Chat noir, feuilles mortes

I was out on the deck, continuing to figure out what I'm going to do with all these potted plants, when I heard Bertie meowing. I looked for him and then realized he was down below, sitting in the sun on a pile of fallen leaves. I hope he was enjoying the sunshine, even though the air was downright cold. Maybe his black coat soaks up the heat of the sun.

Bertie will be eight years old next spring. He has definitely settled in here since 2010, but I don't think he is happy about there being so few people in the neighborhood these days. In fact, there are exactly five of us, occupying three houses out of the nine in the hamlet. Bertie loves people, and would love Callie the collie if she would let him, I'm sure. She won't.

Almost all the leaves are off the two big maple trees out front now. Soon it will be time to go rake them all up. Luckily, we're supposed to have several dry sunny days this week. It's cold, but not yet down to freezing on any regular basis. Walt wants to mow the yard one more time. Other parts of France, down toward Lyon and in the Massif Central and Alps, have already had significant snowfalls.

I'm trying to figure out which of my potted plants can survive a winter outdoors, and which ones must absolutely be brought indoors if I want to keep them. This exercise almost makes me miss San Francisco, where I could leave nearly all the potted plants outdoors all winter, because the temperature never dipped below 5ºC / 40ºF.

Notre cuisine à nous

What's going on in the kitchen? Well, I wanted a meatloaf and Walt wanted some split pea soup. We made both. Not on the same day. First the meatloaf. We'd gone shopping over in Selles-sur-Cher, 10 miles east from Saint-Aignan, last week. There's a relatively new supermarket over there that we wanted to check out.

It turns out that it's a Belgian chain, or the French subsidiary of a Belgian chain. The name of the chain of supermarkets is Colruyt. (Maybe somebody from Belgium can tell me how to pronounce that.) We were impressed with the cleanliness and organization of the store. And the produce prices were amazingly low. A big stalk of celery, for example, for 99 cents. The same thing at the SuperU in Selles was 2.69 euros. That's just one example.

We bought beef at Colruyt too — the butcher counter was well stocked and the meats beautifully displayed. We will return.

I don't really have a recipe for the meatloaf. C'est une sorte de terrine ou pâté qu'on peut manger chaud ou froid. I finely diced up some carrot, onion, roasted red pepper, celery, and mushrooms. I mixed all that with a couple of pounds of ground beef, with just a little pork added in. I put in three eggs and some herbs and spices, and I made two meatloaves, one to eat and one to freeze for later. Today we're having meatloaf sandwiches for lunch, on homemade buns.

The soupe de pois cassés was even easier and more free-form. First of all, we had a liter of well-flavored broth left over from that potée I cooked last week. And we had the split peas. All we had to do was boil the peas in the broth until they were done, and then season it all with salt and pepper. I added three peeled garlic cloves to the pot.

We also bought a piece of smoked pork, at SuperU. The cut is called the palette, which is a shoulder-blade roast, which you might cook as part of a potée or a choucroute garnie. To prepare it, you soak it in cold water for 24 hours in the refrigerator, and then you throw out that water, cover the palette with fresh cold water, bring it to a simmer, and cook it for an hour or more. A couple of bay leaves, some black peppercorns, and two or three cloves (clous de girofle) are good in the cooking liquid.

Once the palette is cooked and cooled, dice up some of the meat and add it to the pea soup at the last minute. Serve with a spoonful of crème fraîche.

At SuperU in Selles, we came across a good-looking countertop oven. We'd been thinking of getting one, to replace a decrepit toaster oven that we were tired of looking at. On an impulse, we bought the SuperU oven, a Brandt model. The price was right. I know it's early, but Merry Christmas to us.

Un rayon de soleil

There's a water tower, what in French is called un château d'eau, on the other side of the Cher River from us, up on the highlands on the north bank. You can see why they call it a château. It looks like it could be one, or at least the main tower of a castle. It's especially striking when fog has settled in the river valley on a chilly but sunny morning.

Now these photos are more than a week old. The weather hasn't cooperated with the photographer much since he took them. (He is I.) The mornings are dark — too dark for taking photos — because of the late sunrise at this time of year, and because of foggy weather. I'd wait to go out later but Callie wants to go at eight o'clock. Later in the morning, I'm busy in the kitchen anyway.

The sun will rise at 8:10 this morning. Skies are supposed to be overcast until late in the afternoon. Tomorrow and Monday look sunnier. Yesterday I was at the supermarket, waiting in line for a long time to get checked out as one item after another that shoppers ahead of me had chosen wouldn't scan. Price checks always really slow everything down.

The woman immediately ahead of me had put two liters of some special low-lactose milk in her cart, and each liter scanned at 10.50 euros. That couldn't be right, she said (it would be $14 for a quart of milk!). The cashier called several people on the telephone, waited a while, and finally, getting no help, she had to leave the register and go somewhere toward the back of the store to find the correct price. In all, it took 10 or 15 minutes, as I just stood there waiting to get my ten measly items scanned, paid for, and put in the bag. Interminable.

It's always like that in this particular supermarket, I kept thinking. Why do I bother coming to shop here? Finally, the cashier came back to her register and said she had found the correct price: €3.50 per liter. C'est trop cher, the customer said. I don't want the milk after all. My baby will have to drink regular milk like the rest of us do. So we had waited 15 minutes for what? Nothing? Oh well, that's life, I guess.

Oh, I forgot the point of my story. The young woman at the cash register finally came to my purchases, and she said she hoped she wouldn't continue having problems getting items to scan. I smiled at her and said I hoped so too. I wasn't her fault, after all. As she scanned my first item, she suddenly turned her head and looked out toward the parking lot. Regardez, she said, mesmerized. Un rayon de soleil ! She was right. The sun had broken through the morning low clouds. We were all happy about that.

Fog, but greens and reds too

Here's the view out the back window just a couple of days ago. You can see that there are still apples on the trees all around us. But the old stone shed out in the vineyard has almost disappeared into the fog.

We've also had more rain and chillier temperatures, but no significant freeze or frost yet. Yesterday morning, it was raining so hard that Callie didn't want to go for her walk. We went outside and she did her morning business, but when I tried to get her to walk down the road she looked at me with a forlorn expression.

We just came back home, after five minutes in the rain. Rain means everything is green now, and there's a patch of grass that Callie enjoys nibbling on when she goes outside. See, we still have flowers, this late in November. Those are called capucines in French.

Walt posted a closeup view of some of these rows of red-leaved vines a few days ago.

My computer has been running fine since I opened it up and vacuumed it out yesterday morning. In fact, the noise was gone before I took the vacuum cleaner to it. I don't know what was wrong with it. Maybe it was just having a moan, as our English friends say. I expect the whining noise will come back sooner or later.