Hier matin

The weather has turned cold again and the sun shines brightly in a clear sky. Yesterday I put my little camera in my pocket before I went out for my daily walk with Callie the collie. I took some pictures, and here are some examples. As I've said before, you have to take advantage of these mornings, especially at this time of year.

You never know when you'll get to see the next sunset. It might cloud over for days or weeks on end, blotting out old sol and plunging us into a gray and dreary existence. Hope you are having a sunny morning...

The Cher and the cliffs at Bourré

Bourré (pop. 750) is a village on the north side of the Cher River. It's just east of the town of Montrichard. Bourré's claim to fame is that a lot of the big blocks of white limestone that were used in the construction of the great Loire Valley châteaux, including Chenonceau, was quarried here. By the way, I took these photos in early December 2005.

Looking east toward Saint-Aignan from up on the cliffs at Bourré

Quarrying at Bourré left hundreds of kilometers of tunnels and galleries carved into the limestone cliffs on the north back of the river. People lived in these galleries or caves, and still do. Their houses are described a troglodytiques in French. Some have formal façades, like the one below. Often, you'll see chimneys sticking out of the ground above these houses, at the top of the cliff.

Une maison troglodytique à Bourré — wonder what it looks like inside.

At nearly 250 miles long, the river called Le Cher is the twelfth longest water course in France. We call it a river in English, and in France it's a rivière, which means it is a tributary or affluent of a major river, called a fleuve. The fleuve in this case is La Loire, which is the country's longest river, at about 600 miles in length. The Cher flows into the Loire on the other side of the city of Tours, and the Loire flows into the Atlantic nearly 200 miles east of Saint-Aignan.

Another view of the Cher at Bourré, looking toward Saint-Aignan

The last time the Cher flooded was a dozen years ago, about the time we were looking at houses that were for sale in the region. We looked at a few houses that had had minor flooding, and we decided that it wasn't worth the risk. We ended up buying a house about half a mile south of the river, near Saint-Aignan, on very high ground.

Troglodytic and semi-troglodytic houses in Bourré

The name Bourré is a funny one in French, because the word bourré means "stuffed or filled (with)" and, in modern-day slang, "inebriated" — cet homme est complètement bourré means "this man is completely drunk." One legend has it that the name Bourré originated because the French Renaissance king François Ier was a local favorite and admired the stone quarried here. He was called "good king" François, and all those centuries the French word for king, roi, was pronounced [rway] instead of [rwah] as it is now. Le village du bon roi became Bourré because [bõ-rway] evolved that way. As I said, it's a legend.

Fall chores and a warming Thai curry

Now that the leaves have finished falling, it's time to start picking them up. Walt got the rake and wheelie bin out yesterday and started the job.

In the kitchen, I had the rest of the Shanghai choy to deal with. This time, I decided to make a Thai-style coconut milk curry to serve with it. I made a red curry, using a kind of home-made curry paste to color, flavor, and spice up the cocnut milk.

The main two ingredients in the red curry paste are Sriracha sauce, a sweet-hot Thai pepper sauce, and tomato paste — about 2 tablespoons of each. To that, I added a tablespoonful of finely grated ginger and the same amount of finely chopped basil leaves, both out of jars that I bought at the Asian market in Tours.

For good measure, I put in a couple of pinches of piment fort (cayenne pepper) and a tablespoonful of Tandoori Massala, which is a red curry powder from India. That might sound like a lot of spice, but the paste has to be pungent enough to flavor 400 milliliters, or about 1½ cups, of coconut milk. A good squirt of Thai fish sauce added flavor too.

We made the Thai curry dish with tofu, and with a few shrimps as a garnish. The vegetables were carrots, onion, garlic, mushrooms, and baby corn (from a tin, of course). Again, stir-frying things separately or in batches, depending on how much cooking time a specific vegetable needs to be cooked to the right degree, worked really well. At the last minute, you put all the prepared and pre-cooked ingredients back into the pan with the curry sauce and just let everything heat through.

For the tofu, I cut it into pieces and put them on a silicone pad in the oven at high temperature to brown them slightly and dry the tofu out a little. I put the tofu pieces on top of the curried vegetables and noodles because they were fragile, and the shrimp on top, too, as a decoration. We cooked some noodles to go with the vegetables and tofu, and I cooked the choy as I did last time, braising it for two or three minutes in simmering water. Serve it separately.

This is a really easy recipe to make if you can get the ingredients, and it can be as spicy as you like it.

Dégel

Thaw. Dégel. There you have two words that bear little resemblance to each other but mean the same thing. The dictionary says 'thaw' was first used as a noun in English in the 15th century. It has its origins in German (douwen), Greek (takein), and even Latin (tabere). We are having a thaw today.

It's a good thing I saw this scene a couple of days ago. It's gone now.

'Thaw' is a very hard word, I think, for a French-speaking person to try to pronounce. First, there's that TH sound that doesn't exist in French. If you become self-conscious about it, you end up feeling kind of silly rubbing your tongue on your front teeth to say the initial consonant of 'thaw'. Is it TH as in 'then' or as in 'thin'? And then there's that vowel. Is it an A sound or an O sound? Some Americans would pronounce as if it were spelled 'thah'.

Old vines on a December day

Dégel is much easier. The first attested use in writing was in the year 1265, according to the French Robert dictionary. The pronunciation is obvious, I think — [day-ZHEL] — even for us anglophones. Of course, you have to say it with a French accent, cutting the first syllable short (no diphthong) and pronouncing the final L completely, not just partially as in 'bell' or 'tell'. The ZH sound is the one we have in the middle of words like 'pleasure' and 'measure'. It's also the consonant of the first person singular pronoun je in French. I don't think we have any words in English that start with that ZH sound.

Frost and feuilles mortes

Okay, I got carried away. The fact is that the temperature this morning is above freezing for the first time in a few days. It's cloudy instead of foggy, and that's why we've had a thaw. No more freezing fog. We haven't seen the sun much this week, but today we probably won't see it at all. It's a trade-off. Clouds and a thaw, or a hint of sunshine through the freezing fog. I'm not sure I'd want to choose. I don't get to choose, anyway.