From dolmens to dolmas

The vines are growing really fast right now. The stems and tendrils seem to be reaching for the sky. And the leaves are getting pretty big but have not yet been hardened by overly hot, sunny weather. All that I've said applies both to the vines in the vineyard and the few table grape vines that we have in our own back yard.

Dolmas as a side dish, served hot with Greek-style spaghetti made with feta cheese, garlic, fresh tomato, dried orgeano, and capers.

So it was time to make dolmas — stuffed grape vine leaves. They are an annual treat. One advantage of using the leaves from the vines in our back yard is that we know they haven't been sprayed with pesticides or chemicals of any kind.

These on the left have been blanched in boiling water and are ready to be filled and rolled.

I've posted about making dolmas several times over the years. In 2010, for example. Or 2013. In past years, I've made a stuffing for the leaves with rice, onion, spices, and raisins.

This year I wanted to make a meat and rice stuffing, and I did, using ground beef, brown rice, and onions. I ended up making way too much stuffing so I put half of it in the freezer.

We'll use the extra beef and rice to stuff tomatoes or zucchini or eggplants later this summer, assuming that the 2014 vegetable garden is a success. It has a lot of herbs from the garden in it — chervil (cerfeuil) and mint (menthe).

I won't go into the process of rolling the dolmas up in this post. It's pretty easy and goes fast. The main thing is to blanch the grape vine leaves in boiling water to make them limp and foldable.

I had picked 35 grape vine leaves, and I blanched them a dozen or so at a time for two or three minutes in a large quantity of boiling water. Then I put them into a cold water bath to stop the cooking.

The other main ingredient in the stuffing is the juice of a lemon. After you brown the beef with a large diced-up onion in olive oil and cook a cup of rice (so you have about three cups after cooking), you mix all that together with the herbs and add the lemon juice and some more olive oil. Greek cooking uses a lot of lemon and lemon juice.

You also cook the dolmas, after rolling them up, with a lot of lemon. The ones above are ready for the oven. Pack the dolmas in an oven-proof dish with a tight-fitting lid. Slice three lemons and arrange the slices on top. Add just enough water to the panto nearly cover the dolmas and put the pan, covered, in the oven at 160ºC (325ºF) for about an hour. Add water as needed to keep the grape leaves moist. Serve the dolmas cold, warm, or hot, as you like.

Two dolmens in Touraine

A couple of days ago I posted about the dolmen called La Pierre Folle over near Valençay, east of Saint-Aignan. There are two other dolmens near here, one in the southern part of Touraine and the other farther west, near Chinon.

 Le Carroir Bon Air at Ligré, 2005

The first time I went to see the dolmen near Ligré, just southeast of Chinon, had to be in 2004 or 2005. Walt and I had driven over there to buy wine at the Château de Ligré. I don't know if we had read about the dolmen or had just seen a sign along the road. I haven't yet found the pictures from that excursion.

Two more views of Le Carroir Bon Air, from September 2005

But I did return to Ligré in September 2005, that time with my mother, who was visiting from North Carolina. We drove over to Chinon to see the town, and we stopped at Ligré to buy wine and go look at the dolmen, which is called Le Carroir Bon Air. Carroir means the intersection of four roads, I've learned — the word is related to carré, the French word for "square." So four roads must have met at this point (at the top of a hill). I don't know much more about it.

Les Palets de Gargantua in April 2006

The other dolmen in the area is near the village called Charnizay, in the southern part of Touraine near Preuilly-sur-Claise and Le Grand-Pressigny. The first time I went there was in 2006, on April 11. I remember because it was the birthday of a close friend from California who was visiting at the time.

“Gargantua's Skipping Stones” in June 2014

My friend CHM and I returned to see the dolmen at Charnizay a couple of weeks ago. It's called Les Palets de Gargantua, after the legendary giant who was featured in the works of the 16th-century Touraine writer François Rabelais. Palets are little flat disk-shaped rocks of the kind you would skip across the surface of a lake (palet is also the word for "hockey puck"). The idea is that the 50-ton stones near Charnizay were tossed there by Gargantua. That's how big he was supposed to be.

The dolmen near Charnizay in south Touraine, 2014

I'm including a photo of the old informational panel that stood at Les Palets de Gargantua in 2006. It's legible but just barely. In posts about the dolmen that have appeared on Antoinette and Niall's Chez Charnizay blog, and on Tim's Touraine Flint blog, you'll find the newer informational sign that was put up subsequently.

Linguine with white clam sauce

Linguine was one of the things we enjoyed being able to buy at the Dia store in Saint-Aignan, which closed down — along with the rest of Dia's supermarkets in France — a few weeks ago. I have to check to see if we can still find the pasta called linguine — like spaghetti but slightly wider — in the other local supermarkets where we shop. (Carrefour has bought all of Dia's 800 stores in France, it seems.)

Anyway, spaghetti or some other pasta would work too. Other than that, all you need is onions and garlic, the French clams called palourdes, some olive oil, some white wine, and (almost optionally) some fresh herbs. This is a dish we call "linguine with white clam sauce" in America. In Italian, it's spaghetti alle vongole — spaghetti aux palourdes in French.

By the way, thanks to CHM for the beautiful photos you see here, which he took as we made the linguine with white clam sauce.

It was a good idea that Walt had a few weeks back, and CHM and I were immediately enthusiastic. Actually, the original idea wasn't based on palourdes (European bivalves that resemble small North American clams) but on lavagnons (sometimes called lavignons), another bivalve that we had enjoyed cooking and eating when we went to the island of Oléron in 2008.

The seafood vendor at the Saturday market on the old village square in Saint-Aignan comes up here from the Oléron area, which is on the southern Atlantic coast between the cities of La Rochelle and Bordeaux. And Walt had seen lavagnons on sale there a few weeks earlier, but hadn't bought any. He set out to buy some on the Saturday when we ended up with palourdes and linguine with white clam sauce. It's a long story. One day soon, we'll find lavagnons again.

Bivalves like clams, palourdes, the similar French molluscs called praires, cockles (coques), and lavagnons can be full of sand. They feed by siphoning water and sand into their shells, digesting the plant and animal plancton that get sucked in with the mixture, and then expelling the water and sand out another tube. If you catch them when they have a lot of sand in their digestive tract, they can be gritty.

What do you do to cleanse them? Well, the best method is to put the clams in a large quantity of cold, heavily salted water and just let them sit for an hour or two. They will start feeding, and soon they will have expelled any sand they had ingested. You can put a spoonful of cornmeal in the water, and they will feed on that, accelerating the cleansing process (theoretically). You'll notice the water going cloudy and gray as the clams feed. Then just rinse them under running water and they are ready to be consumed.

To cook them, "sweat" some chopped onions and garlic in butter or oil in a big pan. Then put the clams or palourdes, whole in the shell, into the pan, and pour on a cup of white wine. Cover the pan tightly, turn up the heat, and wait five minutes while the clams shells pop open and the clam flesh cooks. If you cook them too long, the flesh gets rubbery, so be careful.

Before cooking the clams, cook a package of linguine, spaghetti, or other pasta according to the standard directions. When the clams are done, pour the contents of the pan over the hot pasta in a big bowl and wait a minute for the pasta to more or less absorb the cooking liquid (clam juice, white wine, and oniony/garlicky olive oil). Grind some black pepper over all, or even add a pinch of dried hot red pepper flakes. Don't forget the fresh herbs — we used cerfeuil (chervil) from the garden. Stir. Eat. Enjoy.

Thanks again to CHM for all these photos...

Why is it called "white clam sauce"? Do you use white clams? No, it's white clam sauce to distinguish it from a slightly different version which you make by adding a little tomato sauce or paste to the pan of clams with the white wine. That makes pasta with red clam sauce. It's good too.

La Pierre Folle, a dolmen

La Pierre Folle is a dolmen. What's that? A dolmen is a stone structure dating from the megalithic era — five to six thousand years ago. There are many hundreds of dolmens in France.

The one called Le Dolmen de la Pierre Folle ("the crazy rock") is located not very far east of the town of Valençay, with its famous château, and just outside the village of Bagneux near the border between the Indre and the Cher départements. That puts it about 40 km or 25 miles east of Saint-Aignan.

The table stone at La Pierre Folle is nearly five meters (15 ft.) long and three meters (10 ft.) wide. It sits on top of seven upright stones. Nobody really knows who built it, or why. It's often assumed that dolmens were grave sites — prehistoric tombs.

A man named Ludovic Martinet did archeological work at La Pierre Folle in 1875. On the site, he found several fragments of pottery but no human bones at all. What he found mostly was fragments of flintstone that had to have been transported to the site from elsewhere, because the only local stone is sandstone.

To find the Pierre Folle dolman you drive for a mile or two through the woods...

...until you see this sign on the side of the road.

La Pierre Folle is not really easy to find. There are several other prehistoric stones in the area — menhirs — according to what I've read. They are even more difficult to locate and I didn't find them when I drove over to the area with CHM a few weeks ago.