Poulet à l'estragon et à la crème

Poulet à l'estragon, or tarragon chicken, is a classic French dish. I remember the first time I ever tried it. In 1972, I was teaching English in a lycée (secondary school) in Rouen, a big city in Normandy. A French couple I had met through American friends who were also working in Rouen that year invited several of us over for dinner — they were getting ready to go live and work in New York for a few years and wanted to get to know us and practice their English. They served us poulet à l'estragon, which I had never even heard of before. It was delicious, and obviously memorable.

Above is a slideshow that I think is fairly self-explanatory. You start the recipe by cutting up a whole chicken so that you have eight pieces — two each of the drumsticks, the thighs, the breast filets, and the wings (with a portion of the breast meat attached). You can of course use chicken pieces and chicken broth from the supermarket and save yourself some prep work. I can give you a more detailed recipe if you want one, but maybe the summary below will be sufficient.

Brown the chicken pieces lightly in butter and/or oil and take them out and reserve them. Separately, sauté some mushrooms. Then sauté some diced shallot or onion in the fat the chicken cooked in. Put the chicken and onion together in a pot and pour chicken broth and an equal quantity of white wine over all to barely cover. Cook on medium heat for 20 to 30 minutes. Then add a good amount of cream, the sautéed mushrooms, and some fresh or dried tarragon. Don't forget the salt and pepper. Let it cook for another 10 or 15 minutes. If the sauce is too liquid, take the chicken and mushrooms out and boil the liquid down to thicken the cream. Serve the chicken with rice, potatoes, or pasta and the sauce. Garnish with some fresh tarragon leaves if you have any. Enjoy.

Here's one more photo of the cowslips (coucous). Enlarge it and pan across it to see detail.

P.S. It's about one degree C (two ºF) colder this morning than yesterday at this time. The Renaudie vineyard people have their smudge pots burning. Our thermometer is mounted on an exterior wall of the house, so it reads a little high. Even though the smudge pots are only, say, 100 yards from the house, it's probably significantly colder out there.

April flowers

Yesterday morning, I took my camera out with me on the daily walk with the dog. It was really too dark to get the best results using the camera I have, but I did get a few salvageable shots. As I've said, there are flowers and blossoms everywhere right now, despite the morning frosts and freezes we're experiencing right now. Here's a slideshow that lasts just over one minute.

On our outdoor thermometer, the reading now is just slightly lower than it was 24 hours ago but not all the way down to 0ºC. The flowers in the slideshow above are primroses that come up spontaneously in our yard every spring, some plum and pear tree blossoms, purple flowers on our lilac bush, and yellow cowslips that grow wild all around the hamlet and vineyard.

L'hiver en avril

Morning temperatures are supposed to be down to freezing, or even slightly below, these next few mornings. This is a critical time for fruit trees and especially for the vineyards and the people who own and tend them. We had warm, sunny weather early this year, back in late February and again in mid- to late March, so the plants got ahead of themselves and are especially vulnerable to frost and freezing temperatures right now.

Yesterday the people from the Domaine de la Renaudie, who own all of the vineyard plots that border on our hamlet and yard, came and set out smudge pots on the northern edge of their vineyards. A north wind is blowing right now, and it's cold. Afternoons are warm but mornings are frigid. I guess lighting what are called bougies ("candles" — smudge pot = bougie antigel) on the upwind edge of the vineyard plots will warm the air currents just enough to prevent freezing. That's the theory and the hope anyway. You might remember this post Walt did with photos of the burning bougies back in 2017.

I was up early this morning. I couldn't sleep for most of the night. Anyway, it's 5:05 a.m. right now and a couple of cars just drove by the front gate. That's unusual. I'm sure it's the Renaudie crew out lighting the smudge pots. We all remember that we were in this same situation two years ago. (My photos in this post are from April 2017.) Right now, the apple trees in our yard are covered in blossoms, as is our big lilac bush. Cherry trees all around the vineyard are blooming too. The plum tree I planted a decade ago is covered in tiny plums. We can only hope the damage won't be too bad. The people who will suffer the most if the frost is very damaging are the ones who make their living by growing grapes and making and selling wine.

L'Auvergne : La Cascade de la Beaume

The day we went to see the villages of Le Monastier, Goudet, and Arlempdes in the southern part of the Haute-Loire, we drove back north toward Le Puy and our gîte on little back roads. Along the way, looking at the map, Walt noticed that there was a waterfall along the way, near the village called Le Brignon (pop. 600). We decided to stop and see if we could get a photo of it.

The photo above shows what the countryside around Le Brignon looks like. A small river called la Beaume cuts a fairly deep valley near the village as it flows northeast and joins up with the Loire river. La Beaume is just six miles long, while the Loire is 600 miles long.

Leaving Le Brignon, we came to a turn-out where we could park the car. We were on high ground, and we weren't sure we wanted to walk all the way down to river level at the bottom of the waterfall, la cascade de la Beaume, which is 27 meters (about 90 feet) high. We walked part way down a path and got the view you see above.

We thought the sign above was funny. If you just read the English translation of the French warning, you might get the idea that your valuables are out walking around, clambering to get into your vehicle.

The headwaters of the Loire are somewhere off in the distance in this photo. We didn't drive quite that far south.