Amiens, il y a déjà dix ans

Ten years ago this week, I was up in Picardy, north of Paris, with CHM. He wanted to take some things from his apartment in Paris to the museum in Péronne, the town his grandfather, a 19th century painter, came from. Charles-Henri Michel was born in 1817 and died in 1905. I'm going to post some photos from that trip over the next week or two.

One of the most memorable places we visited in July 2010 was the city of Amiens, which is about 70 miles north of Paris and 35 miles from the France's northern coast on the English Channel. Amiens is especially well known for its cathedral, which is one of the biggest and most beautiful in France. It was built over a period of about 70 years starting in the year 1220. The north tower, on the left, stands nearly 70 meters (about 225 feet) tall — the same height as the towers of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris. As usual, you can click on the photos, or "unpinch" them on a tablet, to see them in more detail.

I took a lot of photos inside and from outside the cathedral. Here's one detail shot. I've got more... Walt and I were scheduled to take a trip to Amiens and the nearby Baie de Somme region this past April, but the coronavirus pandemic and French lockdown forced us to cancel. It will be a trip for another day, I hope.

Sandwich buns made with winter squash pulp

I've posted about these sandwich buns before, I know, but they are so good I want to show them off again. They really are better than buns you buy at the supermarket. And when you eat them, you know you are also eating some vegetables too — either pumpkin, winter squash, or sweet potato. Buns can be called petits pains in French.

I use pumpkin or squash because we grow them in the vegetable garden. I haven't yet tried the sweet potato version of the buns. With the squashes (butternut, acorn, etc.) or pumpkin, what we do is roast them in the oven first (in wintertime), scoop out the flesh, and mash or puree it. It keeps well in plastic containers in the freezer. If you use sweet potato, you could cook it or them in the microwave.

This time I made the buns using bread flour, called "strong flour" in some anglophone countries. I think I made them earlier using cake flour made from "soft wheat" varieties, which is the flour used to make buttermilk "biscuits" in the American South. You want the cooked buns to be soft, so I'll be curious to see (or taste) the result with bread flour.

Sandwich Buns
made with pureed pumpkin or sweet potato

First make a "sponge" by combining in a large bowl:

2½ tsp. dry active yeast (10 g)
½ cup warm water (120 ml)
½ cup flour (65 g)

Let the sponge develop for 20 minutes. When it's foamy and bubbly, add to it:
1 cup lukewarm mashed sweet potato or pumpkin flesh (240 ml)
2 tsp. honey (or more to taste)
1¼ tsp. fine salt
1 large egg
3 Tbsp. vegetable oil or melted butter
3½ to 4 cups flour (450 to 500 g) as needed to form a nice ball of dough

Don't add all the flour to the sponge at once. Whether you are kneading the dough by hand or using a stand mixer, add a good amount of flour to start and then gradually add the rest, as much as it takes, to make a ball of dough that is soft and just slightly sticky. Let the dough rise, covered, in a lightly oiled bowl in a warm place until it doubles in volume. It might take as much as two hours. (I've had good luck putting a bowl of boiling water in the oven with the bowl of dough and letting the dough rise. Don't turn on the oven yet, of course.)

Then "deflate" the dough by punching it down. Knead it by hand for a minute or two on a lightly floured work surface. Using your hands, flatten the dough on the floured surface so that it's less than an inch thick. With a 4-inch (10 cm) biscuit or cookie cutter (un emporte-pièce) cut out rounds of dough — the dough I made yesterday gave me nine big sandwich buns, as you can see.

Place the rounds of dough on a baking sheet so that they are touching each other. Let them rise again in a warm place so that they more or less double in size (another 40 minutes or so). They'll continue rising when you put them in a hot oven to cook.

Bake the buns at 400ºF (200ºC) for 10 to 15 minutes, or until lightly browned. When you take them out of the oven, cover them with a kitchen towel and let them cool completely. They should be soft and pillowy. Make them ahead of time and store the ones you have left over in plastic bags in the freezer if you're not eating them right away.

This is a set of emporte-pièces that we use. I think we'd call them cookie cutters in the U.S. You can use them to cut pastry into rounds that have either a plain or fluted edge. The largest cutter, which is the one I used, is about 10 cm or four inches in diameter.

Stuff

The comedian George Carlin famously talked about how much we become slaves to our stuff as we get older. One of our projects this summer is to empty out the garage and our closets and wardrobes to take stock and, especially, to clean out. We've just got too much stuff.

We've got all this stuff ready to load into the Citroën and haul away. A dozen or so sweaters. As many shirts, some never worn. Walt's old business suits from his working days in San Francisco. Books. CDs and DVDs. Three toilet seats! Two pressure cookers. Coffee pots. Full sets of dishes. A set of green glassware that was my mother's but that Walt and I have never used and never will use. My bicycle. I'll never use that again either.

We'll be driving over to the town of Romorantin this coming week to donate all this and more to the Emmaüs charity shop over there. Emmaüs, pronounced [ay-mah-'yooss], is an organization that gives used items a second life. Members of the Emmaüs association refurbish, repair, and then sell items that we don't need any more but which are still completely serviceable.

This is just a first load of things we want to donate. I remember helping my mother go through this same process 15 years ago, when she sold the house she lived in for 54 years and moved into an apartment. Now it's my turn. Walt and I aren't moving. We're staying put, but we'll feel better after a good clear-out. We're lucky enough to no longer need so much useful stuff.

Beans and bread

American friends of ours, K & J — they live just five miles upriver, on the other side of St-Aignan from where we live — have a fantastic vegetable garden. It's not only well laid out and tended to, but it's very productive. They have a lot of green beans right now, and they brought us a few pounds of haricots verts this week. I cooked them in a steamer pot and froze more than half of them. I made the ones we ate fresh into haricots verts à l'italienne (recipe), one of my favorite green bean recipes. It's green beans cooked in tomato sauce flavored with onion, garlic, herbs, and olive oil.

There's a good recipe for beans prepared and served this way in The Classic Italian Cookbook (p. 362) by Marcella Hazan.
I normally use this French recipe and it's good with any type of green beans.

I also made another loaf of sandwich bread yesterday. The dough had been in the freezer for a few weeks. It rose beautifully, doubling in volume and becoming foamy and light. I baked it in the Pullman pan I bought a while back. It's a metal loaf pan with a slide-on lid and a non-stick (anti-adhésif) coating on the inside.

Today we'll make croque-monsieur sandwiches (link) with a few slices of this bread. Those are toasted ham and cheese sandwiches that you eat with a knife and fork, and they are staple of French café food.