Veau aux olives

Veal with Olives is something I made for dinner once before, years ago. It was in California, I think. I don't know where I got the idea or recipe. It was a French recipe, if I remember, called Sauté de veau aux olives. It stuck in my memory because it was so different and brightly flavored compared to the standard Blanquette de veau, in a cream sauce, or Sauté de veau aux légumes, cooked with little spring vegetables like peas, green beans, carrots, and turnips.

I assumed the Sauté de veau aux olives was a Provençal dish because it contained not only olives but tomato, onion, garlic, and thyme. I can't find the recipe from back then, but descriptions that I've found on the Internet point to Corsican origins.

A deboned, rolled, and tied veal shoulder from the supermarket

I'm not sure why, but I started thinking about veal cooked with olives a week or two ago. Well, I had a veal roast in the freezer and some olives in the fridge. I guess that was reason enough.

In fact, veal cooked with all the same ingredients, except the olives, is called Veau à la Marengo. It was something Napoleon's chef created (using chicken, not veal) at the time a battle near the city of that name, in Italy. Or that a Paris chef invented after the fact to celebrate Napoleons victory at Marengo, if you believe other sources. Along the way, Chicken Marengo somehow became Veal Marengo.

Brown the veal roast or stew meat (or chicken, etc.) in olive oil

And Napoleon was Corsican, as we all know. Napoleon's Chicken Marengo supper, whether in Italy or in Paris, was supposedly garnished with cooked crawfish and fried eggs, so it was fancier. The version I made I made, more family-style, included salt pork lardons and olives, both green and black.

Veal Marenco greatly resembles the Italian dish called Osso bucco, and that's probably not a coincidence. One of my Provençal cookbooks, La Cuisinière Provençale by J.-B. Reboul, includes a recipe called Sauté de veau à la chasseur, which could be translated into Anglo-Italian as Veal cacciatore. We've all had Chicken cacciatore, called Poulet chasseur in French. It's very similar to the Marengo. So I guess the inclusion of olives is what makes this recipe more Corsican and less Italian or Provençal.

I cooked the Veal with Olives in the oven.

Here's the recipe as I adapted it. The roast I had was a piece of veal shoulder that had been boned out, rolled, and tied. I decided to cook it that way rather than untie it and cut it into pieces. Otherwise, I was inspired by a couple of recipes I found on the Internet, including one on the marmiton.org site.

Veal cooked in a light tomato sauce with olives —
untie the roast, discard the string, and cut up the meat for serving.

Veal with olives

2 lbs. veal shoulder
4 oz. salt pork cut into lardons
3 oz. green olives
3 oz. black olives
2 oz. dried boletus mushrooms
1 cup tomato sauce
1 cup rich stock (veal, chicken, turkey, or vegetable)
1 cup dry white wine
1 onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 bay leaves
1 tsp. dried thyme
1 tsp. fennel seeds
3 Tbsp. olive oil
black pepper to taste

Sauté the veal roast or veal pieces in olive oil until the meat is golden brown. Take the veal out of the pot and set it aside. Sauté the onion, garlic cloves, and salt pork in the same fat until lightly browned.

Put the veal back into the pot, season the mixture well with black pepper, and pour in the tomato sauce, the stock, and the wine. Add in the dried mushrooms, bay leaves, fennel seeds, and thyme. Don't add salt until later, because the salt pork and olives may make the sauce salty enough.

Let the veal simmer in the sauce for 1½ to 2 hours, uncovered and either in a 325ºF oven or on top of the stove, so that the sauce thickens slightly. (The sauce will end up more brown than red). Add the olives and let it cook another 30 minutes. Add more wine or water to thin the sauce as necessary.

Serve with pasta.

Veal with Olives, served with macaroni

After what I said about cacciatore, it seems obvious that this recipe would be excellent made with chicken, turkey, or even rabbit. With veal, it is excellent. Much of course depends on the quality of the tomato sauce and the stock that you use to make it with.

Things are looking up... sort of

I went out for a walk with the dog yesterday afternoon. The sun was shining but big dark clouds were moving in from the west, and I was walking toward them. It had been chilly enough in the morning to make us resort to turning the heat on for an hour or so.

Sure enough, when I got out toward the end of the gravel road that runs through the vineyard, it started raining. I was about a mile from the house.

The arc-en-ciel from maybe a kilometer out —
I almost regret complaining about this weather.

Luckily, it didn't rain too hard or too long. I was wearing a rain parka with a hood on it, and when I turned back toward the house the wind was at my back. My face stayed dry. As I cut across the vineyard after walking a ways on the paved road, I saw the rainbow — l'arc-en-ciel.

In the close-up you can see our house and the neighbors'.

At the end of the rainbow were our house and our hamlet. That was a pretty sight. I'm taking it as a sign that the weather will get better this coming week — that and the MétéoFrance forecasts for warm, even hot, sunny weather by Wednesday or Thursday. Sunny weather will be our pot of gold.

The grapes at La Renaudière are looking healthy,
for the time being.

P.S. On my walk this morning, I ran into one of the grape-growers who has vines out back. He was spraying what I assume was "Bordeaux mixture" up and down some rows. The Bordeaux mixture includes copper and lime, and spraying plants with it prevents mildew from growing. It's a fungicide, in other words.

« Ça va ? », I asked Bruno. « Oui, ça va », he said, adding that it would be nice if we'd had a little less rain He was wearing rubber knee-boots and splashing around in water and mud as he worked. When I mentioned that forecasts call for hot sunny weather over the coming days, he just shook his head.

I'm not sure if these are flowers
or actually grapes already on the vines.

If it turns hot, with all this moisture in the ground and humid conditions, that's bad for the grapes, according to Bruno. We need some cool, dry, breezy weather at this point. I think we'll go out and spray our tomato plants with some Bordeaux mixture today. Actually, Walt just went out to do it now.

Hanging on for dear life

I was able to photograph a butterfly yesterday morning. I took at least a dozen pictures of it, hoping one would be in focus. Maybe you are already aware that taking decent photos of animals — even domesticated animals, like Callie — requires a lot of patience and no small amount of luck.

Here's a movie showing you what I had to deal with. It wasn't raining (surprise, surprise), but it was blowing a gale. As Walt said when he saw the movie, the butterfly seems to be holding on for dear life. It must have known that the gusts could tear its pretty little wings off.

Callie, please don't eat the daisy, or the butterfly!

The easiest subjects in the animal kingdom to photograph are, without much doubt, snails and slugs. I guess clams and barnacles would fit into that category too, except they are in the ocean or bay and you might have to get your feet wet. Of course, here in Saint-Aignan I'm getting used to having wet feet anyway. Never mind. The point is that mollusks are slow-moving, in general.

Some insects — the kind that don't fly — are also not too hard to capture on ... well, I was going to say film, but those days seem to be over. To capture on a flash memory card, I guess I mean. Bugs that fly away just at the crucial moment are the most frustrating. Birds behave the same way, but they won't even let you get close to them before they take to the air.

Butterfly in the vineyard, 16 May 2009

Anyway, these little digital cameras are amazing. Above is the best photo I managed to get. The other 10 or 11 weren't bad either, with some being fuzzier than others. I took them all from the same angle, so there's not need to post more than one.

Now I'll wait for somebody who knows to tell me what kind of butterfly it is.

Enough with the rain already

Okay, I'm back at that point where I've had enough rain now. We have had more rain since May 7 than we had over the whole period from February 15 up to that date. On the other hand, at least we haven't had to turn the heat on since about May 1. If the rain doesn't let up soon, weeds and snails are going to take over the vegetable garden.

Rock rose

There are some nice flowers right now, but not as many of them as you would expect. The roses sauvages — I'll call them rock roses, because they look like that flower we had in California — are in bloom all around. The garden roses haven't yet come into full flower yet, but they are covered in buds.

Iris

As Walt has written, our irises didn't do much this year, although we had one or two magnificent blossoms. I've noticed that the neighbors' irises haven't bloomed profusely either. I don't think this is a year for irises.

Ancolies

It has been a nice year for the columbine, les ancolies, however. They come up all by themselves every spring in a little patch of garden that we keep telling ourselves we really ought to dig up and replant. Then every year, this happens and we just leave it alone.

Bellflowers by the front door

It's the same with these little purple bellflowers, or campanules. They bloom really nicely when the weather is warm. Obviously, this year, they couldn't wait for the sun. Or the sun we had earlier stimulated them sufficiently. There are millions of flowers on them right now, right by our front door.

A profusion of plums

Unless the weather prevents it, we are going to have a great year for stone fruit, from all appearances. The plum and cherry trees are absolutely covered in immature fruit. The hot weather they are promising us for the coming week will make the difference.

And maybe we'll get to put shorts on again. It's too chilly now. My tan is quickly fading....