Haricots verts à l'italienne

There have been major problems with the TGV in the "chunnel" since yesterday morning. An electrical problem immobilized a train in the tunnel yesterday morning. Nearly 400 people had to be evacuated through an emergency side-tunnel. Trains from Paris to London were delayed or had to be canceled.

Walt just saw a post our friend Peter left on Facebook. He and Jill left Saint-Aignan yesterday morning at 7:15, and they finally arrived in London 12 hours later — four or five hours late. But at least they made it. Meanwhile, Walt and I were resting at home after a very busy weekend. I went to three restaurants in three days, and we prepared dinners at home on Thursday (grilled chicken breasts and salade macédoine) and Saturday (raclette).

Yesterday, I needed to cook some green beans I had bought for the weekend but hadn't used. They were the wide, flat beans called haricots cocos plats in France — I think they are known as Romano beans in America. I decided to cook them Italian-style, with tomatoes and onions, since I also had a few fresh tomatoes in the kitchen.

Here's the recipe I like. It's from the book Cuisine pour toute l'année (1969) by a woman named Monique Maine. The book has been my favorite French cookbook for nearly 35 years. I'm translating:

Green Beans Italian Style

750 g (1¾ to 2 lbs.) fresh green beans

500 g (1 lb.) fresh tomatoes

4 small onions

1 clove of garlic

thyme

salt and pepper

30 g (2 Tbsp.) butter

1 Tbsp. oil

Wash and trim the green beans. Cut them into pieces if you want. Wash and trim the tomatoes

and cut them into halves or quarters. Peel and slice the onions. In a big pot, melt the butter

 with the oil and cook the tomatoes and onions for a minute or two on medium-high heat.

Add the beans to the pot with the garlic clove, salt and pepper, and some thyme.

Pour on a half cup of water. Cover the pot and let the beans cook

for about an hour on medium heat.

You can reduce the cooking time if you like the beans crunchier. I used only olive oil (3 Tbsp.) instead of part butter and I used our dried, garden-grown oregano instead of thyme this time. I also added some mushrooms we happened to have in the fridge. We'll be having half the beans for lunch today, with escalopes de dinde. The rest of the beans go into the freezer for later.

The weather here is lousy right now. It feels downright chilly this morning, and the weather woman on Télématin just said that the high temperatures today will be much lower than seasonal averages. It's raining in different places around the country, but not in Saint-Aignan for the moment. The plate of hot green beans with tomatoes and onions will be good comfort food.

A travel day and a different restaurant experience

It's a travel day for our friends Peter and Jill. I'll be taking them to the train station across the river in Noyers-sur-Cher in a few minutes. They'll be in London by mid-afternoon. We've had a good visit despite the rainy, cool weather.

It rained pretty hard from 7:00 a.m. until about 5:00 p.m. yesterday. We spent the day inside, making only a short trip to a restaurant over in Pouillé (five miles from our house) to have lunch. It's a restaurant that occupies an old wine cellar or cave — pronounced [kahv] — meaning a network of tunnels and alcoves carved into a limestone hillside by people quarrying the stone in past centuries. It's called Le Bousquet and has been in business, I understand, for 40 years now.

We're not talking about a gourmet food experience. It's really the polar opposite of a place like the Agnès Sorel restaurant in Genillé, where the atmosphere is calm and dignified. It was a case of quality vs. quantity of food. At Le Bousquet, we were in a room where every table was full and people were good-natured, relaxed, and boisterous. As we started started our meal, two musicians — an accordionist and a guitarist — starting playing to entertain the crowd.

The musicians approached each table and asked people what song they would like to hear. They obviously knew all the French classics — Piaf, Montand, Aznavour, and so on. When they came to our table, I looked at them and said: "We are a group of four Americans, so..." They had that panicked look on their faces that indicated they wondered if we would suggest a song that they actually knew how to play.

Peter and I had joked about maybe asking them to play a Janis Joplin song like "Another Little Piece of My Heart." But we didn't. I asked them to play the pre-war French standard called "Parlez-Moi d'Amour". A woman about my age at a neighboring table was watching and listening to our exchange with the musicians, and when I named the song she smiled and winked at me!

The music was so loud — they played six or eight songs in all before moving on to another part of the restaurant — that we could hardly talk to each other at all. But it was fun. The food was real "down-home" French fare. First, they brought us a pot of rillettes (potted pork), a dish of country-style pâté, and crock of cornichons (pickled gherkins). It was all-you-can-eat time.

The main courses we could choose from were entrecôte-frites (steak and fries), a chicken breast in cream sauce with fries or rice, and a salmon fillet with either fries, rice, or green beans. The fries weren't very good, and the steak, while tasty, was kind of gristly. The next course was a very nice cheese board with a dozen cow's-milk and goat's-milk cheeses. The waitress just left the board on the table and we had 10 minutes or so to serve ourselves whatever cheeses we wanted. There was also a bowl of green salad in vinaigrette to go with the cheese.

Dessert was a couple of scoops of ice cream or a cup of coffee. There were plenty of other desserts, but if you ordered those you had to pay for them separately from the set price of the meal — 20 euros. Wine was separate too, of course — we had a local rosé. I didn't take my camera. It's too dark in a cave to take pictures without a flash.

We arrived at the restaurant in a hard rain, and we left in a hard rain two hours later. We spent the afternoon watching the men's final at Wimbledon on TV. Now it's time to go to the train station, for a 7:15 departure. It's not raining... yet.

Disappointing weather

The weather this weekend has been disappointing. I was disappointed to have to cancel our trip to Bourges on Friday, even though we had a good afternoon in Genillé and Loches. Yesterday, it threatened to rain all day, and we had a few showers. The threat was enough to make us curtail our activities.

Ah, summer in the Loire Valley! In England it's even worse, from what I can gather. Here, a chilly rain is falling as I type this. And I have to take the dog out for a walk in it.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of photos of our entrées (first courses) at the Agnès Sorel restaurant when we had lunch there on Friday. Nasturtiums were one of the meal's themes; they're in season and the flowers are edible. My starter course, above, was a steamed artichoke bottom filled with what is called a faisselle de chèvre frais — a sort of cultured goat's milk concoction that has the texture of yogurt — with a lot of fresh chives on top and some salad greens and pine nuts underneath. It was delicious...

Walt ordered tête de veau, a kind of head cheese (fromage de tête in French) made of veal instead of pork. It was served warm, so that the gelatine that is a feature of head cheese had melted. You either like that gelatinous texture or you don't, and Walt said it was very good. It was served with salad greens, chives, chopped walnuts, and a nasturtium (capucine in French) blossom.

Changement de programme

Il faut savoir s'adapter... You have to be flexible. We ended up changing our plans yesterday morning because of the weather. No, we didn't have a hurricane, but we had predictions of rainy and even stormy weather all day.

It didn't make sense to drive three hours round-trip over to Bourges for lunch. The whole idea was to be able to walk around the old town in the afternoon before driving back to Saint-Aignan. We couldn't see ourselves doing that in the rain. Early in the day it was already raining — it's raining this morning too — and weather reports said it was only going to get worse over the course of the day.

My main course at the Agnès Sorel restaurant yesterday was a chicken breast in a mustardy tarragon sauce. Delicious.

At 7:30 a.m. I made an executive decision. We would go to Genillé and have lunch at the Agnès Sorel instead of driving all the way to Bourges and taking a chance on a restaurant where we've never had a meal before. Peter had expressed a desire to try the Agnès Sorel, which is only a 30-minute drive from our house, and we know the food is very good and pretty affordable.

 Jill, Peter, and Walt all had fish for lunch — a filet de daurade on a bed of diced eggplant and zucchini.

So we had a delicious lunch and then we went shopping. We bought several things but mainly we spent a lot of time just looking around and we got food for lunch today and tomorrow, which we plan to make here at home. Of course, plans can change. Peter and Jill are here today and tomorrow, and then they leave early Monday for England. We're playing it by ear.

As to hurricanes, all's well that ends well. See my comment on yesterday's blog post.