Le temps reste maussade

It feels so strange this year, not having any summer weather. Or at least not since April, which was abnormally warm and dry. These gray, rainy, blustery days... no, weeks — more like October than June, except it stays light until nearly 11:00 p.m. — remind me too much of the weather in San Francisco in summertime. They make me feel restless and dissatisfied.

Look, blue sky! It's nice to see that once in a while.
The photos are from a walk with Callie a couple of days ago.

The lack of extended periods of warm, sunny weather in San Francisco during the summer months was one of the things about life there that really tired me out. Now I'm getting tired of this weather we're having in Saint-Aignan.

Our house and a neighbor's under a brooding Loire Valley sky

You can't really enjoy being outside, unless you keep moving. You have to dress in long pants, sweatshirts, and shoes and socks. For all the other summers since we've been here, it's been shorts, tee-shirts, and sandals from May until October. With the exception of last August, that is, when we also had a rainy cool spell.

Our garden, which we put in late because the rainy weather in May was not conducive to working the soil and setting out plants, is very much en retard compared to past years. I'm starting to wonder if we will get any tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and squash at all this season. I'm sure we will get some, of course, and the plants are growing. There are blossoms on the tomato plants. But the temperatures are not yet hot enough to coax the plants to set fruit.

Callie, 26 June 2007. She's doing fine for now and
enjoying walks in the vineyard again. Sweet face...

It's supposed to rain again today, to be fairly nice and significantly warmer tomorrow, and then be almost hot on Sunday, but with thunderstorms. I guess that's better than blustery, chilly, and misty/drizzly. Maybe we'll have some exciting thunder and lightning.

Because we have Callie this year, we aren't getting out much. We haven't seen our local friends nearly as much as in past years, so we are kind of out of the gossip loop right now. It wasn't supposed to be like this. We waited until springtime to get a dog, calculating that we would be able to spend a lot of time outdoors in the sun with her. We'd enjoy a season in the yard and garden with her, where she could run and play — and not chew up everything in the house.

Here you can see how her belly was shaved for the operation.
I'll spare you the pictures of the six-inch incision and all the
stitches. I wish we knew why the got sick the way she did.

Instead, as soon as we got Callie in early May, the weather went south. If anything, I'm feeling a touch of cabin fever. It's just the way I used to feel in June, July, and August in San Francisco. Close the windows and doors, dress warmly, and stay inside as much as possible.

No sitting out on the deck and watching the stars as the dark closes in at 11:00. No stars anyway, too cloudy. Few bright sunny mornings when you feel like going out and pulling some weeds or watering (not necessary this year) or repotting plants. Or just listening to the birds sing.

Instead, we get weather that the forecaster on France Inter radio just characterized as maussade. The dictionary definition of that term: Qui inspire de l'ennui. - Ennuyeux, terne, triste. It's weather that inspires boredom, restlessness, sadness.

Remember Judy Collins singing that melancholy Randy
Newman song called "I think it's going to rain... today..."

The difference here is that this situation is likely (though not sure) to change. In San Francisco, people always smugly remarked that there were never more than three sunny, warm days in a row. They were glad it didn't get hot and muggy there. After the third decent day, the city's natural air-conditioning — fog and cold wind off the ocean — would kick in and the air would turn chilly again. People enjoyed that.

At least in Saint-Aignan, there is a chance that it will turn hot in July and stay that way in August. The garden hopes it will happen. I hope it will happen. I know I'm not alone in this.

Croissants aux amandes

Last week on an Internet travel forum I participate in, an American who was spending some time in Paris posted a question to ask people what they thought a good French croissant aux amandes — an almond croissant — should look and taste like. She had bought one and had been surprised to find that it was soggy with syrup rather than flakey and light.

I found a picture of a good almond croissant on a blog (The Girl Who Ate Everything) and posted a link to it on the forum. The discussion of croissants aux amandes went on for a few days, with a lot of people weighing in with opinions, experiences, and recommendations about where to find the best one in Paris.

Well, that set my mouth to watering. I don't remember what day of the week it was, but the fact is that our bread lady delivers to our front door five days a week. On Mondays and Saturdays she comes at about 9:00 a.m., but on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays her route brings here here at about 11:00. That's a little too late for a breakfast of croissants aux amandes. I waited, and then kind of forgot about it.

Ten butter croissants for €1.50 at Intermarché this week. I bet you could pay that much for one croissant in a lot of places.

Friday came around, and I remembered to ask the bread lady if I could place a special order for an almond croissant the next morning. I don't normally have any on Saturdays, she told me, because the bakery usually sells out of croissants on Fridays. It's only when the baker has left-over croissants that he makes croissants aux amandes out of them the next morning.

Really? I said. I never realized that almond croissants were a way to use up leftovers. Yes, she said, you can't really make a good almond croissant out of a fresh butter croissant. The fresh ones are too delicate. The croissants you use needs to be slightly stale.

I reported that to the Americans and British people who read the travel forum, and some were frankly disillusioned. Others just wouldn't believe me at all. They were sure that the Paris bakeries they frequented would never pull such a stunt. One woman in Sacramento said the Vietnamese baker in her neighborhood baked almond croissants fresh; she was sure. I have no reason to doubt her.

The next day, the bread lady surprised me by bringing me an almond croissant, despite it being a Saturday. She said the baker had made it especially for me, since I wanted one, and he had used a fresh croissant. Be careful, the bread lady said, it's kind of falling apart because of the freshness of the croissant. And it was.

Actually, she had two croissants aux amandes in the van that morning, and I bought both of them. I thought Walt might want one. She charged me €1.25 apiece for them; a regular croissant au beurre costs €0.75.

Walt didn't want one, so I ate them both. I had heartburn for the rest of the day. They were good though, even if they were a little soggier and stickier than I would have liked. Damned fresh croissants!

Yesterday we got an Intermarché flyer in the mail, and one of the specials this week is a sack of 10 croissants au beurre for the amazing price of €1.50. That's 15 cents a croissant, and the ad says they are made with butter, not margarine. The ones made with margarine, which you hardly ever see any more, are called croissants ordinaires.

Last year I asked in a boulangerie whether they still made ordinary croissants. The woman behind the counter said no, there's no real call for them any more. Croissants are a luxury item, a special treat, so you might as well buy the ones made with butter, she said. I remember having croissants ordinaires in Paris back in the '70s.

How much do you pay for butter croissants (if you ever buy them)? The baker in our village charges 75 cents, as I said, and I think that's a fairly standard price out here in the country. I bet they charge more for them in Paris.

Since Intermarché has such a deal on 15-cent croissants (and I'm sure they are not as good as the ones made in bakeries), I decided to look up recipes for almond croissants on the Internet. Sure enough, here's one on the famous cooking blog called Chocolate & Zucchini that Clotilde Dusoulier writes. And sure enough, she uses day-old croissants to make hers.

"You will find croissants aux amandes in most traditional French bakeries," Clotilde writes. "Originally devised as a way to sell not-so-fresh croissants from the day before, they are simply croissants filled with almond cream, sprinkled with sliced almonds and baked again, until the cream has set and the elbows of the croissant have crisped up."

That's definitive, I think.

My next project is to make the rounds of the seven or eight boulangeries in the Saint-Aignan "metropolitan area" and buy a croissant aux amandes in each one to see who makes the best one locally. Then I'll have to start going on two or three walks a day with Callie to burn off all those calories. And I'll have to do it before our supply of Rolaids runs out.

I don't think I'll be making almond croissants anytime soon, however. Too dangerous.

Colorful slugs

I mean snails without shells, not any other meaning of the word slug. A slug is called a limace in French, and people don't eat them. Many years ago, when I used to take meals in university cafeterias in Aix-en-Provence and then in Paris, I always saw people turning over the leaves of their lettuce before they ate any to make sure there were no slugs hiding in the salad. Washing salad was not a strong point of the university restaurant staff.

On her French blog Vieux c'est mieux a couple of days ago, Claude posted a picture of a big orange slug (une limace rouge) that she took in the park at the château de Chenonceau when she was there a few weeks ago. I told her that I would post a picture of a California banana slug this week.

Une limace rouge que j'ai prise en photo
un jour d'automne dans la rue de la Renaudière

I had found such a photo, long forgotten, when I was recently sorting through, inspecting, and organizing the two or three hundred CDs that I have archived all my photos on over the past 10 years. I ran out of space in my CD storage system so I had to transfer everything to a different system. That involved looking at some of the older CDs to see what was on them.

A California banana slug that I photographed at Butano
State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains ca. 1999.

I would include a link to Claude's blog in this post but both her sites seem to be down this morning. I know she's been having trouble with her blogging software.

These two slugs are of similar size, but the yellow one was all stretched out, whereas the orangey red had assumed a more compact shape for its street crossing.

Back to normal

Callie spent a normal night and was obviously glad to get back into her routine this morning. She woke me up at 6:10 and I took her outside. She trotted around the yard and did her business the way she is supposed to. She ate a good breakfast. And she's back to chewing on everything in sight.

She has a 6-inch incision that runs down the middle of her pretty belly. I guess she is going to have a big scar. But it doesn't seem to bother her at all. We hope she won't start picking at it — otherwise she'll have to be fitted with one of those funnels around her neck and head. So far, it's not a problem.



~~~~~~
Green is
the color
of our
summer
so far.
~~~~~~



And guess what! It's raining this morning. They say on the radio that there was major flooding in northern England yesterday. Here is it was really windy and black clouds blew by spitting a few drops of rain here and there. The weather in France makes it feel like October or March, not June. Meanwhile, it was over 100ºF in Rome and Florence yesterday, and it was closer to 110ºF in Athens, Bucarest, and Sofia. Southeastern Europe is having our summer.