de tarte dans un moule.

Préparez l’appareil en mélangeant les 3 œufs et 60 g de sucre, puis la crème et le yaourt.

Placez des rondelles de bananes sur la pâte et versez l’appareil. Remettez des rondelles de bananes et saupoudrez de sucre pour la colorer.

Enfournez et faites cuire la tarte pendant 30 minutes. À la fin de la cuisson, sortez la tarte du four et laissez-la refroidir 10 minutes sur une grille. Démoulez et placez-la sur un plat à service puis servez.

I made this tart yesterday using a sheet of pâte sablée (cookie or shortbread dough) that I bought at the supermarket. It was easy to use and it turned out to be very tasty. The instructions on the dough package said to put a sheet of parchment paper with the dough on it into the baking dish. Trim the edges of the paper to the shape of the dish. I made sure I had enough dough to cover the bottom and run up the sides of the dish so that the cream custard would be contained and not run out into the bottom of the dish. The paper made it very easy to get the tart out of the baking dish.

The next time I make this tart I think I'll use all cream and no yogurt. Or cream diluted with a little milk, or low-fat cream (which is probably the equivalent of American half-and-half). The yogurt, I believe, gave it a slightly sour taste that I would like to avoid. As I said, the pâte sablée is good, but the tart could also be made with a standard pie crust (pâte brisée) or even with puff pastry (pâte feuilletée). The tart turns out to be a clafoutis custard — minus the flour — baked in a crust. The recipe in English, thanks to Google Translate, is in the comments below.

Janvier 2008 (4)

In January 2008 my Christmas cactus plants were blooming nicely. This was a plant that we found in the garage when we moved into our house in Saint-Aignan almost 20 years ago. Who knows when it had last been watered. The house stood empty for two years before we moved in.

   

I still have two or three cacti, but last summer's three extreme heat waves did several pots of it in. The plants burned up in the greenhouse before I could move them outdoors. The few branches I have left are flowering right now, but not beautifully.

    These cacti are in the genus Schlumbergera and are native to Brazil. I plan to take some cuttings from the ones that are still living and start some new ones for next year.

Janvier 2008 (3)

    Which pile of rocks do you like better? The one on the right is known as the Château de l'Estang (or de L'Étang) and is located near Orbigny, less than 15 minutes from Saint-Aignan by car. It has a Wikipédia page in French. The one on the left is "just another pile of rocks" and is nearby. It has no Wikipédia page.

    All the photos in this post are ones I took in January 2008. Just above, you can see we had had a lot of rain and there were many ponds and puddles in the Renaudière vineyard we live in. And then the clouds went away and we had beautiful sunsets and sunrises for a while.

    Here are two photos that I took on January 15, 2008, exactly 15 years ago today, out of our kitchen window. The sunrise was pretty colorful that morning. Actually, it's often pretty colorful.

Janvier 2008 (2)

We had a fairly average winter in 2008, if I remember correctly. It looked like these photos. No ice and snow, but a lot of rain and mud. It's like that this year. Today, for example, is another rainy day.

Our border collie named Callie (2007-2017) loved walking in the vineyard and finding everything that smelled interesting out there. She was less than a year old when I took this picture. The yellow branches are osier — wicker.

Most of the grape-growers and vineyard workers used to burn the clippings after they pruned the vines in winter.  They don't do things that way any more, and I don't know why.

Morning skies over the vineyard, January 6, 2008

Peupliers — poplars — on the edge of the Renaudière vineyard

Stakes, wires, vine clippings (sarments), and trees — peace and quiet

Janvier 2008 (1)

These are photos from January 2008 — I can't believe that was 15 years ago. It's a long and winding road... that runs through the vineyard. I wonder how many times I've walked it. Hundreds, I'm sure, although I seldom walk all the way out to the end of the dirt road any more.

   
The photo on the left above is looking west toward the end of the dirt road that starts 1.22 kilometers (4,000 ft.) to the east at our house. The vineyard continues for another mile or so, with a paved road running through that western section.

The elevation rises more than 50 feet as you walk west from our house to the end of the dirt road, according to Google Earth. Above is a view looking east toward our hamlet from the point of highest elevation.

    From the time we came to live here until a couple of years ago, we had four apple trees in our back yard, and two more just outside our back gate. We put thousands of apples in piles to compost every winter. We've also made a lot of apple sauce, apple tarts, apple crumbles, and apple cobblers over the years.

Un gâteau (plus ou moins) basque

Certain people will tell you that there is ONE and ONLY ONE recipe for something like this cake — and for thousands of other "named" recipes. I don't subscribe to that viewpoint. A couple of days ago, I made a gâteau basque based on several recipes I found on the internet. Some instructed me to fill the cake with cherry jam. Others said to fill it with crème d'amandes (almond cream) or crème pâtissière (pastry cream). I had two-thirds of a jar of Bonne Maman confiture de cerises in the refrigerator, so that's what I chose to use. And because I was putting cherry jam inside the cake, I substituted kirsch (cherry brandy) for the vanilla or rum in some of the recipes I found.

This kind of cake could be made with any confiture you like — abricots, myrtilles, fraises, pêches....

I bet it would be good with sliced bananas inside.

   
The dough resembles what I call a cookie dough, others call a shortbread dough, and still others call une pâte sablée. The dough is sticky and not very easy to work with. But since it's sort of a half-batter, half-dough, it's easy to patch it when it tears as you try to put it into the cake pan. Make sure the dough has had plenty of time to cool down and firm up in the refrigerator before you roll it out. I didn't brush the top with egg yolk because I wasn't planning to serve it to company. It was just for our homespun pleasure. It is delicious.

I'll put a recipe in the comments. This is a cake I've made before, but maybe only once, in 2006. I was taking it to a potluck dinner, so I glazed it to make it look more appetizing. Here's a link to a post about that gâteau basque, which I filled with plum jam (confiture de prunes).

Off the "air"

I'm pretty unhappy this morning. Yesterday afternoon I turned on the television to watch CNN for some news from California and all the storms out there right now. All I got was a message on the screen saying Cette chaîne ne fait plus partie des offres de Canal+ — this channel is no longer carried by Canal+ (our satellite TV provider). I'm feeling very cut off. The channel went off the air with no warning. The same thing happened years ago when the BBC's special channel for Europe was taken off the air in France, with no warning.

When we lived in San Francisco back in the 1990s, I was able to have a second satellite dish installed at our house so that in addition to Direct TV, I could get French programs off a different satellite. Ever since we've lived here in Saint-Aignan, I've had CNN. I'm not happy to be without it now. I usually only watch it for about an hour early in the morning (late evening in California), and sometimes for an hour or so in the afternoon (early morning in California). Now I won't be able to watch it at all.

Maybe I'll just curl up and snooze the way Bertie does instead of watching the news on TV...

CNN is available in the U.S., for a hefty fee, through streaming services, but it's not available here in France. My best alternative is Sky News International from the United Kingdom, but it's not focused on coverage of U.S. news, of course. I can also get BBC World News, Bloomberg TV, CNBC Europe, France 24 (in French or English), and Al Jazeera (English), as well as international news in French or English from Germany and China. None of those really replaces CNN for U.S. news, however.

Walt just found an article saying all the Turner/Warner Bros. channels (CNN, TCM, etc.) have been taken down by Canal+ because negotiations to reach an agreement between the two organizations have fallen through. Maybe they'll get an agreement soon and put everything back together again. Recently, Canal+ removed one of France's main TV channels, TF1, from its offerings as a pressure tactic to get a deal negotiated, and it worked. It didn't matter much to me because can get the TF1 live stream off the internet without going through Canal+.

The 2012 cold snap

The pictures I've posted for the last three days were all taken on the same day, 31 January 2012. That was the beginning of the longest spell of really cold weather that we've had here in Saint-Aignan since we came to live here in 2003. It lasted about two weeks. For today, here are photos from the first half of February 2012.

05 février 2012 — More snow fell in our back yard.

06 février 2012 — The sun came out and temperatures plunged.

14 février 2012 — the snow had pretty much all melted.

It's unusual for Saint-Aignan to have freezing temperatures for so many days in a row.

Janvier 2012 (2)

It was in late January 2012 that the weather turned cold and snowy. We were comfortable here in our house, and we had the supplies we needed. Our central heat was working well, and we also had enough firewood to burn in our wood stove. We didn't need to go outside except to walk the dog.

   
A friend of ours, who we had known for six or so years, was living in an old house in the village called Orbigny, about 10 miles south of where we live. She called us and told us her car wouldn't start, and that she desperately needed groceries. Her house was freezing cold. Could I come get her and drive her to the Super U store in Saint-Aignan? I said yes. The photos here show what the roads were like that day, and what the countryside looked like.

Above is a typical hamlet in the countryside between Orbigny and Saint-Aignan. The drive from our friend's place to the supermarket was also about 10 miles on icy roads.

   
The whole drive covered about 40 miles and it took more than two hours. I was pretty brave (or foolhardy?) back then. I don't know if I would quickly say yes to such a long drive in such bad weather today. But our friend was in dire straits. And there were photo opportunities to be had along the way. I also can't believe I was taking pictures from behind the steering wheel. I wasn't going fast and my nimble little Peugeot had good tires on it. There was no traffic, as you can see.

Janvier 2012 (1)

The longest and most frigid cold snap we've had in our 20 years of residence in Saint-Aignan started in late January 2012. If I remember correctly, it lasted about two weeks. We had snow and ice on the ground and in the trees and vines for all that time. Here's what it looked like.

The road up the hill to our hamlet in the vines

The pond outside our back gate

The trees off our front deck over the carport

The linden tree in our back yard

Janvier 2010 (2)

Memories of Januaries past. If somebody had told me 20 years ago that I'd spend the rest of my life living in a vineyard, I probably would have laughed out loud. At that point, we still owned our house in San Francisco. It had to be sold before we could move to France. We put in on the market in February 2003, and it was sold in four days' time. We moved out in March after handing over the keys to the new owners.

We became the owners of our house in the vineyard in France in late April, and moved to Saint-Aignan in June, having shipped about half of our belongings over here in a container on a ship and sold or gave away the rest. I'm so glad we did all that back then, because, at age 74, I probably wouldn't attempt it today. I don't even go out on long walks in the vineyard any more, in all kinds of weather, though I still take walks — shorter walks — with the dog every day.

 

I came to France for three reasons. (1) To live the good life (food, peace and quiet, and no commuting) out in the country. (2) For opportunities to travel to parts of France that I had always heard about, but had never seen. And (3) to finish my life over here. And no, it's not over yet. It's just slowing down slightly.

Janvier 2010 (1)

In the Renaudière vineyard in mid-January 2010. Some days when I go
walking with the dog out there I can't stop snapping pictures.

Frost in early January

A spectacular sunrise a few days later

The same sunrise a few minutes later as the sun poked through

The sky through a hole in the clouds

Janvier 2014

The oyster (l'huître in French) is a wintertime food. The supply here is not lacking; nor is the demand. Walt and I have now stopped eating them fresh and raw on the half shell. For the first 10 years we lived here, we ate a lot of them that way, both at home and in restaurants. When we lived in San Francisco, we had the opportunity several times to go spend a few days in Seattle, an oyster town, wandering the streets on foot, going from one oyster bar to the next to try as many types of oysters (and white wines) as we could. It was always an adventure and a feast.

  

In Saint-Aignan, there are several seafood vendors who specialize in oysters from the Atlantic coast of France, from Brittany down to Bordeaux, at the open-air market on Saturday mornings. I've eaten oysters in Normandy at Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue; on the Île d'Oléron off the Atlantic coast; in Paris; in San Francisco; and of course in North Carolina, where we mainly ate them lightly steamed. In 1992, my mother flew to California and brought a surprise gift: a sealed plastic bin holding several dozen oysters, taken that day, fresh, out of N.C. waters, and still alive.

  

The oysters in today's photos are some that we bought at the market in Saint-Aignan in January 2014. We cooked them briefly in a hot oven to make them easy to open, and we ate them at home.