Crêpes au sarrasin (galettes bretonnes)

The gluten-free flour that is called sarassin or blé noir in France is used especially to make savory crêpes (thin pancakes). Blé noir literally means "black wheat" and it's what we call "buckwheat" in English, but it fact it's not a kind of wheat at all. Buckwheat crêpes are often called galettes (or galettes bretonnes) in France and come specifically from Brittany.

The reason buckwheat is called sarrasin is that the plant was supposedly brought back to France by the Crusaders in the Middle Ages. At the time, Europeans called the people of the Middle East "Saracens" and had found them growing buckwheat and eating the seeds as a cereal or grinding them into flour.

We recently acquired a new, larger crepe pan for making
galettes. The smaller pan is for making dessert crepes.

Buckwheat flour alone can be used to make pancakes, or it can be mixed with wheat flour. A typical recipe calls for just buckwheat flour, egg, salt, and water or milk, to make a thin batter. I posted a recipe back in 2009. Here's a gluten-free version:

Gluten-free buckwheat crepes from Brittany

4 cups (500 g) buckwheat flour
2 tsp. (5 g) salt
1 egg
3 cups (700 ml) water

Put the buckwheat flour and salt in a big mixing bowl and make a well in the middle. Drop in the egg. Gradually stir in the water and then beat the batter to make it a little frothy. Let the batter rest for at least an hour. If it's too thick, stir in more water before cooking. [You want it pretty liquid to make thin pancakes.]

Film a lightly oiled non-stick pan with a very thin layer of batter and let it cook for three minutes on one side. Turn it over and cook it for three minutes on the other side. Stack the cooked pancakes on a plate covered with a dishtowel.

To finish the pancakes, put each one back into the pan, lay on a slice of ham (or two or three strips of cooked bacon), and sprinkle grated cheese over all. Fold up the edges of the pancake to make it into a square shape (see picture) and let the cheese melt.

Optionally, add sliced, cooked mushrooms and/or break an egg onto the center of each crepe. As you fill the pancakes, put them in a low to medium-hot oven to wait until you're ready to take them to the table.

If you're not worried about gluten, you can replace about a quarter of the buckwheat flour with regular wheat flour for a different texture.

Moi, froid ? C'est sûr !

For two nights in a row I've tried to get the boiler regulated so that the radiators all through the house will stay warm and keep the temperature warm but not too warm. Night before last, I set the dial to the night-time setting and turned the temperature down slightly. The result was that I woke up suffocating at 3:00 a.m. I really don't like sleeping in a heated room.

In the middle of the night, then, I had to go down and turn the boiler completely off. By the time I got up (again) at 7:00 the temperature in the house was down to 11ºC (which is about 52ºF). It took two or three hours to get it back up to a comfortable level (which for us is about 65ºF/18ºC). However, I talked to a friend yesterday and she said she hasn't been able to get the temperature inside her house up above 12/54 this whole week.

So I guess I shouldn't complain. I'm sure a lot of other people are shivering these days too. And many are dealing with frozen pipes, which is a problem we haven't had (knock on wood). The weather widget on my Windows 7 desktop says the temperature in Saint-Aignan this morning is a balmy –17ºC ( between +1 and +2 on the Farenheit scale). That's an aberration, I'm sure. Our thermometer says it's closer to –10.

Just what you wanted to see: more snow pix.
They say we might have a thaw by Monday or Tuesday.

What they are saying on the TV news is that it's not so much that temperatures are frigid — they've been as low or lower in the past — but that the cold snap is lasting so long. Crops are freezing in the ground, even inside greenhouses. The rivers, including the upper Loire and the Rhine along the Alsace-Germany border, are frozen over. Even the Canal St-Martin in Paris is frozen over. I haven't been down to see if the Cher is ice-covered.

The last time I remember weather like this in France was in 1978. It was also very cold — colder than now — in 1985 (I wasn't living here then). Right now, our house is getting colder and colder with each passing day. It's a losing battle, despite the fact that we are using the central heating system a lot more than we normally do, along with having roaring fires in the woodstove every afternoon and evening.

So last night I tried once more to change the settings on the boiler to get it to keep the house just minimally warm. Can you believe we don't have any thermostat in the house? I guess we need to get one installed. These days, I think you can get a thermostat that's a remote-control unit. As for the boiler settings, I was once again unsuccessful.

I woke up at about 2:30 a.m. and I could hear the pump on the boiler running. I came downstairs and touched some radiators. They were almost stone cold, and the house was cold too. I guess I turned it down too low. When I hear the boiler running for nothing, I think about the small quantity of heating oil that we bought in January to get us through the season, and how much it cost. It was 265 U.S. gallons, and it set us back more than $1300 U.S. (just over a thousand euros). I don't want to waste any of that precious substance.

When I went down to tinker with the boiler one more time, I of course woke up poor Bertie, who was sleeping down there in the cold. Finally I decided just to turn the boiler on, take the cat upstairs with me into the relative warmth, and block the dog in up in the loft, where Walt was sleeping. That worked.

I got out a couple of blankets, took the cushions off the downstairs sofa, and made up my temporary bed. Bertie jumped up and slept on my chest and abdomen for a couple of hours. I of course couldn't move without knocking him off, so I wasn't very comfortable, but I did sleep a little. The house started warming up a little bit more with the radiators back on.

I have to go out and tromp around in this with the dog
in a few minutes — unless Callie chickens out.

At one point, Bertie got up and had a long drink out of Callie's water bowl. I was able to move around and find a more comfortable position, on my side. Bertie came back and slept next to me instead of on top of me for a while. Then, the last I remember, he climbed up on my side, sort of on my shoulder, and he slept perched up there for a couple of hours. Again I couldn't move, but I slept. We woke up at 6:45 and I fed him. He's still in the house.

Sometimes I feel like Callie is just not being cooperative. She lunges at Bertie, barks, and tries to bite him. He panics. We have to keep them separated. I don't think Callie really intends to hurt the cat. She must see him as an intruder, and as an animal to be herded. That's a border collie's nature. I don't think it will ever change. I try not to despair.

Day eight of the freeze

If I were a really courageous and dedicated blogger, I'd be going out during the day to take pictures of châteaux, churches, and villages under the snow. Sorry. I'm just staying in and going out only to walk the dog.

Winter sunrise

Yesterday morning Callie wouldn't even go for a real walk. We hadn't gotten far from the house when she starting giving me her unmistakeable "can we go home now?" look. She started limping and stood in the now with one front paw up in the air, as if she was injured. I pried a chunk of ice out from between her pads and we turned back. She literally ran back home, joyfully.

Downspout

Bertie has been spending a lot of time in the house. Callie still doesn't accept him, but we can keep her up in the loft and let Bertie come in an lie on a rug in front of the fire for most of the afternoon. He likes that. It's chilly down in the garage where he sleeps at night, but we've given him a pile of towels to sleep in and he seems fine.

The pond

It's not as cold this morning as it was yesterday, but it was a lot colder when I got up in the middle of the night. The overnight low was minus 9ºC, but now it's up to minus 6.5. And it's snowing. That's why it got "warmer" — cloud cover moved in, stopping the clear-sky radiation of residual warmth into the atmosphere.

The woodpile, or what's left of it

When this is all over, it will be interesting to see how many plants have been killed. I have some little trees in pots that I planned to plant in the ground this spring or next. I bet the roots have frozen solid. I'm wondering whether certain small plants that are already in the ground will survive. Oh well.

Will these pull through?

It's not snowing hard but we are having flurries. The weather report says they will continue through the day. I just looked out the window and it's actually snowing pretty hard right now.

“A cold day...”

I got up at 6:45 and the first thing I did, of course, was to check the temperature outside: minus 9.5 degrees centigrade. Now it's 7:45 and I just checked again. The thermometer is still going down — minus 10.1 is the latest reading. That's 14ºF. It's the coldest morning so far. This cold snap started only a week ago, but it seems like a month. And we live in a relatively warm micro-climate for our region.

I know a lot of people live in places where it's a lot colder than 14 degrees F, but they don't live in the same kinds of houses we live in here in Saint-Aignan and across France. Our houses are built of stone or concrete blocks, with tile floors. There isn't much or any insulation in the walls, and the tile floors are freezing cold. (Our house in San Francisco, built of wood, wasn't insulated either, by the way. It too was cold when the temperature dropped, but then it was pretty much always cold in San Francisco.)

Snow-covered hedges, with sunshine

In our 1960s-vintage Saint-Aignan house there's a thin layer of fiberglass in the ceiling, but that's it. Otherwise, the air spaces in the concrete blocks of the walls provide the only protection against the cold. When we got the attic finished in 2010, we had walls built of plaster board put in up there, with a thick layer of insulation between the walls and the roof tiles. The loft is actually warmer than the main living space downstairs.

Yesterday's Boston baked beans with bacon

Besides the arctic cold, which is all the news in the French press and on French TV, what's going on here these days is the ramp-up to the upcoming presidential election, scheduled for April/May (with two rounds of voting). The incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, has not yet declared his candidacy, but he is clearly campaigning. And he has help from outside France. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is in France doing what looks like campaigning with and for Sarkozy.

Making tracks

Some say the situation is unprecedented. It makes me wonder what wag might have said that it would be “a cold day” when a German political leader would be the model and inspiration for a French presidential candidate, declared or not.