Multiplication

Well, that worked. Thanks to Simon, I now have a lot more space on the Blogger servers to store the photos posted here. I'm plural now. There are two of me, and each of me gets a gigabyte of free photo storage from Blogger and Picasa. I hope I don't start seeing double. Maybe one of me should post in French and the other in English.

The Renaudière vineyard, near Saint-Aignan

Alors, je recommence mon blog, peut-être avec un nouvel élan. Espérons. C'est « ckb » qui vous parle. Pour le stockage des photos, Blogger me donne 1 Go d'espace sur ses serveurs par identité.

The Cher River Valley near Mareuil

En tant que moi — l'ancien moi — j'avais presque rempli le premier Go qui m'était accordé pour les photos. Il y en a des milliers. Maintenant que je suis le nouveau moi, il y en aura encore. C'est un peu comme les cheveux d'Eléonore.

Oaks

Il fait de nouveau très froid à Saint-Aignan. Hier matin, on a eu droit à un paysage entièrement blanc. Pourtant il n'avait pas neigé. Dehors, toutes les surfaces étaient couvertes de gelée blanche, grâce à un épais brouillard givrant.

Callie on our path through the woods

Avant midi, cependant, le brouillard s'est levé et nous avons eu un brillant soleil pendant tout l'après-midi. Le froid ne s'est pas dissipé pour autant, et ce matin nous sommes encore une fois en dessous de zéro.

January sky at sunset near Saint-Aignan

Ken here. Should I let this ckb guy continue? Or should I take my blog back? As ckb, I'm uploading a few photos that I took on yesterday afternoon's walk with Callie, just to see how this new identity thing works. They show wintertime landscapes around Saint-Aignan and our hamlet, La Renaudière.

Broccoli, or « des brocolis »

A few days ago I cooked some broccoli that I had bought at the supermarket. In American English, we pronounce that [BROCK-uh-lee], or sometimes in two syllables as [BROCK-lee]. I noticed recently that some speakers of English (not American) might pronounce it as [BROCK-uh-LYE].

In English, it's "broccoli" with two Cs. In French, it's brocoli with one C. That's confusing, at least to me. And in French it's often used in the plural, with an S: ce sont des brocolis.

I remember back in the 1970s, when I lived in Paris and Normandy, that there was no broccoli available at all. I missed it. I guess I started cooking and eating broccoli when I was in college and grad school, because I don't think we ate it at home in North Carolina when I was growing up. We ate turnip, mustard, and collard greens instead. And cabbage of course.

The only broccoli-like vegetable I could ever find in Paris all those years ago was broccoli rabe, which is not really the same thing. It was sold by Portuguese vendors in the farmers' markets, and I read now that rabe is much prized in Portugal and Galicia (northwestern Spain) as well as in Italy. It's called brocoli-rave in French but I never see it here in the Loire Valley. It's much used in China too and some call it Chinese turnip or Chinese cabbage. It's more bitter than the other broccoli, I think. It's good sauteed with garlic, apparently.

One French web site I've found says that broccoli was not much consumed in France until about 20 years ago, which would confirm my souvenir of the situation. A few years ago, I mentioned to an old French friend — a good home cook that I learned a lot from — that there was no broccoli in the markets in France back in the 1970s, but she was surprised and said she didn't really remember. I only remember because I remember missing it.

The Larousse Gastronomique food and cooking encyclopedia mentions broccoli, which it calls chou brocoli or "broccoli cabbage," but the author gives no recipes or cooking instructions. All it says is that you substitute broccoli in any recipe that calls for cauliflower. Cauliflower is abundant, delicious, and inexpensive in France. A lot of it is grown in Brittany, where the climate is mild and damp.

None of my other favorite old French cookbooks has any recipes for brocoli or even a mention of it, with one exception. Tante Marie, whose book La Véritable Cuisine de famille dates back to the 1920, does refer to « brocolis », calling it « choux d'Italie » (Italian cabbage), as a sort of afterthought appended to her collection of cauliflower recipes. She says to cook it in boiling water and serve it with a white sauce.

By the way, we had broccoli with the steak and kidney pudding that Susan and Simon of Days on the Claise brought over for lunch a few days ago. The steak and kidney pudding was very good, I thought, with it's suet "crust" — Susan described the dish as a big steamed dumpling filled with chunks of steak and beef kidney. Broccoli was good with it. I wish I had taken a picture.

And again by the way, I've now used up 98% of my photo allowance on Blogger. I have to figure out how to get more space on the server so I can continue posting pictures. I figure you probably know what broccoli looks like...

La Mairie

When we need anything administrative or official done, we go to the mairie in our village. It's pronounced [may-REE] and it's a feminine word: la mairie. It's where the mayor — le maire — has his or her office. In bigger towns, the same building is often called « l'hôtel de ville » — that's what it's called in Saint-Aignan, for example, and in Paris.

I guess in English it's the village hall, the town hall, or city hall.

I had to go to the mairie a couple of days ago because I got a letter from the tax authorities in Blois asking me whether the work on our house had been finished and whether we had filed a declaration saying as much. We had, actually. I thought the mayor's office, where we filed the papers, would have notified the tax people. I guess they hadn't, but they said they will do so now.

Often the mairie in little towns is in the same building that houses the elementary school. That's the case in our village. You'll see Ecole de Filles — Girls' School — and Ecole de Garçons — Boys' School — engraved in the stone on either end of the building. Nowadays, there's a more modern classroom building located behind the mairie.

You'll also see, in front of the main entrance, a monument dedicated to the memory of those who died in past wars. For such a small (but very old) village, the mairie is quite a grand building.

White or brown?

All the eggs you find in France are brown. I've seen white eggs only once in the past 7½ years. They were being sold by a farmer at the market in Loches. I don't think he was selling anything but eggs, and he didn't have an awful lot of them. So I assume he kept chickens and the eggs were the product of his hens.

According to French Wikipedia, French chickens used to lay mainly white eggs. But French chickens were cross-bred with Asian breeds starting in about 1850, and now all the eggs are brown (called œufs rosés in French).

Twenty-four eggs laid by free-range chickens.

English Wikipedia says that, in general, "chicken breeds with white ear lobes lay white eggs, whereas chickens with red ear lobes lay brown eggs." Ear lobes? I guess I'm not very familiar with chicken anatomy, because I didn't know that chickens had visible external ears.

French eggs are always brown.

Different cultures have their preferences when it comes to eggshell color, but chicken eggs of one color are not inherently better that chicken eggs of other colors. In the U.S., at least where I lived, brown eggs used to be considered to be "better" than white eggs, but that is evidently not the case. One French friend told me she assumed that brown eggshells are not as fragile as white eggshells, and that's why egg merchants prefer them: less breakage. I don't know if that's true.

In France, the eggs are brown and they are often sold in cartons of 10, not 12. They are also sold by the half-dozen. The ones I bought in Loches a few days ago came in a pack of 24. Oh, and in the supermarkets they are not kept in refrigerated cases. They're just out on the shelves like the bags of flour and sugar.