Le nouveau volet, et des poivrons rôtis

Here's what the new volet roulant in the kitchen looks like. By the way, un volet roulant (a roll-down shutter) is also called un store. In the first photo, the store is closed but the sheer curtains are open. In the second, the sheer curtains are closed.

While the five new shutters were being installed, I was in the kitchen roasting peppers that I bought at the supermarket the day before. I roasted them in the air fryer. Five of them fit perfectly in the fryer drawer. They came out looking beautiful. Now all I have to do is peel them (in theory, the skin just falls or slips off) and then de-seed them (also a fairly easy job but messy). The roasted flesh of the peppers will be good in salads or eaten on crackers or toast with some goat cheese (fromage de chèvre) or cream cheese (fromage à tartiner) and a little glass of wine.

La fenêtre de la cuisine, et les nouveaux volets

This is the window in our kitchen. It faces east, so it gets morning sun. It's cooler and shadier in the hottest part of the day, which is the afternoon. The window opening measures approximately 50 inches in width and 50 inches in height. It's a sliding, double-glazed PVC window that we had installed when we first came to live here, replacing an old French window that was single glazed.

French windows and doors traditionally open into the room they are installed in. In the case of this kitchen window, and in the case of similar windows in two small bedrooms in the house, that meant that as the the windows opened the glass panels pretty much swept across the entire room. One day, the woman who sold us the house in 2003 told me that one negative feature of the house (which her husband and his first wife had had built in about 1970) was something like les fenêtres sont trop grandes pour les pièces.

It took me a while to figure out what she meant. I think that was it. Sliding glass windows made a lot more sense, given the way the house was built. The window installer who put ours in told me later that he had been skeptical. He was pretty sure that we were going to hate the sliders. We didn't. It's what we had in San Francisco. I think they're great. Only the shutter (le volet roulant) on the kitchen window is a pain. First of all, it seems to take longer and longer to crank it up manually in the morning and down, again manually, at nightfall, as it ages. And it's dark when seen from inside the house as above.

Back in 2004, we had three windows on the back side of the house replaced with sliders. The old ones were leaking not just air but water. They faces west. We kept the old metal shutters for a few years but in 2018 had those windows fitted with roll-down shutters that are electric-powered. All you have to do is press a button and the shutter goes up or down. You can stop it when it's down or up far enough by pressing the button again. These shutters are solar powered, actually. You don't have to worry about power outages. And the sensor that re-charges the battery is powered even by dim daylight, not just sunlight. In other words, if we have a week or two of gray fog and rain, it doesn't matter. The shutters work just fine despite gloomy weather. They've been reliable for 6 or 7 years now. It's nice to be able to open an close the shutters without having to open the windows and let either hot or cold into the house.

Here's what the kitchen window looks like when the glass panels are closed or open and the old crank-operated shutter is closed. The wand and the crank mechanism are on the left. The new shutter that we're having installed today, along with new shutters on four smaller windows in the house, will be made of white PVC (vinyl). Two new shutters will also go on south-facing windows that really heat up when the sun shines brightly in summertime, making the house very hot. Two other new shutters will go on small, old, French-style windows that are single-glazed and drafty. They're up in the loft where we watch TV where we sleep. It will be nice to be able to "black out" the room in the daytime, and to be able to reduce evening and nighttime draftiness and noise.

Here's the kitchen window with the brown shutter and the curtains closed. Too dark, basically.

"The Endive Show"

I'm naming this post after one of Julia Child's many shows about French cooking. I found it in her book titled The French Chef Cookbook (30th aniversary edition). She cooks endives in several different ways, including my favorite way, which she calls Endives et Jambon, Mornay. It required first making Endives Braisées à la Flamande. As you can see in the photo above, I wrapped my braised endives in streaky bacon instead of sandwich ham (jambon de Paris).Here is a link to a video of Mme Child's endive show. The segment about ham-wrapped braised endives starts at minute 21:53.

The smaller pictures just above and below show the endives I made at four stages of cooking, the first three in butter, a squeeze of lemon, a glug of white wine, and four cloves of garlic. The picture on the right below shows the bacon-wrapped braised endives covered in cheese sauce and melted cheese after cooking in the oven.

This last photo shows the leftover endives in that cheese sauce and the boiled potatoes I cooked to accompany them and sauce. I've blogged about gratin d'endives au jambon many times in the past. Type "endives" and hit Enter in the Blogger search field to find the posts.

"Pulled" turkey "barbecue"

This how to make "pulled" turkey "barbecue (you can do the same with pork or chicken). In my case, I bought two leg-and-thigh sections of turkey. I seasoned them with spices including salt, pepper, paprika, etc. (to taste). Then I cooked them for about an hour in the air-fryer at medium temperature.

I took the pieces of turkey out of the fryer and let them cool so I wouldn't burn my fingers.The next step is to pull the cooked skin off the turkey meat and then pull the cooked turkey meat off the bones. Discard the bones. Wash your hands. Brown the chunks of turkey meat a little more in the oven or in a frying pan if you like it with more color and texture.

Take the chunks of meat that fell or got pulled off the bones and pull then into smaller pieces. Taste for seasoning and add what you like (BBG sauce, vinegar, spices, wine, a little duck fat (the turkey meat is very lean), and so on. It's is good on a sandwich bun with cole slaw; wrapped up in a burrito, enchilada, or taco; or in a kind of shepherd's pie (un hachis parmentier) made with mashed potatoes. It's all in how you season things.