Un gîte rural en Auvergne

In early September we'll be going to spend a few days' vacation down in the Auvergne region, a four or five hour drive south of the Loire Valley. We're going with three other friends, and taking the dog with us. The challenge has been to find a rental house, un gîte rural, that would be big enough to accommodate us, located in an interesting area, and available to people traveling with pets.

I found one, and it wasn't that hard. The organization called Gîtes de France has a web site that a lot of people say isn't the easiest to negotiate. One problem is that it's pretty much all in French. If you can deal with that, you'll do okay. There's a national site for Gîtes de France, and there are regional sites. The regional sites are sometimes easier to use.

Anyway, here's the gîte I found: it's big — 145 square meters, or 1560 sq. ft. — and it has two bathrooms and two WCs. There are three bedrooms, two with double beds and one with twin beds. There's a living room, a dining room, and a full kitchen.

Some photos of the gîte rural we have rented in Auvergne

In case you are wondering, the French word gîte is used to describe a short-term vacation rental out in the country. Gîte [zheet] means "shelter" or "a place to sleep" and an animal's gîte — a fox's or a hare's, for instance — is what we would call its den in English.

Unfortunately, we can only go down there for three nights, and for Walt and me that's pushing it. We have the vegetable garden to worry about. If it rains a time or two over the four days we'll be away, everything will be fine. If it's hot and dry, well... we'll just water everything thoroughly before we leave and hope for the best.

Most gîtes are rented by the week. That's the case with this one. We are going to pay for the whole week, but only spend three nights there. Some gîtes are rented out for weekends, but we won't be there over a weekend, since we'll arrive on a Tuesday and leave on Friday morning.

Still, the whole-week rental price won't break the bank. It's only 360 euros for seven nights with up to 6 people. So for the five of us, that will come to less than 75 euros per person, or 25 euros per night for our three-night stay. That's pretty affordable. Only in France...

Heat costs extra, but there's a big fireplace and firewood is supplied for free. We hope we won't need heat, but a fire in the evening might be nice. Here's a list of some of the house's other features:

• fenced-in garden/yard
• television
• telephone
• barbecue grill
• washing machine
• dishwasher
• microwave oven
• fireplace and free firewood
  
• outdoor table and chairs
• bed linens available at extra charge
• cleaning service

We'll take our own bed and bath linens with us, and we'll see if we really need to pay for cleaning. We'll probably be able to do it ourselves after such a short stay. We'll also take a couple of coolers, basic groceries, and some wine.

Map of France showing our approximate route from Saint-Aignan
down to Aurillac. Map shows the French regions and their names.

The house is in a tiny village that is 7 km/4 mi. from a slightly larger village (pop. 1200) with shops, and 13 km/8 mi. from the medieval village called Salers (pop. 368). Salers is one of "The Most Beautiful Villages of France" — here's a link to the page about Salers on the Les Plus Beaux Villages de France web site. Salers also famous for a cheese and a breed of beef cattle that go by the same name.

We'll about 30 km/18 mi. from the largish town of Aurillac (pop. 30,000). All this is in the French département called Le Cantal, which is also famous for a cheese also called Cantal. It's a mountainous region, and a lot of the mountains are actually part of a chain of extinct volcanoes. We'll be right on the edge of a national park.

Sweet and spicy plum sauce

The other day we went over to the neighbors' and picked up 3 kg of little wild red plums that had fallen out of a tree in their yard. The ground was dry and the plums hadn't yet been attacked by insects. Our neighbors had told us to go get some of them; they had picked 15 kg/33 lbs. (!) for themselves and their extended family.

Walt made a tart out of about a third of the plums we picked, but we were left with nearly 5 lbs. of them. I had the idea to make plum sauce, which is spicy and sweet and goes with grilled pork, duck, or chicken. It makes a good dipping sauce for what we call « nems » in France — a.k.a. egg rolls, or fresh or fried Vietnamese-style spring rolls.

Plums pitted for a pie

Here's how you make the plum sauce. Put the plums, whole, in a thick-bottomed pot and add water so that they are just barely covered. Turn on the heat and let the plums and water come to a low boil. The skins will split and fall off the plums, which will start to cook down. Let them cook at a low simmer for 20 to 30 minutes.

Wild red plums by the kilogram

Pour the cooked plums into a colander and press them down with the back of a big spoon to remove as much juice as possible. I tried putting them in a clean kitchen towel and squeezing the juice out of them that way, but it didn't work very well. That method has worked great in the past for extracting the juice from grapes cooked the same way. I ended up using a French « chinois » — a conical wire strainer with a big wooden pestle — to extract the juice and some of the plum pulp, leaving the skins and pits behind.

Here you can see the consistency.

Put the juice — there must have been a quart of it — back in the pot and season it. I wanted a sweet sauce, and these were very tart plums, so I added about a cup of sugar. The amount of sugar is up to you. I also added about half a cup of cider vinegar for acidity and a good teaspoon of dried red pepper flakes for heat. And I put in two tablespoons of finely diced ginger root and a teaspoon of salt, with pinches of black pepper and allspice (poivre de la Jamaïque). Soy sauce would have been good in place of the salt, but I didn't think of it. I also didn't use any garlic or onion— next time I will.

The jar on the left is the one we opened
when we had grilled pork chops for lunch.

I let that mixture of plum juice and seasonings cook down for 30 to 45 minutes on medium low heat. It just boiled slowly. When it seemed thick enough, I put it in sterilized jars and sealed them. As you can see, I didn't get a big quantity — just three small jars — but then again you don't eat much of it at a sitting. It will last until next year, I'm sure.

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A chinois is a conical sieve
with a wooden pestle
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Here's a link to the recipe that I based my procedure on. Merci beaucoup to SusanV.

Neuvy-Saint-Sépulchre

About the last place where CHM and I stopped back in June on our drive around the Berry region was a little town called Neuvy. Actually, the full name of the town is Neuvy-Saint-Sépulchre. That's a mouthful. And to make it even more complicated, the last word of the name has an idiosyncratic spelling.

The "Saint-Sépulchre" part of Neuvy's name refers to a church. Part of the existing church in Neuvy, which is dedicated to Saint Stephen (St Etienne), was built in the middle years of the 11th century. Another part was built 100 years later. That "newer" part of the church is a round building featuring an impressive rotunda modeled on the Holy Sepulchre, which is Christ's tomb and is to be found in the walled Old City of Jerusalem.

Part of the Eglise St-Etienne in Neuvy is a structure
modeled on the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

The French people — they were Berrichon people, of the Berry, really, since France as we know it didn't exist back then — who built the church in Neuvy had recently come back from a "pilgrimage" to the Holy Land. I think "pilgrimage" is a euphemism for the term "crusade" — they hadn't gone to Jerusalem as simple worshipers or tourists, but as conquerors and Defenders of the Faith. Theirs had been a military mission — the first great Crusade took place starting in 1095.

The unusual church in Neuvy

When they came back to Neuvy, these anonymous crusaders decided to build a church in their town that would be a replica of Christ's tomb in Jerusalem. They had the support and aid of a bishop named Eudes from the town of Déols, a few miles north next to the bigger town called Châteauroux. Bishop Eudes also had recently done the pilgrimage. They tore down a big part of the church that had stood in Neuvy since 1049 and in its place built the rotunda that still stands today.

The ceiling of the rotunda was restored by Viollet-le-Duc in
the 1800s. Thanks to CHM for the photo; mine came out blurry.

Later, they found out from other returning "pilgrims" that a rectangular addition had been built onto the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. So they decided to leave standing the part of the older Neuvy church that remained next to their rotunda, in order to keep the whole complex authentic.

Inside the rotunda of the Neuvy church

They set about re-attaching the once-condemned rectangular church section to the newer round section, which had originally been planned to completely replace the older church. The result is a round building with a rectangular building stuck onto it. It's not harmonious, but it is interesting.

Even the people who designed the Monument Historique
sign by the church in Neuvy spelled the name wrong.

"Sepulchre" is, by the way, a chiefly British spelling of the word we write as "sepulcher" in American English. It's « sépulcre » in modern French, but « sépulchre » in Neuvy-Saint-Sépulchre. The Michelin guide spells the name of the Jerusalem church as Saint-Sépulcre. It's enough to make your head spin.

Sorry this is all so convoluted. Just look at the pictures if the text is too confusing.

Flashes of lightning and balls of fire

We have Internet service this morning. That's comforting. The France Télécom « expert » did not call yesterday between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. as had been promised. I guess there was no need to call since everything was working normally again.

Before 6:00 p.m. I took Callie on her walk out into the vineyard. I went out to see if I could find any evidence of a lightning strike out there. I couldn't. Everything looked perfectly normal — no big burned spot on the ground anywhere that I could find, no trees broken or scorched. Maybe I imagined the whole thing. But I don't think so.

Walt's basil garden in the mini-serre

I ran into Roland, who does gardening work for two of our neighbors. He was out piling up some grass trimmings and cut branches for, I imagine, burning later. I told him my story about the lightning bolt. He said sometimes you can get the impression that a lightning strike was much closer than it really was. He said that the sharp bolt and nearly simultaneous thunder I saw had happened just before 1:00 a.m. — he was awake and watching the storm too.

It rained this morning.

In French, people say that lightning "falls" from the sky — « la foudre est tombée sur une maison », for example. It's just an expression, but I think it's a funny one. One French lightning expert I read put the verb tomber in quotation marks when he used it in this context. His name is Christian Bouquegneau, and he says that balls of lightning probably occur but there is no scientific proof of their existence.

One night, 10 or 12 years ago in San Francisco, where lightning and thunder are rare occurrences, we had an electrical storm. I was standing in front of a sliding glass door and watching the display. There was a crack of lightning and I saw — I swear I did — a ball of fire or lightning or whatever it was fall into our little back garden and zoom, bouncing, across the width of the yard before disappearing into darkness.

Morning sky, 23 July 2009 at La Renaudière

I had never seen anything like that in North Carolina or Illinois, where we often had awe-inspiring, violent, scary thunderstorms. I told a guy I worked with in California about the ball of lightning that had skidded across my back yard. He said he had seen the same thing one time — at his grandmother's house in Missouri. But in his case, he said, he and his grandmother watched the ball of fire come in a window on one side of the house, bounce and roll through the house, and go out a window on the other side.

Emm's comment on yesterday's post reminded me of all this. I guess I never thought there would be such violent weather here in the Loire Valley. I do remember rare but impressive thunderstorms in Paris back in the early '80s, when I last lived there. Usually the weather here in northern France is very mild, though.

Tomatoes in the garden

It was extremely hot yesterday afternoon, with temperatures again approaching 90ºF. The humidity was high. It started raining, with just distant rumbles of thunder around Saint-Aignan, early in the evening, and I have the impression that it rained all night. It's raining now. It's the kind of light steady rain that sinks right into the dry earth.

By the way, yesterday I made plum sauce with those little wild red plums. It has salt, sugar, hot red pepper flakes, vinegar, and diced ginger root in it. We're going to have some with grilled pork chops for lunch today.