Lunch at Le Crêpiot

I mentioned a day or two ago that on that June day in 2008, Walt, CHM, and I had lunch at the Saint-Aignan restaurant called Le Crêpiot. It's located just down the main street in town, not far from the tourist office and the post office. I think it must have been a crêperie at some point in time, but for the past 20 or so years it has been operated as a more of a café, serving a wider range of dishes. It has always been fun to have a meal there, and the food has always been good. The people who ran it when we first came to live here have retired and the place is under new management. It's been quite a while since I've been there for lunch or dinner, for a variety of reasons — the pandemic and confinements, for example.

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So what did we have for lunch on that June day? In a comment, CHM said that he didn't remember. Well, I don't have to remember because I wrote about it on my blog in 2008:

Back then, the daily special at lunchtime cost you about 12 euros. The day we were there the main course was a grilled slice of ham served with white beans. As a starter, the choices were a salad with grilled goat cheese, a salad with strips of chicken breast, or a half an avocado stuffed with tuna salad. The desserts were a slice of tarte aux pommes (apple tart), a "floating island" (île flottante) or two scoops of ice cream (several flavors were available). Instead of dessert, or in addition, you could choose to have the cheese plate, with pieces of two different cheeses.

We decided to have the €16 menu instead, because we wanted steaks. As an entrée, CHM had a salad with Sainte-Maure-de-Touraine goat cheese. There were four big pieces of cheese on the plate with salad greens and chopped walnuts. Walt had a herring salad — two or three fairly large pieces of fish served with sliced boiled potatoes, onions, and salad greens in vinaigrette. I had the half-avocado stuffed with tuna salad.

Our main dishes were steaks called bavette d'aloyau, which is a sort of flank or skirt steak. It's lean meat with no fat or gristle. We all ordered the steak cooked rare (saignant). Walt and I got frites — French fries — with ours. CHM decided to substitute sautéed mushrooms for a supplement of one euro. I thought the steak was perfectly cooked and tender (French beef is from grass-fed cattle and therefore very different from American beef in taste and texture). It was served with a pat of garlic/parsley butter that melted on top of and flavored the meat. CHM had such a big portion of mushrooms that he couldn't eat them all, but Walt and I both finished our frites.

Our desserts were a crêpe with warm chocolate sauce and vanilla ice cream for CHM, a piece of apple tart for Walt, and a floating island for me. Do you know what an île flottante is? It's blobs of soft meringue sitting in a light crème anglaise — an egg custard — with toasted sliced almonds on top.

I completely forgot to take pictures of the food. I was too busy anticipating and then eating. Oh, and now I almost forgot this detail: the Crêpiot always featured a locally made wine as its vin du mois. That month it wass a Cabernet Franc and Côt (aka Malbec) blend made and bottled by a couple over in the village of Couffy, about three miles east of Saint-Aignan. It was tasty.

La Chapelle Saint-Lazare à Noyers-sur-Cher : détails et souvenirs

I took a friend from Paris (her name is Claude) to see the chapelle Saint-Lazare nearly 15 years ago. We were were taking pictures and she asked me if we could go inside the building. I told her it had always been locked when I'd been there before. And sure enough, the side door was bolted. On the off chance, I walked around the building to try the front door. I was surprised to find it unlocked.

I pushed it open and got my first glimpse of the interior. It was like night-and-day compared to the exterior — the building looked like a complete ruin on the inside. Claude had followed me around to the front of the building and we stood just inside the doorway, taking in a desolate, gloomy scene. We didn't dare go farther in — it looked too dangerous.

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Then some movement above us caught my eye and I heard the the swishing sound of beating wings. A big white bird flew across the ceiling and ducked into a hole in the wall just above our heads. What was it? It was too dark in the chapel to see much or take a good photo.

My first thought was that the bird might just be a pigeon, but I realized that it was too big and very white. It had to be an owl. Just at that moment it emerged from its hiding place above the front door and flew across the ceiling again, landing on a stone ledge at the other end of the room and looking out at us. It looked like a ghost, and it seemed discourteous of us to have invaded the creature's space. We backed out and closed the door.

We stepped outside and walked around the north side of the chapel. I looked up at the stone carvings around the building's roof-line and the first one I saw was, appropriately, a representation of an owl. You can see a photo of it above. Later I looked through some bird books I had and saw that the ghostly bird must have been a barn owl, which is sometimes called une dame blanche in French. In the years since that day, the inside of the chapel has been cleaned up and repaired, and the building is now used as an art gallery for temporary exhibits.

Views from, and of, Noyers-sur-Cher

It was June 18, 2008. CHM and I were spending the aftenoon driving around taking photos. The weather was beautiful. After having lunch in a restaurant in Saint-Aignan, we drove across the bridge over the Cher to the town of Noyers. We went up to higher ground on the north side of the river valley to take in the views. Here's what we saw: the château de Saint-Aignan off in the distance.

We also noticed that there was an old windmill in Noyers. We took photos of it from the heights, and then we went to find it and take some photos closer up. It wasn't easy to find, bas as you can see in the second photo below, we succeeded in getting pretty close. I also took pictures of a pretty wheat field and of the church in Noyers.

    

    

Here's another view of Saint-Aignan taken from the highlands. It's a wider view that includes, on the left, the church.
We were about two miles from the château.

A 12th-century at Noyers-sur-Cher

The chapel called Saint-Lazare is in Noyers-sur-Cher, just across the river from Saint-Aignan. It's less than two miles from our house. Lazare or Lazarus was the patron saint of lepers, and there was a leper house or colony in Noyers back in the 12th century, when the chapel in my photos was built. I think that means it was a chapel where lepers could go to pray to be cured of the disease. The old hospice it was attached to is long gone, but the chapel has survived. It's located on the main east-west road in our area and not far from the banks of the Cher river.