Il pleut

Mais le soleil brille en même temps. It won't last, but we are getting a few drops.

By the time I got this picture uploaded to the blog, the rain had stopped.

Oh how I wish...

...that it would rain, doo doo doo doo. Planting the vegetables in the garden, and planting annuals in the window boxes, I just can't get this song out of my head. The words don't apply exactly, but the refrain sure does express a prevailing sentiment around Saint-Aignan.

Day before yesterday, in the evening, we saw a big dark cloud in the western sky. I took a picture of it. But it just blew on by and we didn't get a drop of moisture out of it. Yesterday we didn't even have a serious cloud.

How long can this dry spell go on? Will there be hell to pay this summer? Or in a month or two will we be saying, mimicking Louis XIV : « Après mai, le déluge ! » ?

Warm bean and bacon salad

I was nosing around on the Washington Post newspaper site on the 'net the other day when I came across a Jacques Pépin recipe. Pépin is a well-known cook, author, and TV personality in the U.S., but he is not really known in France at all.

Jacques Pépin was born in the French city of Bourg-en-Bresse, near Lyons, in 1935. His parents owned and operated a restaurant there. He worked as an apprentice and then a chef in France through the 1950s, mainly in Paris. Then he immigrated to the U.S. in 1959. He worked in the test kitchens of the Howard Johnson's hotel & restaurant chain in the 1969s, as well as in French restaurants in and around New York. He also earned a master's degree in French literature at Columbia University. He started doing cooking shows on TV in the U.S. in the late 1980s.

Warm bean and bacon salad

If I have a favorite French chef, it's Jacques Pépin. His recipes, both in his many books and on his TV shows, are completely uncomplicated, unfussy, and straightforward home-style preparations. Because he has spent most of his life in America, he knows how to use American ingredients and products to produce French-style results.

Anyway, I was happy to find Jacques Pépin's recipe for this warm bean and bacon salad. He uses beans out of a can, because they are one vegetable that does not suffer much from the canning process. I actually used dried beans to make my salad, because I had some in the pantry downstairs and wanted to cook them. I used white beans, but other kinds — red beans, pinto beans, black beans, or black-eyed peas — would work just as well.

A mixture of plain-cooked, unsalted
white beans and lima beans

Pépin also calls for slab bacon in his recipe. That's not an easy kind of bacon to find in many parts of the U.S., in my experience. Not in California, anyway. But here in France it's an everyday product called lard maigre (lean bacon) or poitrine de porc (pork "belly" or breast). You cut slab bacon into chunks or matchstick shapes to make what French cooks call lardons. The French poitrine comes in smoked or salt-cured versions, or you can buy it fresh (uncured).

A substitute for French poitrine de porc or slab bacon in America is Italian pancetta, which might be easier to find in many places than slab bacon — especially in cities with a large Italian population. You could also use regular American bacon — thick-sliced would be best.

Sautéed lardons, onions, and garlic

The other indispensable ingredients for the bean and bacon salad are onions, garlic, a simple dressing of oil and vinegar, and some fresh herbs. As I said, this is a typical Jacques Pépin recipe — no muss, no fuss; simple, quick, and good. Especially if you use beans out of a can. Be sure to rinse them well before making them into salad.

Here is Jacques Pépin's recipe for the warm bean and bacon salad. I found it later on a Canadian site, with quantities given in North American and metric measurements.

Warm Bean and Bacon Salad
Start to finish: 20 minutes. Makes 6 servings.

• 250 g (8 oz.) slab bacon or pancetta, cut into 1-cm (½-inch) pieces
• 1 medium yellow onion, chopped (about 250 ml/1 cup)
• 6 garlic cloves, crushed and chopped
• 2 cans (398 ml/14 oz.) navy or other small white beans, rinsed and drained
• 2 ml (½ tsp) salt
• 125 ml (½ cup) chopped fresh parsley
• 45 ml (3 tbsp) red wine vinegar
• 45 ml (3 tbsp) olive oil
• 5 ml (1 tsp) ground black pepper

In a medium saucepan over low heat, place bacon. Saute, covered, for about 8 minutes, or until meat has rendered much of its fat. Add onion and garlic and cook, stirring, for about 5 seconds. Transfer contents of saucepan, fat and all, to a large bowl.

Add beans, salt, parsley, vinegar, oil and pepper. Mix well, then serve warm or at room temperature.

Source: Recipe adapted from "Essential Pepin" by Jacques Pepin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, October 2011).

By the way, Jacques Pépin's autobiography, The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen (2003), is a very good read.

I can see clearly now...

Well, not really. They are glass blocks, after all.

I got up early yesterday morning. By 8:00 a.m., I had made coffee, watched the news and weather, and finished my blog post. So I set about cleaning the glass block windows. It went much faster than I had thought it would. It was all done before 9:00.

All cleaned up and shiny

That left a good part of the morning for me to spend on yard work. Cutting blackberry brambles out of the bay laurel hedge, for example. Pulling ivy off tree trunks. Pruning a big bush and gathering up the clippings. All those are Sisyphean tasks. Then it was time to cook lunch: Chinese stir-fried beef with asparagus, ginger, garlic, and noodles. Afterward, Walt cooked up some spéculoos cookies and sliced some fresh strawberries for dessert.

I guess it's time to put the curtains back up.

It was somehow a typical day. Now I'm feeling a little let down. The painting job is very close to absolute completion. Now what will I do with all the hours in the day? More cooking, I guess. Longer walks with the dog. Waiting for the garden to start producing, and then processing the produce for canning or freezing.

Looking down the stairs

It's summer here in Saint-Aignan and it has come so early that I'm disoriented. I could use a rainy day. I miss weather that changes with regularity. Besides, the collard patch needs the moisture, as will the rest of the garden as soon as it's planted.

And besides, I had a miserable allergy attack yesterday afternoon and evening. Watery eyes, sneezing, needles in the nose. The temperature in the loft was near 80ºF. No wind. Is that what is in store for us all summer long?