Things I saw in the back yard this morning...

...when Tasha and I were going out for a walk. Above, the back yard itself, freshly mowed again.

Above left, a few mole hills and one mole mountain. Above right, the fig tree we planted 12 or 15 years ago. Maybe we'll get a good crop of figs this year.

Above left, what our compost pile looks like right now. It's been taken over by weeks, including a thorny blackberry bramble. Above right, a spider, I assume, has built a nest in tall grass. Or is it a trap for the spider's prey?

Favorite walks

Above are two photos of our neighbors' huge yard. They live in Blois (25 miles north) and only come down here a few times a year — less than once a month. Usually, they don't stay for more than a week each time, and often less. We have the keys to their house and we are free to walk our dog around their property when they're not here. They trust us to keep an eye on their place for them.

The neighbors have six acres of land, if I'm not mistaken. Most of it is woods. Less than a third of it has to be mowed. Our yard, in comparison, is fairly small at only about half an acre. Living here is like living next door to a big private park. The woman who owns the house is nearly 90 years old and she has five children. It will be interesting to see what they do with the house after she passes away. And what they do with the house their mother lives in up in Blois.

Crevettes !

Walt came home from the market in Selles-sur-Cher yesterday morning with a kilogram of fresh — never frozen — raw shrimp. This is a first for us in France, where shrimp are almost always sold cooked. You can sometimes buy raw ones frozen at the supermarket, but they cost a fortune.

The only real solution is to buy frozen raw shrimp in the Asian grocery stores in Blois, or Tours, but that requires a two-hour drive from Saint-Aignan and back. I like to clean the raw shrimp (called crevettes or gambas in France) myself by removing the shrimps' head, shell, and the digestive tract. That's what we did in North Carolina when I was growing up. I don't throw the heads or shells away, but I boil them in water to make a shrimp broth to use in soups and sauces.

Yesterday for lunch I made a stir-fry (called « un wok » in French) using shrimp, onions, garlic, ginger root, broccoli, mushrooms, bell peppers, and Asian sauces including soy, yakitori, oyster, and Thai fish sauce. We enjoyed it with steamed rice and some potstickers. Another idea for cooking with shrimp and shrimp broth is risotto.

Notre terrasse

Here are just a few photos of the state of our front terrace these days. We keep a lot of plants (too many?). The larger ones are too heavy to move downstairs to over-winter, so they have to come into rooms in the house that are on the same level as the terrace.

Walt has headed over to the big market at Selles-sur-Cher (10 miles east of us) to get some seedlings to plant in our window boxes and, we hope, some fresh shrimp. That's a rare commodity around here. If he can get them, I'll trim and clean them for the freezer (minus the ones we might eat for lunch today.)

P.S. Walt just got back from the market, and he scored some shrimp. Nice big ones, heads on, but fresh not frozen.

Le steak « suisse »

For yesterday's lunch, I made a dish that I hadn't made in years: Swiss steak. It's steak cooked in a rich tomato sauce with carrots, green beans, and bell peppers (or other vegetables of your choice. It's a good way to tenderized cuts of beef that are otherwise fairly durs (tough). I had some steaks like that in the freezer and this was a good way to use them up. I last made Swiss steak in 2018, I believe. Here's a link to my blog post about it.

The steaks are "dredged" in flour, or sprinkled with it. The flour serves to thicken the tomato sauce you pour over the steaks for long, slow cooking (three hours or more) after you have pan-fried them with onions, shallots, and/or garlic.

Take the steaks out of the tomato sauce after one or two hours, set them aside, and then stir vegetables into the sauce. Put the steaks back in the pan and let everything cook slowly for another hour or even two.

At the end of the cooking, when the steaks are almost fork-tender, take them out of the pan again and cut them into strips or dice the meat before putting it back in the sauce and heating it up one last time before serving it with potatoes (mashed or boiled), steamed rice, or pasta. Here's a link to a recipe on the Simply Recipes website.

A leak and a lunch

The day before yesterday it rained steadily from about 9 a.m. until nearly 6 p.m. The downspout on one corner of our house, near the front door, is evidently stopped up. The gutter at that corner was overflowing as I've never seen it do before. Now we have to find out how to fix it, or find someone who will come fix it for us. It's supposed to rain again today. Sigh...

Yesterday's lunch was not complicated or fancy. We had a hamburger, some leftover asparagus spears, and some diced potatoes cooked in the air fryer. I also had some leftover cheese sauce (sauce mornay) in the fridge, so we heated that up and put some of it on the burger and on the asparagus. Satisfying...

Alubias Judión (giant white beans)

Last week, I found a kind of beans that I'd never heard of before. I believe they are imported from Spain, and I've seen them on the internet called haricots blancs géants. They are large and and plump, and they are sold in jars at Intermarché over in Noyers-sur-Cher and labeled as Alubias Judión. They melt in your mouth and the skins are exceedingly tender. They remind me of large, white lima beans I ate growing up in North Carolina, as well as of French beans sold as haricots de Soissons, which I only rarely find here in Saint-Aignan. Here's a blurb in French describing the Judión beans:

C’est un haricot de grande taille bien connu sous le nom de Judión. Malgré sa taille, ce haricot est très fin et très tendre. Sa texture, qui rappelle le beurre, ne manquera pas de vous surprendre. Nous préparons tous nos légumes de manière artisanale et cela se voit : ils sont tendres, on ne sent pas la peau, ils ont un goût franc et naturel de légume … et seulement de légume. Lorsque vous aurez goûté nos légumes, vous ne pourrez plus vous en passer!

I used a jar of Judión beans along with some French haricots rouges and Italian haricots plats (Romano beans) to make a three-bean salad. I added some blanched green, red, and yellow bell peppers to the mix, replacing the sugar that Americans often add to the vinaigrette dressing for such beans salads. I hope Intermarché continues to stock these Alubias Judión beans in the future.

Outside and inside

Outside, vegetation is trying to take over our property. Where possible — meaning where there are no plants nearby that I don't want to kill — I've been spraying high-acid vinegar on invading plants to keep them under control. It seems to work, and they say it won't harm people, animals, or the environment. You can see how the leaves on this invasive Saint-John's Wort turn brown and crispy after being sprayed with vinegar (vinaigre ménager is sold as a herbicide and as a cleaning product.

Meanwhile, we still have a lot of plants inside the house. Those we water to keep them unstressed and help them keep growing and looking nice.

Today is market day in Saint-Aignan. Walt is going into town to get asparagus (green this time, if there is any), strawberries, artichokes, chicken sausages, and fresh bread at the open-air market. He says he might take some pictures while he's down there.

Plants inherited, gifted, rescued, and pinched

I've come by many interesting plants over the decades. Here are some of them.

The peonies above are some we inherited when we came to live here in Saint-Aignan 22 years ago. They were growing in the back yard next to the garden path. There's another clump of them on the other side of the path, and I think I'm going to dig that one up and re-plant them elsewhere.

As for the plants just above, from left to right, here's where I got them:

The dark green sanseveria plants were a gift from one of my first cousins on my father's side of the family. The cousin who gave them to me called me one day in 1983 or '84, when Walt and I were living in Washington DC, and said she and her husband were going to be in DC and asked if they could come see us. Of course, I said. When they arrived, she came with this plant as a gift. She said they had been at our grandmother's bedside when she passed away a few years earlier. I've had them for all that time, and they have lived in DC, San Franciso, Silicon Valley, and now France. I think I gave some of them to Charles-Henry when we left California in 2003, and he brought me a cutting or two a year or two later when he came to visit.

The donkeytail is a sedum plant is that I found, and rescued. I was in North Carolina 20 years ago and my mother and I were browsing around in a garden center. I happened to notice a two- or three-inch branch of the plant lying on the floor. It had (been) broken off. I picked it up, put it in my shirt pocket, and brought to back to Saint-Aignan when I returned to France a few days later. It's easy to grow but hard to handle because branches break off at the slightest touch.

The plant on the right above is a cutting from a big shrub growing in the yard of one of our neighbors here in Saint-Aignan. I pinched it last September, put it in a jar of water, and the planted it in a flowerpot when it started growing roots. I have two more cuttings in a jar of water now. I hope they'll grow roots over the summer.

The porch (?)

I guess this is a porch. I don't know what else to call it. It's always been an awkward space. When we bought the house, it was open to the outdoors, and for much of the year falling leaves blew in and it looked like a mess. We had the space closed in with sliding glass doors about a year after we came to live here. That was a big improvement.

Over the space of a couple of years, the porch became a place to keep potted plants, especially in winter. The space is not heated, but the temperature in there never gets down to freezing. Plants look tidier in there than piles of dead leaves did, but they require attention and maintenance.

And it's not just plants that end up in there. Souvenirs do too. In fact, a lot of my plants are souvenirs. They were given to me over the years by friends and relatives. A lot of the people who gave me the plants have now passed away. My mother, our neighbor Gisèle, our friend Charles-Henry.

The jar on the right above is an example. It's filled with seashells that I brought back to France from the beaches of North Carolina, where I grew up. The cluster of oyster shells is an objet d'art created by a friend of my sister's and mine. She lives in N.C. and gave me the objet when I said I liked it.

A glance at a lunch and a vineyard view

A couple of days ago I made what is called a shepherd's pie for our lunch. We all know what that is, even though purists will tell you that it shouldn't be called a shepherd's pie unless it's made with mutton or lamb. The pie made with beef, like this one, should be called a "cottage" pie. In France, this is called un hachis parmentier, named after a man named Parmentier who is credited with convincing people in France that potatoes were good food for people, and not just for livestock.

I didn't have quite enough ground beef, so I added some mushrooms and some green garden peas to the hachis de bœuf. Cook the meat mixture separately and put it in the bottom of an oven-proof dish. Carefully spread the mashed potatoes over the hachis and bake the dish in a hot oven until it browns on top. Optionally, sprinkle some grated cheese over the potato layer. That's what I did, using Gruyère cheese.

Earlier in the day, I had taken Tasha the Shetland sheep dog out for a walk in the vineyard out back. She seems to love running up and down the rows of vines. A minute or two later we happened upon a couple of little roe deer grazing on grass on the south edge of the vineyard.

Sedum morganianum — Kalanchoe blossfeldiana (2) — Portulacaria afra

Just a few potted plants for today. I'm in the middle of moving plants from one location to another for the summer.

Croissants au jambon et au fromage

Ham and cheese croissants are what I made for lunch yesterday. I'm still eating a croissant for breakfast every day and sharing it with Tasha the Sheltie. In the past I've made croissants aux amandes (almond croissants). Ham and cheese croissants are a way to enjoy croissants as a light main course or as an appetizer.

The secret ingredient in the recipe for these croissants is cheese sauce, which is a sauce béchamel with grated cheese melted in it. Split the croissants in half and spread some cheese sauce (or crème fraîche) on the botton half. Cut a slice of ham in half and put each half on a croissant you've spread cheese on. Spread a little more cheese sauce on the ham slices and then put some grated cheese on top. Then put the top half of the croissant back on.

Bake the croissants, ham, and cheese in the oven on medium heat to melt the grated (or sliced) cheese inside and heat up the croissant and ham.

Voilà! We ate croissants with a some asparagus spears served warm with some more of the cheese sauce.