Moroccan chicken with fennel

This is another tajine idea. In French it's called Tajine de poulet au fenouil. The ingredients are two big bulbs of fennel, four chicken thighs, four chicken legs, one whole lemon, a couple of garlic cloves, and some Moroccan spices or curry powder. Add some potatoes if you want, or serve the chicken and fennel with rice or couscous. It's an easy recipe.

Ingredients for Moroccan chicken with fennel

If you have full leg sections of chicken as I did, cut the thighs and legs apart to make them easier to cook. I used four leg sections, but you could easily use six. Salt and pepper the chicken before cooking it.

Chicken legs and thighs, salted and peppered

Wash the fennel bulbs, discard the blemished outer layers, and cut the bulbs into quarters. Cut the lemon into four or five slices and remove the pits.

Fennel and lemon ready for cooking

Sauté the chicken pieces in a little olive or other vegetable oil. When they are starting to brown, add a good pinch of fennel seeds if you have some, a good pinch of hot paprika, and three tablespoons of curry powder (or your own mix of spices like cumin, ginger, turmeric, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cayenne pepper, and others).

Chicken pieces browning with spices

Stir the chicken around with the spices and then add the fennel pieces and lemon slices to the pot. Throw in a couple of bay leaves and a couple of whole garlic cloves in their husk. Add not quite enough water to cover the ingredients — you can always add more water later if you think it needs it.

Chicken, fennel, lemon, and spices in the pot with some water

I decided to add some little red potatoes to the tajine because I had some in the cellar downstairs. Steamed potatoes are good with a curried sauce.

Add potatoes to the pot, or leave them out and eat
the chicken and fennel with steamed rice or couscous.

Cover the pot and let the chicken, fennel, and potatoes simmer on low heat for about 45 minutes or longer. Test the fennel and potatoes for doneness by poking them with a skewer or knife. If the chicken falls apart a little, that's okay.

Moroccan chicken with fennel ready for the table

For mine, the chicken was falling off the bone and the fennel was tender. The potatoes were completely cooked. I thought there was too much sauce, so I poured it off into another pot and boiled it down until it reduced and thickened a little. Then I poured it back over the dish, which I had kept warm in the oven. Taste it for salt, of course.

I thought the cooked lemon slices were good to eat, skin and all. Walt thought they were a little bitter.

Another ingredient you can add toward the end of the cooking is a dozen or so big green olives. Give the olives about 15 minutes to poach in the sauce before you eat them. They will add saltiness, so be careful with the salt shaker if you add olives.

About thunderstorms and dental charges

We woke up to thunder at 5:00 this morning. It was one of those textbook thundershowers. First there were low rumblings off in the distance to the southwest. Daylight was just beginning to break. The dog was awake and listening.

Then there was the first flash of lightning. I started counting. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand... The storm was nearly 20 miles away. After the next bright lightning flare, I only got up to 15. Then 12. Then seven. Finally four-one-thousand was the highest I could count before there was a loud thunderclap. That's as close as it got. It moved past us on the west and continued north.

La Renaudière yesterday afternoon, 18 June 2007

We had eight or 10 bright flashes of lightning and claps of loud thunder between 5:00 and 5:30. The wind came up, rustling the leaves of the linden tree outside the bedroom window. And it rained — lightly at first, then much harder, and then in a steady light rainfall that lasted until about 6:15.

In the middle of all that, it was time to take Callie out for her early-morning constitutional. I put on my rubber gardening shoes and took an umbrella with me out into the yard. Otherwise, I was wearing shorts and a tee-shirt. Callie did what she needed to do and then scooted back into the house to get dried off.

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Callie sits with the tip of her tongue sticking out of her mouth.
It's one of her favorite looks. The tip of her tongue
looks like a pink artichoke leaf, I think.

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A couple of weeks ago I had to go to the dentist's to have an old filling repaired. I mentioned it on the blog then, and lately I've been wanting to tell you about the cost of dental care in France. I'll do it here.

When the filling replacement was done and after scanning my new French medical insurance card into the office computer, Dr. Christian Bigot presented me with a bill for €46.29. That seemed very reasonable to me. I assumed he was just charging me for my portion of the cost of the treatment and that the French national medical insurance plan would pick up the rest of the tab.

———————————————————
If we keep finding
recipes for cookies
like these Biscuits
aux amandes et pignons,
I'll get to take full advantage
of the reasonable rates that
dentists charge in France.
———————————————————

I even asked Dr. Bigot if he knew what percentage of the cost was being covered. He said it depended on the plan I was enrolled in. Even if my coverage is only 50%, I calculated, that would mean the treatment cost less than a hundred euros. I've been happy with the result.

The other day I got a statement from the medical insurance plan up in Blois. It showed the €46.29 dentist's charge, and then showed a reimbursement of about €32.40. I looked at that and thought well, the social security coverage is less than 50% after all. I thought I had paid more than half, and they insurance had picked up only the €32.40.

And then I realized (thanks to W., who explains these things to me) that, no, the national insurance had deposited a reimbursement of €32.40 into my bank account. The total cost of the dental treatment was €46.29, and I was getting 70% of that, or €32.40, back! How reasonable is that? A new filling for about fifteen euros.

A victory with a grimaceand a defeat with a smile

The big news in France this morning is the unexpectedly strong performance of the Parti Socialiste's candidates in yesterday's second-round of parliamentary elections. While President Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party won a clear majority in the parliament (called the National Assembly) with 322 out of 577 seats, it fell far short of the landslide predicted just a week ago. Pundits who said the UMP would win 400 seats or more in the new Assembly were wrong.

Une rose

The Parti Socialiste (or Labor Party), despite losing in the presidential election, won 40 more seats in the new Assembly than it held in the outgoing one. That will make it much more interesting to see if Sarkozy and his prime minister can get their entire program passed by the legislature this summer and fall. There will be a more interesting debate than there might have been.

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Blue vs. pink The press in France is describing Sarkozy's party's performance in yesterday's legislative elections as a "victory with a grimace" — the president's party actually lost seats in the National Assembly compared to the last elections in 2002, even though it retained a majority.

The Parti Socialiste's performance is being called a "defeat with a smile" — the socialists picked up 40 extra seats compared to their numbers in the outgoing Assembly.

All along, pundits and analysts had been predicting a "blue tidal wave" for Sarkozy's candidates. His UMP party is represented by the color blue, while the French socialists' color is traditionally pink (for the color of a rose). One headline I saw yesterday said that la digue rose (the pink sea wall) had held back la vague bleue (the blue wave).

Hydrangeas are just starting to bloom.
Ours are turning pink, not blue.

It's interesting that in the U.S. it's the Democratic Party (the left) that controls the Blue States, and the RepublicanParty (the right) that rules in the Red States. It is the opposite in France, where the right is blue and the left is pink. That is symbolic, I think, of the differences between France and the U.S.

Most of the big names in French socialism won the right to keep their seats in the new National Assembly, and some won very comfortably. François Hollande, who has been head of the party, for example, won 60% of the vote in his district. Former culture minister and socialist éléphant (heavyweight) Jack Lang won 55% in his. Laurent Fabius and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, two other éléphants of the party, will be back too.

Centrist François Bayrou did better than expected, with his party winning four seats in parliament, and the Parti Communiste won 15 seats or more. Overall, the left-leaners will have 230 or so seats, and the right-leaners will have about 350, in the new Assembly.

In the district we live in, the Sarkozy candidate got about 55% of the vote. This is a fairly conservative, rural area.

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Au revoir Some of the people who were defeated yesterday were Marine Le Pen (extreme right presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen's daughter and heir apparent), Jean-Pierre Chévènement (a former government minister and presidential candidate who said he would retire from politics if he lost his seat in parliament), and especially Alain Juppé, still mayor of Bordeaux but as of today without a seat in the National Assembly.

Yesterday's weather

Juppé was a Chirac favorite, was seen as the wonder boy of French politics until scandal brought him down a few years ago, and had been appointed über-minster of the environment and the economy by Sarkozy. He's been compared to Al Gore for his focus on environmental issues and sustainable development policies, and his general wonkishness.

Juppé lost his seat in the Assemblée by 670 votes to the socialist candidate in Bordeaux, a woman named Michèle Delaunay. Now he will turn in his resignation as a government minister this morning. His national political career may have bitten the dust last night.

By the way, there are about 30% more women in the new Assembly than there were in the outgoing legislature, according to France Inter radio. That's 107 women now, out of 577.

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Splitsville To nobody's great surprise, Parti Socialiste presidential candidate Ségolène Royal announced last night that she and François Hollande are ending their 25-year concubinage (they have four children together) . Rumors that their relationship was on the rocks had been circulating ever since Royal secured the Parti Socialiste's presidential nomination last winter. Hollande has long been the general secretary of the party, and some speculated that he wanted the presidential nomination for himself.

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It's the taxes, stupid Why did the socialists do better than expected in the legislative elections, and why did Sarkozy's party fail to realize its dream of an electoral landslide? The analysts seem unanimous in blaming Sarkozy's minister of the budget, Jean-Louis Borloo, for the party's relatively poor showing. He's the one who last week raised the prospect of a hike in the French value-added tax from 20% to 25%.

Callie's reaction to the whole situation

The value-added tax, or VAT (which in French is the TVA, la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée) is fundamentally a sales tax. Whereas in the U.S. the sales tax is added to the price on an item at the time of purchase, in France the TVA is just part of the advertised price of things you buy. The price you see is the price you actually pay at the cash register.

In that sense, it's a hidden tax. If a computer is advertised for sale in a store at €500, for example, about €100 of that is the TVA that the government collects.

It's ironic that it's the right wing in France that proposed a tax increase, and the left wing that reaped the electoral benefits of the public reaction. That's what they call counter-intuitive, in American terms. Right-wing American politicians accuse the left of always wanting to raise taxes.

But what the Sarkozy people were talking about was lowering the payroll taxes that businesses pay and making up the lost tax revenue by increasing the taxes consumers pay on the goods they purchase. It's seen by those who advocate it as a way to encourage businesses to hire more workers.

Someone said that businesses will be able to lower the prices of the goods they produce if they don't have to pay so much in payroll taxes. Do you believe that? I'm not sure I do. But if it were true, the added sales tax wouldn't actually increase prices for consumers.

Sounds like the old voodoo economics of the Reagan years to me. The TVA debate will be a major component of the political noise coming out of Paris for the rest of 2007.

Talking with le père Denis

We had a pretty nice day in Saint-Aignan yesterday, though it wasn't particularly warm, and there were times when it got pretty windy. It didn't rain — that's what makes me say it was pretty nice. On the radio they're saying another front is moving in off the ocean this morning, so we can expect rain this afternoon. So what else is new?

Despite the rain and cool temperatures,
daisies are starting to bloom in the yard

I took Callie out for a walk in the late afternoon; I'm trying to make a habit out of doing that. We had walked out just a few hundred yards and were approaching the little cabane de vigneron — the vineyard workers' shed. These little stone buildings are used nowadays exclusively for tool and equipment storage, but in the past they were a place to spend the night instead of walking all the way back home and returning early the next day to continue working in the vines. I noticed a white car parked next to the cabane.

What to you suppose these gendarme bugs are up to?

Then off to the right, on a tractor trail that runs diagonally off the gravel road, I saw an older gentlemen dressed in blue work clothes and accompanied by two dogs. I waved bonjour his way and planned to walk on by with Callie, who was trotting along right next to me. Then I saw the man's two dogs running toward me at full speed. Uh-oh.

Callie saw them too and turned a ran at full speed herself, down a row of grape vines back toward our back gate. She was headed home. One of the man's two dogs was right behind her, but the other one stopped and stayed near me. I turned around and walked down a row toward the back gate too, figuring I would find Callie sitting there waiting to be let into the yard.

A fading rose in a neighbor's yard

When I got to the end of the long row and could see the back gate, there was no Callie in sight. Then I saw the man in blue waving at me, telling me that Callie had come back to him with his dog. So I walked back around the pond and up the gravel road to where I had started.

The man turned out to be Monsieur Denis, who owns all the vineyards out back. He is more or less retired now and his son Bruno operates the winery, along with his wife Patricia. They must be in their mid-40s. We know them and buy wine from them. This is not the first time I have seen the senior M. Denis out in the vineyard over these past four years.

Our friend Gisèle gave us a cutting off her begonia a couple
of years ago. This summer it is thriving on the front porch.
The drooping clusters of pink flowers are beautiful.

In fact, one day in January or February 2006 I was walking Collette out there and we stopped and said hello to M. Denis. He asked me what kind of dog Collette was, and I told him she was a Sheltie-mix SPCA dog that we had brought with us from California.

A few weeks later, Collette had a stroke and died. It was mid-March. Before long, I ran into M. Denis in the vineyard again, on one of the times when I tried to go for a walk by myself out there.

« Où est votre chienne ? » M. Denis asked. Where's your dog?

« Elle est morte au mois de mars, » I told him, « elle avait 14 ans. » She died in March at the age of 14. Oh, he said, I see. That was the extent of the conversation.

Walt transplanted some cala lilies earlier in the spring.
They enjoy the rainy, cool weather we've been having.

Yesterday M. Denis and I stood and talked a lot longer, while the dogs played. I told him Callie was not yet four months old, and he said one of his two dogs was just five months old itself. The other one is 11 years old. She's a basset hound or beagle, I would guess, and the younger one is the kind of spaniel, maybe a Brittany spaniel, that they use for hunting around here. M. Denis said it was the first time he had brought his puppy out into the vineyard to run around.

He said his work in the vineyard was finished for the season. He told me what it was he had done to the vines, but he used a technical term that went right by me. Then he said he couldn't very well get the the workers' way or do their work for them, so he was off for the summer. I got the distinct impression he wasn't too happy about the situation, but I could just hear his son telling him to take it easy and not try to do so much.

I asked him if the five-month-old puppy was a replacement for one of Bruno and Patricia's dogs, which I knew had been run over by a car last year. It was very traumatic for their children, Bruno had told me. No, M. Denis said, this puppy was his. But Bruno had taken another puppy from the same litter, so now his family had a new dog too. Both the Denis men are hunters.

Part of the Denis' vineyard

I told him that Callie is a border collie. « Ça chasse, ces chiens-là ? » he asked. Will she hunt? No, I told him, border collies are sheep dogs. I told him some friends had suggested we get a couple of sheep for the back yard so Callie would have an occupation, and he just laughed. He said he had had to put up an electric fence around his vegetable garden to keep the dogs from going in and breaking down all the plants — « ils allaient tout casser, » he said — but with sheep it would be even worse.

Grapes are starting to grow.

He said he'd noticed that his dogs were afraid of the wires the grape vines are strung along out in the vineyard, because they apparently thought those wires were electrified like the ones he had strung around his garden. He thought that was funny. « Chat échaudé, vous savez... » I told him, referring to the French version of the proverb that says "once burned, twice shy." He nodded and said that must be it.

After a few minutes he put his dogs in his little white van and headed for home, but not before Callie and the puppy jumped all over him and almost knocked him over. I was afraid I was going to have to pick him up off the ground, but there wasn't much I could do to keep the dogs off him and he didn't really seem to mind.

Callie after her afternoon mud bath

After he left, Callie headed straight for a big pool of standing water and did a repeat of her water-slapping act the day before. We walked on a ways, with me hoping she would dry out and rid herself of the sand and mud stuck in her fur. But I still had to wash her down when we got home, before I could let her back in the house.