Views through a glass block window

We have a glass block window on the south-facing wall of our house. It's the only window on that side, facing the street. According to local building codes, it needs to be a glass-block window because that wall is very close to the property line. It's too close to allow for putting in a standard glass window — one you could see through.

Well, not really too close, we've found out. A couple of years ago, I spoke to our neighbor the mayor of the village about it, and she said she would be glad to give us permission to put in a real window there. Since there's no house on the lot directly across the street, it wouldn't be hard to justify an exception to the rule. Fact is, we kind of like the glass blocks.

A glass block, or brique de verre

When it's sunny, the glass blocks let in a lot of heat. That helps heat up the house when the weather outside isn't especially warm. When it is warm or hot outside, we just open all the other windows and let the heat out. Seldom is it so hot that we feel like we might roast alive. That hasn't really happened since 2003. And even then, it could be that we just weren't used to hot weather again, after living for eight years in cool (I mean chilly), foggy San Francisco.

Through a glass block, blurrily
You can click the picture to see an enlargement.

Truthfully, the glass block window was not in good shape when we moved in eight years ago, and this is the first time we've done anything to improve its appearance. Recently, I scraped and sanded all around inside the window frame, and I used some enduit de lissage — "smoothing putty," a kind of Spackle — to prepare the surfaces for painting.

Two views of the same window — on the left, from below
in the daytime; on the right, from above at night

Then I repainted not just the inside of the frame, but also all the old grout between the blocks. The grout had turned a little black, and there were signs of mildew in the concrete. Before painting it, I washed everything down with a strong bleach solution.

And I didn't worry about "staying in the lines" as I painted. The inside surface of the glass blocks is smooth. Now I just have to scrub off the extra paint. If you look closely, you can see two blocks that I've cleaned as an experiment to see if my plan works. It does. "After" shots to come.

Gardening, etc.

Having a vegetable garden in the summer has everything to do with living the life in Saint-Aignan. It seems like every house in the area has one, and you see people out working their soil or weeding or harvesting crops — selon la saison — all the time.

The man down the hill from us, at the main road, has an enormous garden. You could almost call it a farm. His name is François and he grows tons of potatoes, tomatoes, cabbages, and who knows what all. He's out there every time we drive past, unless it's raining. And right now, it's not. I don't know what he can do with all that produce, unless he sells some of it, or supplies a huge extended family.

The four garden plots, including a little rhubarb patch
and a long row where we have lettuces, radishes,
and leeks already growing.

People who live in town have garden allotments on the island in the Cher across from Saint-Aignan. It's easy enough to walk over there from town, or drive. Each allotment seems to have a shed of some kind on it, and I think they all have running water. The soil looks to be loamy and rich down there in the river valley.

The sky over the vineyard at sunset day before yesterday

Our soil is « de la terre à vignes » — soil that's really only good for growing grape vines. It's hard clay, and full of rocks. We've been working on improving the spot where we first tilled up our four garden plots in 2004. Yesterday, Walt emptied one of our compost piles, by the wheelbarrow load, onto three of the plots. We keep two compost piles going so that we always have some that's ready to use while the other one does its thing — as they say, "compost happens."

One of the neighborhood cherry trees is full of fruit. But it's
the only one, I can report after an inspection
tour of the hamlet yesterday.

Meanwhile, May 15 has now passed and it's time to set out the tomatoes, eggplants, and all. Walt is still hardening them off, exposing them gradually to more and more sun, in preparation for planting them in the ground. For the time being, they are still under the cold frames.

I did a Photoshop mock-up of the red wall with the
batik on it, to see what it will look like after Walt
actually applies red paint over the white.

The ground all around us is dry and powdery, especially the plots that I've tilled again with the rotary cultivator. I did that yesterday — it was a second tilling session for all four plots. The fresh compost got all mixed in. I picked up a lot of egg-sized rocks as I tilled and flung them out over the fence, into the little wood that grows over there. If anybody ever cuts down all those trees and tries to work that soil, he or she will find it as rocky as a Mediterranean beach.

Shrimp, gombos, and Louisiana gumbo

In French — mostly African French, but also in France when necessary — okra are called gombos. You can't find them everywhere, that's for sure. The best source we've found so far is a little Asian grocery store up in Blois, nearly an hour's drive from Saint-Aignan. We were up there last Thursday.

I bought a kilo of fresh okra. The woman at the cash register of the little shop was surprised that I was buying a product that, she said, is mostly bought by her African customers. I explained that okra was very popular in the southern U.S., among black and white people alike. And then I started thinking about what I would do with such a lot of fresh okra.

Louisiana gumbo with rice and grilled shrimp

Gumbo, I thought — I haven't made that in years. The extra okra I would blanch and freeze for later. Making gumbo meant we needed some celery and green peppers, so Walt went to the market Saturday morning. Onions, green pepper, and celery are the usual aromatic vegetables used in Louisiana dishes like gumbo and jambalaya.

Blanched (parboiled) okra pods

The first step in making a thick, rich, soupy gumbo is to make a roux. Not a French-style roux of butter and flour that you turn into a white sauce or béchamel, but a brown roux. What you do is heat up about half a cup of vegetable oil in a pan and the sprinkle in about half a cup of flour. You stir that well and let that cook on medium heat for 30 minutes, more or less, until the flour turns a nice medium brown color, without letting it scorch.

A brown roux with onions, celery, green pepper,
herbs, and lardons cooking in it

The brown roux is both a thickening and a flavor ingredient. While it's cooking, chop up a large onion, a green bell pepper, and two or three stalks of celery. Add them to the brown roux and let it all cook together for another 45 minutes to an hour. Season with salt and pepper, and add some dried herbs — thyme, rosemary, and a couple of bay leaves, for example. Optionally, toss in a cup of lardons or diced ham too.

Add the parboiled okra pods to the vegetable-roux mixture

The next step is to add okra. Whether frozen or fresh, the okra needs to be cooked briefly in a little water or sautéed in oil before it goes into the roux mixture. Okra, whether added whole or sliced, will thicken the sauce. Add a chopped fresh tomato too, for flavor and color.

The finished gumbo after long, slow cooking

Once all the vegetables and seasonings are in and cooking, add liquid. If you're making shrimp gumbo, use shrimp broth that you make by boiling the shrimp shells in water for a few minutes. Or use chicken or vegetable broth, or even just water. You need about a liter (a quart) of liquid to make this much gumbo.

Grilled spicy shrimp

Now it just simmers for an hour or two. It will slowly thicken as it reduces. Everything is already cooked. Toward the end of the cooking time, when you think the gumbo is about ready, add some shrimp or some cooked chicken or sausage to the pan. Raw shrimp will cook quickly, say in 4 or 5 minutes. Or you can cook the shrimp separately like we did — on skewers on the grill. Any other meat you add to the gumbo should already be cooked so it just needs to heat through.

Grilled shrimp, yellow rice, and Louisiana gumbo – with gombos

The only other step is to cook some rice or grits/polenta to eat with the thick, rich gumbo. Enjoy. And don't forget the Tabasco or other hot sauce at the table.

More Paris photos

The garden is all tilled and good to go. The weather is all chilled and not so conducive. It's not exactly cold outside, but it's much cooler than it has been. Today is the 15th, and the saints de glace are over — that's the May 11, 12, and 13 saints' days, which are supposed by popular wisdom to be chilly with a chance of frost in northern France.

The weather will warm up again and we'll set plants out in the garden plots this week — too many tomatoes (but can you really have too many fresh tomatoes?), a lot of eggplants (ditto), pumpkins, cucumbers, golden sunburst squash (thanks to a friend), and others crops. Corn, haricot vert, and lima bean seeds will go directly into the ground.

Meanwhile, here are some more photos from that April 1 we spent in Paris in 2002.

Le Centenaire, avenue de la Tour-Maubourg

Le Centenaire, in the picture above, is a big café/brasserie on the avenue de la Tour-Maubourg, at the corner of the rue de l'Université. That's in the 7e arrondissement, near Invalides and not very far from the Eiffel Tower. We once had a memorable meal at the Centenaire.

Another café we've always liked is Le Champs de Mars, near
the Eiffel Tower. You could call it touristy, but the food —
steaks, dinner salads — is usually excellent.

It was in 1995. We had cut short a vacation in the Lot, at Puy-l'Evêque, to take a short side trip to Provence. It was October, and as we headed on north to Paris, where we didn't have a hotel room reserved, we had the idea of calling a vacation apartment rental agency in California to see if they had any last-minute vacancies. They did — a studio apartment on a quiet little street in the 7th. We booked it, giving them a credit card number over the phone for the payment.

People enjoying food and drink on the place de
l'Ecole-Militaire — nobody we know, however

When we arrived in Paris at noontime that October day, it was starting to rain. It was a Sunday, so the neighborhood was quiet and a lot of businesses and even restaurants were closed. We were hungry. Luckily, the Centenaire was open. We ate a roast chicken that was about the best either one of us had ever tasted, and had a side of pommes frites (French fries) and a little bottle of red wine. As I said, it was memorable. We still talk about it today.

I like this mirror image picture of a chalkboard menu.

I've been back to the Centenaire several times over the years, but the food has never been as good as that first time. Cafés are notoriously changeable. The quality of the food and the cooking all depends on who happens to be doing the ordering and working in the kitchen at any given time. Sometimes you luck out; sometimes not.

Another popular place in the 7th, the Café le Dôme

We stayed in apartments in the 7th arrondissement four or five times in the 1990s. It's more or less a residential neighborhood, but with a lot of cafés and restaurants. It also has a good if touristy market street in the rue Cler (of Rick Steves fame), and a great market on Thursday and Saturday mornings on the avenue de Saxe.

A rue St-Dominque street scene

The 7th isn't exactly central Paris, but it is in the inner ring of arrondissements, and you can walk to nearly anywhere in central Paris from there. It's a fancy neighorbood, in fact, with expensive shopping streets like the rue St-Dominique. When Michelle and Barack Obama were in Paris a few years ago, they had dinner at a 7th arrondissement restaurant called la Fontaine de Mars.

La Terrasse is a big café near the rue Cler at Ecole-Militaire

A couple of times we noticed well-known political figures in shops — National Assembly president Jean-Louis Debré shopping in a produce market on rue Cler, or former government minister Michèle Alliot-Marie at a café on the avenue de la Tour-Maubourg. We enjoyed all our stays in that part of Paris.