Meatballs Burgundy

That would be « Boulettes de bœuf à la bourguignonne » in French. It might seem like a strange idea, but it turned out to be pretty good — Bœuf Bourguignon made with ground beef.

Actually, to be more precise, it is « Boulettes de bœuf à la tourangelle », because I used local Touraine wine, a vin de pays from the co-op in Saint-Romain-sur-Cher, to make it. Any drinkable, dry red wine will work fine.

Boulettes de bœuf à la tourangelle —
meatballs cooked in our local red wine

Since ground beef is so easy to get in the U.S. (and in France nowadays), and since meatballs cook a lot faster than stew beef does, this might be a practical alternative to the classic Beef Burgundy. The traditional version cooks for three hours or more because it takes that long for the beef to get tender. And then meatballs are just good — moist and tasty without needing long cooking.

A ground beef mixture for making meatballs

I used about 2 lbs. of ground beef. Incorporate into the meat a finely chopped onion or shallot, a couple of mashed and chopped garlic cloves, a pinch of dried thyme, 2 Tbs. of finely chopped fresh parsley, and some salt and pepper. Mix in half a cup of fine bread crumbs, and work in two beaten eggs.

Meatballs

Form the mixture into meatballs about one inch across.

Sauté some sliced carrots and onions.

Then proceed as for the classic Beef Burgundy. Slice up and sauté a medium onion and a couple of carrots in a non-stick pan. Slice some fresh mushrooms, or rehydrate some dried shitakes, and sauté those too.

Finally sauté and add in about 6 oz. of smoked pork lardons (or bacon). Smoked pork, mushrooms, and onions are standard ingredients in Bœuf Bourguignon, along with red wine. As these flavoring ingredients get slightly browned and cooked, transfer them into a higher-sided pan or stew pot. Keep it warm on a low flame.

Carrots, onions, mushrooms, and smoked pork give flavor.

Sauté the meat balls in the fat from the lardons or bacon. Do them in two batches so that the pan doesn't get too crowded. Brown them on all sides. They don't need to cook completely, because they will braise in liquid for 30 to 60 minutes before you serve them. When the first batch of meatballs is cooked, put them in the pot with the carrots, onions, mushrooms, and bacon.

Brown the meatballs in a frying pan.

As the second batch of meatballs gets browned, sprinkle 3 Tbs. of flour over them. Add a little butter or vegetable oil to the pan if necessary so that the flour can absorb it and get moistened. There should be no lumps. Let it cook for three or four minutes. Then pour two cups of red wine into the pan and let it come to the boil. Stir it gently as it thickens.

Pour all that into the stew pot over the flavoring ingredients. If you rehydrated dried mushrooms, add the mushroom liquid to the pot. Pour in enough water or broth so that all the ingredients are just covered.

Add red wine and water just to cover the sautéed ingredients.

Season with salt and pepper, put in a couple of bay leaves, and bring the stew up to the simmer on top of the stove. You can stir a tablespoon of tomato paste (or even ketchup) into the stew to enrich it and give it good color — but don't overdo it.

Let it cook, covered, for 30 t0 60 minutes, either on a low flame or in a low oven. You want it to simmer and bubble but not boil hard, because you don't want the meatballs to fall apart.

I guess this is comfort food too.

Serve these MeatballS Burgundy with pasta, boiled potatoes, or rice, and a green salad. And bread — that goes without saying. With it, drink the same wine you used to make the sauce (or an even better red wine if you have one).

Just another spring day

Now they are saying it's going to rain in Saint-Aignan today. And we could really use the moisture. The ground seems very dry, especially out in the vineyard. Maybe the vines are sucking up a lot of water right now. I see leaf buds on a lot of them these days.

French dogs say « Ouah ! Ouah ! » when they want attention.

I say it seems dry, but yesterday I dug a hole to plant a sage bush in. I was moving it from one location to another. Just a few inches down the ground is still very wet. This clay soil we have really holds moisture, I guess. I have a second sage bush to transplant, but I probably won't get it done today, assuming it rains.

The little lilac bush we planted in 2007 is about to bloom.

I bet we get only clouds. That seems to happen a lot here in Saint-Aignan. Rain threatens, but doesn't actually materialize. Meanwhile, they've had 3 or 4 feet of snow in the Alps north of Nice, and rain on the Mediterranean coast for a few days now.

These Sempervivum plants are multiplying so fast
that I don't know what to do with them all.

The weather has been so warm that it is very tempting to start sowing seeds or setting out plants in the garden, but I know that would most likely be a mistake. So I'm satisfying myself with transplanting established specimens. A couple of days ago, I dug up a big old rose bush and moved it to a sunnier location. I also replanted a peony Walt had dug up so he could plant a lavender bush in its place.

Willow canes that have been cut and stacked in the vineyard

I sat out in the sun for three or four hours yesterday, listening to the radio and occasionally throwing a stick for Callie to chase. I took a thermometer outside and it read 22ºC in the shade. That's a veritable heat wave in Saint-Aignan, especially in April. Don't get too excited — 22ºC is just barely above 70ºF. The sun was strong and hot, and there was no wind at all.

Scene in a neighbor's yard

When I took the dog out for her walk at 6:00 p.m., our neighbor Madame le Maire and her husband were out working in their yard. Callie saw them and went running down a row of vines over to their place to greet them. She didn't stay long and came immediately when I called her. I waved at the neighbors. I could hear a lawn mower or rotary cultivator running, so I assume they were either cutting their grass or preparing the vegetable garden for the season.

Peonies coming up out in the garden

Tomorrow is market day in Saint-Aignan. I'm going to go look for some local white asparagus. It's the beginning of the season. Asparagus and strawberries are two big spring crops locally — that is, in the Sologne region, which starts just across the river from us. They have sandy soil, not clay, over there, and that's perfect for asperges and fraises.

The house and the bilingual dog

Even though it is only moderately picturesque, I never get tired of taking pictures of our house from out in the vineyard. This is a series from farthest out to closest up that I've taken over the past week or so. It makes me remember how lucky we were to find place in such a setting.

The Renaudière vineyards and the hamlet called
La Renaudière, near Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher

The sky has been what the MétéoFrance forecasters call laiteux — milky — for a few days now. We're in that exceptional April period when the weather is better up here in the north of France than it is down south in places like Provence and the Nice area. They're having rain, and we are getting just the edge of the storm, with thin clouds, here in Saint-Aignan. Farther north, the skies are bluer and sunnier, they say.

Our house is the taller boxy one with the dark brown roof tiles.
The houses on the left are across the river valley from us.

By the way, the Guerriers, our winemaker neighbors whom I mentioned yesterday, have been really happy this week to learn that Callie seems to understand French now. Walt was out walking the dog and saw them. Callie was acting shy, and Walt told her: « Va dire bonjour ! » — "Go say hello !" And Callie did.

There are three houses in this picture. The one on the right
is the oldest, and ours, on the left, is by far the newest.
In the back you can see the highlands across the river valley.

The same thing happened when I went out with Callie day before yesterday. Again, she obeyed when I said « Va dire bonjour ! ». Chantal and Jean-Noël laughed in amazement and said it was a good thing that Callie can understand some French now. Everybody here things it's hilarious that the dog "speak" English.

This is the back of the house, the west side, from just outside
the yard. You can see our garden tunnels and cold frames
(mini-serres) in the vegetable garden. We've planted
radishes and mustard greens so far.

I told them that Callie is only 2 years old, after all. And French is a hard language to learn. She's making good progress, considering that she's a British dog, a border collie. Her parents were named Ruby and Vince, and I don't know if French was their native language, or English. Silly, isn't it? But Callie makes for a good conversation piece.

Here's the north side of the house from out in the side yard.

The weather continues to be nice and dry. We've had hardly any rain since mid-February. If it stays warm like this in April, we might have bumper crops of cherries and plums again, the way we did in 2007. Here's hoping...

La Dame à Lili

Yesterday afternoon was beautiful, and I went out for my walk with Callie at 5:30. She wanted to go around the north side of the vineyard so we did, despite the dangerous donkey that lives over there. I was taking pictures of flowers, bugs, and berries.

I noticed, as did Callie, that somebody was whistling and calling for a dog on the other side of the woods. There are half a dozen houses up there, on the other side of the donkey pen and a little wooded ravine, along the paved road. Then I looked up into the vineyard and saw a yellow dog watching me and Callie. Callie saw the dog too, but she stayed with me.

I have now weeded and watered my collard patch.

As we looped around the parcels of vines back up toward the gravel road, there was that dog watching us again. I thought at first that it was Max, a dog that belongs to one of the grape growers and spends time with him out there when the man pruning back his vines. But we were pretty far from that grower's parcels, and it wouldn't be like Max to stray so far.

Cherry blossoms out on the edge of the vineyard

Then I realized it was Lili, and she was the dog being called. She's lives with a couple who moved to Saint-Aignan from Paris a few years back and whose house is up on the paved road. I wrote about Lili and the woman who walked with her back in December 2007 — here's a link to that topic. What I said then, in part, was that I didn't enjoy seeing Lili and That Woman — we ended up calling her La Dame à Lili, or The Lili Lady — because:

“Callie and Lili take off together and disappear from view for long minutes. I stand around calling Callie, but she doesn't come back. I'm afraid she'll end up out on the paved road, where The Woman and Lili live, and in front of a car. And when she finally does feel like coming back, she's a muddy, tangled mess. She has to have a full bath when we get home, and giving her a full bath every day is not my idea of Quality Time spent with her.

Besides, the woman who walks with Lili is so boring. We have nothing to say to each other, and we always end up standing around or walking together for a good part of the time I'm outdoors. That also is not my idea of Quality Time in the Vineyard. I'd rather be walking briskly, for the exercise, or taking pictures. Thinking my own thoughts. Keeping tabs on Callie's activities.”

So yesterday, there was Lili. It had been many months since I'd seen the dog, but I'd seen the woman in Saint-Aignan on market days a few times and, I thought, not all that long ago. We'd said Bonjour to each other a couple of times, but that was all. Even then, it had been a while since I'd seen her out in the vineyard walking her dog — well, she didn't actually walk with Lili. She just let the dog go running off and stood around waiting for it to come back to her.

Les pâquerettes — English or "Easter" daisies —
are blooming all around now

Lili was friendlier yesterday than she had ever been before. I squatted down and called her. She came to me, hesitantly. She let me pat her on the head and rub her nose. She's part Labrador and part Greyhound, I think, a pretty dog, and fast. She's bigger than Callie, but not that much. She came from a shelter and had behavior problems at the beginning, La Dame à Lili had told me.

This time, Lili tried to get Callie to go running off with her, but Callie stayed with me. Lili ran ahead, toward some people who were working farther up, in a row of vines. It turned out to be the Guerriers, our neighbors who have about 15 acres planted in grapes and make very good wines, which they sell at low prices. I wanted to talk to them, so I headed that. Here's a link to earlier topics about the Guerriers and their wine business.

Cherry blossoms with an insect visitor

The Guerriers saw me and Callie coming and were worrried that Lili, who had joined them, might be aggressive towards Callie. "Oh, the two dogs know each other," Chantal Guerrier said. Yes, I told her, they've known each other for a couple of years. She could tell by the way they interacted with each other. There was no sign of La Dame à Lili.

Chantal started to say something about « la mère de Lili » — "Lili's mother" — but stopped herself because that sounded funny. That's when I told her that we called her La Dame à Lili, a name that one of the other grape grower's wives had come up with when I stumbled over finding the right phrase. That woman agreed that Lili was a problem dog.

Callie in the back garden

Jean-Noël, Chantal's husband, said Lili had apparently run away from her owner while they were out for their afternoon walk, because they had heard Le Monsieur à Lili calling for her to come back home. You could see Lili's house out across the vines from where we were standing.

Last year it was usually La Dame à Lili who brought the dog out into the vineyard in the afternoon, and Le Monsieur who walked her in the morning, I told the Guerriers. But I haven't seen La Dame à Lili in quite a while, I said.

Ivy berries

« C'est parce qu'elle est décédée, oh... en septembre », Chantal told me — that's because she passed away last September. I was stunned. She died? Yes, Chantal said, she died suddenly and unexpectedly. One morning her husband took Lili out for a walk. He left his wife sitting in an armchair watching the TéléMatin news on TV. When he got back from the walk 30 minutes later, his wife was still sitting in the same chair, but she had died. It was her heart.

La Dame à Lili was just 64 years old, the Guerriers told me. I of course feel bad about what I said about the poor woman in that post just over a year ago, but it was how I felt at the time. Le Monsieur à Lili has decided to stay in Saint-Aignan for now, even though he has grown children in the Paris area, where he and his wife lived until about three years ago.