Une fenêtre oscillo-battante

The new living-room window we had installed yesterday consists of two fixed side panels and one central panel that opens. There are two ways of opening it: the middle panel can swing into the room on its side hinges (like a door), or it can "tilt" slightly into the room on bottom hinges. The point is to be able to let air in or out of the room without opening the window all the way and letting cats, birds, or burglars in.

The new air-tight, double-glazed tilt-and-turn window

Oscillo-battant : type de châssis de fenêtre permettant de l'utiliser comme un battant ou comme une fenêtre oscillante. In English, this is called a "tilt-and-turn" window, apparently. It's a very common type of window in Europe. Several years ago, we had one installed in our W.C., which is the half-bath where the toilet is located (there's no toilet in the main bathroom). It's very practical for ventilation.

Window installer Serge Roch getting ready to put in the

new window frame on a warm summer day

Battant is an interesting word in French. Whenever talk turns to doors, windows, or shutters, you hear it. I'm not sure what the translation is. The battant is the door or window panel that hangs on hinges and can be opened. French windows and door open into the room, whereas English windows and door open to the exterior. I guess the battant is the door panel. A double door is a porte à deux battants.

In this photo, you can see the window tilted slightly into the room for ventilation

and held in place by hardware. There's tennis on TV.

The job took only about three hours to complete. Serge Roch, who has installed half a dozen windows for us over the years, always does a good job, and his fees are reasonable. We were lucky to make his acquaintance in 2004, when we were starting our renovations.

We've had good luck growing coleus plants on our north facing window ledge this summer.

Now I'm almost eager to have some cold weather so that we can feel the benefits of the new window. I posted this picture of the old window yesterday.

Vieilles photos

We've been in France for so long now that when I look back at photos I took when we first arrived in Saint-Aignan, they really look like old photos. I guess digital cameras were different nine years ago, when I took this one of the Château de Montrésor.

September 3, 2003, at Montrésor, south of Saint-Aignan

Our old living room window is being replaced today. We've been talking about having a new window put in for about nine years. The old one dates from the 1960s and, while it is sort of charming and old-fashioned, it's not at all airtight.

This is the window that we are having replaced.

The new window will be double-glazed and better sealed, and it will protect us from the cold much more effectively. It won't have the old look, but it will be easier to clean. The installer should be here in about an hour. By afternoon, we'll have a new look and a new view.

Sauce for the winter

You can only make and eat only so many stuffed tomatoes or tomato-basil-mozzarrella salads in August and September. The rest of the tomatoes, when we are lucky enough to have a surplus, get made into thick, rich sauce that goes right into the freezer.



Making sauce is the best way to use up blemished and misshapen tomatoes. And we've had quite a few of those this year, since our weather in June and July was so damp. Drastic trimming gets rid of the blemishes, leaving big chunks of healthy tomato flesh to put in the sauce pot. Save the perfect tomatoes for salads and garnishes.

About 10 quarts of tomatoes with onion, carrot, celery, etc.

Two pieces of equipment are crucial for sauce making. One is, of course, a big pot to cook the tomatoes in. The other is a food mill, a moulin à légumes, which you use to puree the sauce and remove all the tomato seeds and skin. You also need a sharp knife, a ladle, and some containers to pack the sauce in for freezing (or canning).

Processing the chunky sauce through a food mill (moulin à légumes)...

...leaves you with smooth, thick sauce to enjoy eating later...

...and a mass of tomato seeds and skin for the compost pile.

We nearly filled up a 12-qt. pot with chunks of fresh tomato, diced onions, chopped celery, thyme, white wine, and bay leaves. Salt, pepper, and a tablespoon of sugar. (That frozen block in the pot was some frozen tomato and zucchini pulp and seeds we had saved when we made stuffed vegetables.) The pot bubbled away on the stove for at least 6 hours the other day, at low temperature, so that the sauce would thicken up without burning on the bottom of the pot. It reduced by about a half.

Seven 50 cl containers of sauce for the freezer

After it was cooked, I let it cool in big containers in the refrigerator overnight before I ran it through the food mill. Then we packed it in smaller containers for the freezer. The sauce is easier to work with when it's cold. That many tomatoes gave us 3.5 liters of thick tomato sauce. That's almost a gallon U.S. I hope we'll harvest enough tomatoes this month and next to make at least another gallon of sauce for the winter.

Here's what happens...

...when you start on what seems like a simple project. Window ledges all around the house need repainting. For some of them, somebody has to climb a ladder. Ladder work is Walt's domain. My feet stay on the ground.

Other window ledges, at ground level, are hidden by vegetation, but they still need to be scraped, sanded, and painted. So you have to get rid of the vegetation. In this case, it was a rosemary bush that we planted a few years back and that grew to be a monster. Rosemary loves this hot sunny location against the south-facing wall of the house.

As they say in France: « Rien n'est simple. » The rosemary bush had to go. Well, I didn't actually want to pull it out. But it badly needed a radical pruning. I attacked it yesterday morning with pruning shears, limb-loppers, and hedge clippers.

I wish I had taken a picture of it before I started, but I didn't think about it in time. In the top picture in this post, you can see how much of it I cut away. It's the two piles of branches on the ground. In the picture below, you can see the other rosemary bush that is growing up against the house.

The untrimmed rosemary bush is actually smaller than the other bush was before I started hacking away at it. At least now the window ledge is accessible, and soon I can start working on it. We're supposed to have nice dry weather next week, so progress will be made. The other bush will have to be pruned back too.