A rooster bell

We got a new bell. No, it doesn't cluck or crow. It just clangs. Walt put it up yesterday.

Cocorico !

I found it in a shop across the river in Noyers-sur Cher that sells about everything you can think of. It only cost 16 euros. The rooster (cockerel, coq) model was the only one they had.

Walt put the new bell up on the gate post.

The old bell was a cat. Walt had painted it black so it looked like Bertie. Unfortunately, when we got a delivery of firewood in December, the guy driving the tractor sheared off the cat bell with his trailer as he was trying to back into the driveway. There was no easy and obvious way to repair it.

Choux-fleurs et feuilles de choux-fleurs

The chou-fleur (“cabbage flower”) or cauliflower is a variety of the standard cabbage, Brassica oleracea, that has undergone centuries of careful selection by growers to produce the plant and vegetable we know today. The cauliflower is harvested immature, before the flowers actually open.

A very fresh cauliflower from Brittany

Typically, only the underdeveloped flowers or "meristems" of the cabbage are eaten. But the fact is that the leaves that envelope the cauliflower are edible too. It's just a cabbage, after all. Those leaves need to be fresh, of course.

A little while back I bought a beautiful chou-fleur at the supermarket in Loches. It was perfectly fresh, judging from the green leaves that had been left around the flower — to protect it from bruising and drying out, I imagine. I'm not sure how often cauliflower is sold this way in the U.S. I hope it's sold with its leaves all the time.

The Larousse Gastronomique food and cooking encyclopedia says that the chou-fleur has "oriental origins" and is an « aliment très délicat, qui doit toujours être acheté avec ses feuilles vertes (d'ailleurs comestibles)... » — a very delicate food product that should always be purchased with its green leaves (which are edible, by the way) intact.

Brittany and the southeast area of France produce a lot of cauliflower, so it is available year-round. I usually buy it during the winter, when the Brittany crop comes in and prices go down. It's good to eat cooked or raw. If it's not overcooked, it doesn't develop the unpleasant odors and taste that many people associate with cooked cauliflower. The same is true of broccoli.

Un gratin de choux-fleurs comme je les aime...

One of the best ways to cook cauliflower is to blanch it or steam it briefly and then finish cooking it in a cheese sauce in the oven. Sprinkle some extra grated cheese over the top of the casserole dish and it will brown nicely. You can mix some chopped ham or smoked pork lardons into the cheese sauce (c'est une sauce Mornay) to turn the cauliflower au gratin into a complete main dish.

I've posted before about making un gratin de choux-fleurs, here and here, with the recipe. That's what I did with the cauliflower I bought in Loches recently. And here is another recipe for finely chopped cauliflower incorporated into the cheese sauce served with pasta. It's something I made a few years ago, trying to reproduce a dish I had in a good restaurant in Half Moon Bay in California in the 1990s.

So the other day, when making another gratin de chou-fleur, I decided I needed to cook the green cauliflower leaves too. I trimmed them up, washed them well, and cooked them separately with water, salt and pepper, and some duck broth and duck fat for seasoning. I also trimmed and chopped the "core" of the cauliflower after I had cut off the florets, diced it up, and added it to the pot with the greens.

Cauliflower leaves and trimmings cooked as greens
with a little duck fat for seasoning

Both the gratin and the greens were delicious. We ate the greens with some pulled pork "barbecue" — eastern North Carolina style — that I made last week. I bought two boneless pork shoulder roasts and steam cooked them in the pressure cooker the same way I had earlier cooked a pork loin roast. The shoulder made better barbecue, and since I cooked five pounds (2.3 kg) of pork we have plenty of it in the freezer. Pork barbecue made this way freezes really well.

Hiking past the trees in winter

There was supposed to be a randonnée pédestre this morning, we thought. I'm not sure how to translate randonnée. A hike? A walk? The Robert dictionary defines the term as a « Promenade longue et ininterrompue. » I guess. It's an organized event. People participate by going out and hiking or walking around on the local dirt roads and paths through vineyards and woods, at their own pace.

Of course we do that every day with the dog. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon.

The woods in January, just down the hill from our back gate

Two or three times a year, crews (or maybe just individuals) come through and paint arrows on the ground and pavement at different strategic points, showing people which way to turn or not turn if they want to stay on the hiking path. They did that over the past few days. They also put up little signs at critical junctures, with little arrows on them. They'll come and take all those down tomorrow, probably.

Trunks of pine trees on the east side of the vineyard

This time, the path comes down the gravel road through the vineyard toward La Renaudière, our hamlet. Right behind our house, beside the communal pond, it turns downhill past our back gate and into the woods where we usually walk with Callie in the afternoon. In the morning, these days, we walk out into the vineyard. That pattern changes with the seasons.

Clumps of mistletoe in a stand of trees down by the river

This morning I took the dog out into the vineyard, fully expecting to run into groups of hikers along the road. But there were none at all. I just looked out the window and there still is no sign of anybody hiking. Maybe it's just too cold for people. There are also no hunters — I suppose the Sunday hunt was called off because hikers were supposed to be out among the vines. It would be dangerous.

Apple trees in our back yard in January

Callie of course didn't know there were supposed to be hikers, so she wasn't disappointed. If she had seen hikers, she would have run up to them to greet them excitedly. She probably would have tried to jump up on some of the people and kiss them. It depends on the person, though. Some she won't approach, and some she treats like long-lost friends, or saviors. I don't know how she decides.

Trees and the bay laurel hedge around our yard a day or two ago

I'll keep an eye out. Maybe the hike starts at noon, or at 2:00 p.m. it could be an afternoon event. Or maybe the cold weather has kept anybody from participating. People don't all walk together in a big herd, but in smaller groups, at their own speed. Usually, at the end of the hike there will be refreshments, offered up by the mayor or one of the associations in the village. I hope they get some participants today.

The pictures here are just some recent photos of the local trees in wintertime.

P.S. At 11:00 a.m. we have seen maybe as many as 25 hikers come through the vineyard, in little groups. So the event is not a washout. Actually, it's a beautiful day outside, though chilly.

The people in this picture are hiking
with a little black dog.

Pronunciation of -ouille

A lot of English speakers have a hard time with the French pronunciation of the string of letters in the title above. The word that I've heard mentioned recently as a pronunciation conundrum is « grenouille » — that's “frog” in English. Other examples are nouille, rouille, and douille (noodle, rust, and socket in English).

There are a lot of French words that include the -ouille string, and it's always pronounced the same way. There is no -ee- sound in it. There is, however, an -oo- sound. If you break -ouille down, you'll find out it is actually pronounced as -oo- with the ending -ille [yuh]. And as you know, in French, the Ls of -ille are not usually pronounced as Ls, but as an unstressed [yuh] sound — a semi-vowel. If you can pronounce the French word fille correctly as [FEE-yuh], you know what I mean.

Exceptions to the pronunciation -ille as [yuh] are pretty rare in French. One handy trick for remembering them is this little ditty: « Gilles, Lille, et mille villes tranquilles ». In those words, -ille is pronounced more or less like [eel]. It's also pronounced as [eel] in a lot of words borrowed from other language, and in scientific terms, but never mind about those.

In virtually all the other French words ending in -ille — fille, gentille, bille, grille, brindille, Bastille, for example — -ille is pronounced as [EE-yuh]. This little [yuh] sound after a vowel is called a "wet L" in French — un L mouillé. (Mouillé is pronounced [moo-YAY].)

The "wet L" is represented in phonetic symbols as [j]. The phonetic transcription of the word fille, then, is [fij]. Bastille is [bastij]. I hope that makes sense.

And now back to the pronunciation of -ouille. In the international phonetic alphabet, the sound we write in English as -oo- is represented as [u]. For example, the French word fou is pronounced as [fu]. Bout is [bu]. Cou is [ku]. Tout is [tu]. (Don't be surprised that the word tu is represented as [ty] in the phonetic alphabet — that's a different vowel, as you know.)

So here is how the Larousse Dictionnaire de la Prononciation shows the pronunciation of the word grenouille. It shows the vowel as [u] followed by the semi-vowel [j].

The upside-down E in the transcription is the schwa or
"mute E" of French. It's an indeterminate vowel [uh],
like the initial A of about or above in English.

The syllable represented as [uj] in phonetic transcription is the equivalent of what I would write as [OO-yuh] to help English-speakers understand how to pronounce French -ouille. The [yuh] is just a quick glide attached to the end of the main vowel. In fille, the main vowel is [i] or, as I write it [EE]. If it really followed the rules, the word would be spelled as fiille, where the first -i- is the main vowel and the [yuh] ending is -ille.

The mistake most English-speakers are tempted to make is to pronounce -ouille as [WEE-yuh]. That's not right. The main vowel is [OO], not [EE]. It's not like the word oui, where the main vowel is [i] or [EE] and the ou- is pronounced as [w], a semi-vowel. It's the opposite — not [WEE] but [OO-yuh].

Compare grenouille to the French word bouteille. That one is easy: it's [butej] or [boo-TAY-yuh]. N'est-ce pas ? Or the verb in je travaille — [travaj] or, in my version, [trah-VAH-yuh]. The principle is the same: -ille is the [yuh] ending, and the main vowel is the one that comes ahead of it.

But wait. There are harder words than grenouille to pronounce. The word feuille, for example. In that one, the main vowel is [œ] or, in my version, [uh]. It's the vowel of the word peur [pœr]. So feuille is [fœj] or [FUH-yuh]. Apply that to these two place names: the town called Preuilly [prœji], for example, and the village called Mareuil [marœj]. Thats [pruh-YEE] and [mah-RUH-yuh] in my version for Anglophones.