Spring foods and herbs

Walt went to the Saturday-morning market in Saint-Aignan yesterday to look for locally grown asparagus. He found some. It was a man we often buy asparagus and strawberries from who had asparagus at a reasonable price — 6.00€/kg, or just over $3.50/lb. in U.S. terms, at current exchange rates.

Asperges blanches

The dollar is worth about 75 eurocents right now; that's the euro being worth $1.31 U.S. The euro went up to almost $1.60 last summer, so we were getting only about 63 eurocents for a U.S. dollar. It's better now, but when you live here with a limited income in $$, you have to pay attention to costs.

Anyway, you can see the difference between the asparagus we buy and the ones that grow untended out in the vineyard. The vineyard asparagus are the green ones. The cultivated ones, grown here along the Cher River Valley and over in neighboring Sologne, where the soil is sandy, are grown buried in sand so that sunlight doesn't turn them green.

Radishes, asparagus, and mint rooting in a glass of water

It's hard to say which is better, green or white asparagus. They are the same plant — only the growing methods are different. With the white ones, you have to peel each asparagus. Green ones don't need peeling. And the white ones take longer to cook. They have a more delicate, less asparagus-y flavor, maybe. We like both.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention our experiment with true wild asparagus. A few days ago, we cooked the slender stalks I had picked out back. Because it was an experiment, we decided not to cook the wild asparagus into an omelet or scrambled eggs, but to cook them separately and try them. To go with them, we made a mushroom risotto. Well, the wild asparagus turned out to be bitter. Almost too bitter to eat. I ate some by cutting them into small pieces and mixing them into the risotto. But I can't say I thought they were very good. Tant pis.

Herbs in planters. Mostly you see oregano.
Also cactus pads and a desert jade plant.

The other spring vegetable Walt picked up at the market was a big bunch of radishes. French people eat a lot of radishes. First you wash them well to get rid of any sand. You take them to the table slightly damp with the clear fresh water you washed them in. Then each person puts a pat of butter and a little pile of salt on a plate. Spread a little sweet butter on a nice piece of French bread. Take a radish and touch it to the salt so a little bit sticks to it. Then eat a bite of the salty radish and the crunchy bread spread with sweet butter. Now I'm hungry.

One of the trees I'm keeping any eye on out in the vineyard
now has fruit on it. Plums, I guess. I'll soon know.

For lunch Walt is going to make an asparagus and ham pie. More on that in a day or two.

Another spring food is herbs. We've been lucky this year. Our parsley came back up and is green and leafy. It's more beautiful than it was last summer. And mint that we planted last summer has come back up too. It was attacked by an insect (we assume) last summer. All the leaves were completely covered underneath with what I assume was insect eggs. We couldn't eat it. Mint is supposed to be invasive, but ours died back while the parsley next to it thrived.

Parsley and mint growing in the well

I've also planted chives and some other mint in planter boxes. We gave up on the herb garden last summer. Weeds took it over when the weather was rainy, and it's hard to go weed it in rainy weather. So we are going to grow herbs in pots and planter boxes this year.

Last June CHM came to visit and he bought us a couple of tarragon plants from a vendor at the farmers' market in Montrichard. We planted them and they did fine. At the end of the growing season, I dug them up and put them in pots for the winter. I left the pots of tarragon outdoors, at the base of the south wall of the house. I didn't know if they would survive.

Tarragon survived the winter

Well, they did we have a couple of tarragon plants now. I've transplanted them into good potting soil. I want to save them, because the plants were very expensive — 6.00€ apiece. Chicken with tarragon is a classic combination.

Oregano

Another herb that reseeded itself, or grew back from the roots, is oregano. I've transplanted a lot of it from the abandoned herb garden plot (where we will plant vegetables next month) into planters. It is thriving too. It has nice flowers in summertime.

I foresee lots of herby salads over the course of the summer.

April afternoons

Yesterday when Sylvie la boulangère drove up to sell us our daily baguette de pain, I was the one who went out to get it and pay her (still 81 cents). She looked at me closely — she hadn't seen me in about a week — and she said: « On dirait que vous êtes bronzé. » — you look like you have a tan.

« Ça n m'étonnerais pas — je passe mes après-midi au soleil depuis quelques jours, » I told her. I've been spending my afternoons outdoors in the sun. The weather has been that nice. My routine is to write a blog post in the morning, walk the dog (if it's my day), and then do some work in the kitchen until lunchtime.

April afternoons at La Renaudière, near Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher

Work in the kitchen might be making lunch, or it might be preparing food I've bought for the freezer. Yesterday, for example, I had about 5 lbs. of bœuf pour bourguignon, stew beef, that I had bought at Intermarché Thursday morning. It was on sale, and I stock up when the price is right (3.50€/kg, or about $2.20/lb. in U.S. currency).

I give prices because I think it's interesting to be able to compare French prices with U.S. prices (or other countries'). If you're thinking of moving to France, this will give you an idea of the cost of living. And if you are retiring, you will find that prices and bargains matter more than ever.

One afternoon a bumblebee landed on the table right next to me

Before I freeze the beef, I trim it up to remove most of the fat and connective tissue. Walt and I eat the meat, either in stew or ground up to make meatballs, and Callie gets the scraps, which I cook to add to cooked rice or her kibbble. I'm retired, so I have time to fiddle with food a lot — that's why I can buy inexpensive meat and vegetables, for example, and do the long cooking required to make a good bœuf bourguignon, bœuf aux carottes, coq au vin, or blanquette de veau.

Storm clouds threatened yesterday afternoon
and we had a hard rain shower overnight

I had also bought four nice chicken leg-thigh sections because they were also on sale — 2.99€/kg, or about $1.85/lb. Those just need to be repackaged for freezing, so that we don't have to thaw them all at once. Then I started getting lunch ready.

Meanwhile, Walt got out the vacuum cleaner and sucked up all the dust and dog hair in the living room while he watched tennis on TV — he watches without needing to listen. The tournament going on TV right now is a clay-court event down in Monte Carlo. Roger Federer lost yesterday to a fellow Swiss player.

This is Callie keeping her eye on an inteloping bird...

Lunch yesterday was leftovers — more of that rabbit I cooked Easter Sunday, which made three meals for the two of us out of that. The rabbit cost about 9.00€, but we got our money's worth out of it. The leftovers were almost better than the dish was on the day I cooked it. Neither one of us minds eating leftovers for a few days after a big cooking project. I know some people who can't stand to eat the same thing two or three times in a row, but that's not us — as long as it's tasty.

...and her reaction when I tell her it's just a bird — "Duh!"

After lunch, I watched a Woody Allen movie on TV. We have a satellite system and a program package from French CanalSat (which is the only game in town since CanalSat bought out it only competitor, TPS). We get 6 or 8 movie channels, and a lot of them show English-language films in the original English version. They also show a lot of French movies, of course, and we watch many of those, along with a scattering of German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese films.

The makings for April showers

The films always have French subtitles if they are in a foreign language, and you usually have the option of watching them dubbed into French if you'd prefer. Only a few films are actually shown in V.O., which means version originale, with subtitles. Most are broadcast in V.M., version multilingue, which means you can choose the language soundtrack you want to hear. It's nice, and we don't see the point of watching American or British movies dubbed into French. The French movies don't have subtitles, but we're both past the point of needing those.

Me and Callie sitting in the back yard on a nice April afternoon
(this is a composite of two photos that I "stitched" together)

After the movie, at about 3:30, for the past week or two I've been relocating myself to the outdoors. There are usually some clouds but the sun pokes through often enough to keep the temperature at pleasant levels. And as a result of sitting outdoors or working in the garden most afternoons, I've gotten a tan. It's probably bad for my skin, but it feels good.

I have a lot of plants in pots that need re-potting this time of year, and that's a perfect activity for a nice afternoon out in the sun. Yesterday, I re-potted my grandmother's Sanseveria plants. My grandmother died in 1974, and I've had the plants since the early 1980s, when a cousin in North Carolina gave me some of them. There's no telling how long Grandmama had had them. Walt and I lived in Washington DC back then. I moved the plants to California with us in 1986 and they thrived out there for many years.

The grapevines are starting to get some leaves on them.

When I moved to France in 2003, I took most of the Sanseveria plants back to North Carolina and gave them back to my cousin. I had a planter-box full of them. She said all hers had died in an unexpected freeze one night. I didn't see how I could move any of the plants to France. But meanwhile, Walt and I stopped off to see CHM in southern California on our way to N.C., and I gave him a couple of cuttings from Grandmama's plants.

In 2004, CHM came to Saint-Aignan for a visit. And guess what he brought me — a cutting from my grandmother's plant. He wanted me to have it. I potted it up and it has done well. In 2005, I brought back another cutting from North Carolina — my mother had one of the plants I had brought back from California. One of the plants produced a baby a couple of years ago, so now I have three.

One of Grandmama's Sansevieria plants

Anyway, sitting outdoors reading and listening to the radio (my favorite radio program, a French talk/game show called Les Grosses Têtes, is on from 4:00 to 6:00 every afternoon), or puttering around with potted plants, is my idea of a rally nice way to spend an April afternoon. Every other day I walk Callie at 6:00, so that gives me some good exercise too, and a chance to take a lot of pictures.

Cockscomb hairdos

Here's a translation of an article that ran in our local newspaper, La Nouvelle République, last week. I enjoyed it and hope you do too.

The principal of Lycée Ronsard,
arbiter of style
Piercings, scarlet-red hair, chains, OK... but the cockscomb, that’s a no! A Vendôme high school student gets sent home.

He’s a nice kid, easy-going, who is well-liked by friends of both genders. Thursday, however, his life was turned upside down: as he walked onto the grounds of Ronsard high school in Vendôme, the student bumped — figuratively speaking — into the principal, Alfred Piélot.

And that’s when all the trouble started: on the one hand, a classic suit-and-tie, impeccable grooming — everything you would expect in a high school principal. On the other, a leather jacket, funky shoes, red and blue hair, and, above all, a cockscomb haircut. A very impressive cockscomb haircut. Either you like it or you don’t. The principal doesn’t. The esthetic conflict runs deep.

The student is firmly invited to return home and get rid of the crazy-looking hair, the ostentatious character of which has shocked Alfred Piélot. Before departing, the banished student alerts his classmates, who immediately go running to the principal’s office. Over the course of an animated and acrid discussion, it becomes obvious that the two sides don’t at all share the same view of what constitutes elegance in fashion.

Chloë, who is especially outspoken, calls it a “unique and original” haircut. Alfred Piélot calls it “ridiculous.” The arbiter of fashion is the principal and the principal alone. Alfred Piélot puts an end to the discussion by sarcastically inviting the dissident students “to lead a solidarity movement in favor of their reprimanded comrade.”

The problem, with young people, is that there is no need to ask them twice when you're asking them to do something they are already tempted to do: yesterday, 30 or more of them came to school with different-colored cockscomb hairstyles.

Alfred Piélot is doing his best to remain philosophical about it all: “I am not sure that accepting the will of these young people would be doing them a favor educationally. Where are the boundaries? It’s true, last Thursday I decided that one student had gone too far. I really didn’t appreciate that modified Roman-helmet haircut. But the student was re-admitted the next day, because he had trimmed the cockscomb down to make it shorter.”

Everything changes, nothing changes. In the 1970s, students were sent home for wearing their hair too long...

You have probably gathered that a “cockscomb haircut” is what we would call a mohawk in the U.S.

Several subjects...

A spiffed-up old Citroën 2CV parked on a street in Saint-Aignan

Nadège says in a recent comment that none of the people she works with can pronounce the French first name Gilles. She's working with Gilles Marini, who played Dante in Sex and the City: The Movie. Nadège is a makeup artist in Hollywood.

The red cowslips were still there a few days ago.

Well, Gilles is hard to pronounce for Americans because we don't have any words in English that begin with that voiced sibilant sound. We have [sh] but not [zh] as an initial consonant — [sheep] for example, but not [zheep]. We do have the [zh] sound, however, in the middle of words like treasure, pleasure, and measure (all pronounced [-'eh-zhoor]). It's the same sound that is the final consonant in Nadège [nah-'dehzh].

French is full of words that have [zh] as the initial sound: je, jeudi, jouer, jurer, jamais, gîte, giboulée, Giverny, and on and on. Maybe telling people that Gilles is pronounced [zheel] will help.

* * * *

A few days ago Callie found a hedgehog in the yard. Well, a hedgehog that was trying to get into the yard. It was stuck in the fence. Callie was doing her daily early-morning inspection tour when she started barking wildly.

I went over to see what the problem was, thinking she might have chased a cat out of the yard and into the hedge. But the barking was too hysterical. And there was the poor hedgehog, wedged in and trapped.

A hedgehog stuck in the fence

I told Walt about it when Callie and I got back from our walk. He put on some very heavy leather fireplace gloves and went out to see if he could extricate the poor animal. He succeeded, only getting stabbed once or twice by the hedgehog's quills. He stretched the wire fence and little and pushed the animal through. It rolled itself up into a tight ball and stayed there under the hedge for the rest of the day. We wondered it it was injured or even dead.

Callie loves being outside on warm afternoons.

The next morning it was gone. Hedgehogs are nocturnal. It was probably just waiting for nightfall before making its move. Hedgehogs are also animals you want to have in your garden, because they eat slugs and bugs. It's too bad they can't fit through the slots in our wire fence. Maybe that one was just overweight.

* * * *

The wisteria is starting to bloom.

The plum and pear tree blossoms are now falling, and the cherry blossoms are not far behind. I'm getting worried that our weather is not yet warm enough for all these trees to actually set fruit. I think chilly damp weather is not ideal at this stage in their development.

Apple blossoms, a wide shot and a close-up

Now the apple trees and the wisteria are blooming. I wish we knew how to keep the apple trees from setting fruit. Thousands of apples — it seems like millions — cover the ground under the five apple trees in our yard for most of the summer. We can't use them all, and we can't even give them away because everybody we know has just as many apple trees and apples as we do.

And I found these little orchids growing in our back yard...

Meanwhile, we're happy because parsley, oregano, mint, and tarragon from last year's garden have all come up again and look really healthy. Our thyme and rosemary plants also survived the cold winter. Now if we can just get some good tomatoes and eggplant going in the veggie garden, we will be sitting pretty.