The felling

I just got a call from Walt. He has landed at CDG airport and now has to wait 2½ hours before his train leaves for the Tours TGV station. I'll go pick him up there just before noon. We should be back at home for our chapon au vin lunch by about one p.m. Walt thinks his suitcase might not have made the connection at Washington Dulles airport, but he made it. Just barely, he said.

I was surprised the tree felling actually happened yesterday, because the weather in the morning was horrible. We had strong, gusty winds, wind-driven rain, and just general meteorological misery. Then the clouds blew away at about 12:30 and the sun came out. Shortly thereafter, the landscaping crew showed up. There were several gusty showers over the course of the afternoon, but they just worked through them. I did this post as a slideshow because I can show all 10 pictures I want to show and it will take you only a couple of minutes to view them.

The first images show the sapin bleu (blue spruce?) tree in our back yard as it looked in the summer of 2003, when we came to live here, and again yesterday morning. You can see the tree was moribund. Only looking at old pictures made us realize what a sorry state it was in. We've always thought that it was too close to the house, and too close to the huge green deodar cedar right behind it in my photos.

The guy in the red helmet was amazing. He quickly cut off some lower branches with his little chainsaw and in a minute or two he was, I don't know, maybe 30 or 40 feet off the ground cutting the upper branches. Once there was nothing left standing but the tall, straight trunk, he tied a rope around the top of the it and the other three crew members stood a trunk-length away holding it taut. The red-helmet guy sawed through the trunk at its base and the other men pulled it down so that it landed just where they wanted it to land. It felt almost like an earthquake when it hit the ground.

Then the cleanup began. All the branches were hauled out through the back gate and run through a chipper towed behind a truck. The trunk was cut into thick disks that were thrown into a second truck. By 6 p.m., everything was cleaned up. All the while, I stayed in the house, standing at the windows and taking photos.

A cat and a tree

I have to get busy this morning. There's a six-pound free-range capon in the kitchen that I've thawed over the past 48 hours in the fridge. It's waiting to be cut up and made into a chapon au vin, based on the recipe for coq au vin. I assume you know what a capon (un chapon) is, and the au vin part refers to red wine. The bird gets cooked in red wine with broth, onions, carrots, and herbs. It's what I'm making for our afternoon meal tomorrow, after Walt gets home from New York. We'll have leftovers all weekend.

Meanwhile, a couple of good things happened yesterday. First, I took my camera out on the afternoon walk in the vineyard. The light was good, the temperature was moderate, and, most importantly, it wasn't raining. When Tasha the sheepdog and I headed out through the back yard, there was Bertie the black cat prowling around near the garden shed.

The cat jumped up on a small pile of firewood and watched us leave the yard. Before we left, I took another photo of him, above, for posterity. Bertie has been living here for 10 years now, and he'll be 14 years old in April. Unlike us, he is a Saint-Aignan native. He's basically an outdoor cat, but he spends more and more time in the house with us nowadays. He and Tasha get along famously.

I took a lot of pictures on the walk, including the one above to which I've added labels. That's because around 6 p.m. the phone rang and it was the man who owns and operates the landscaping business we hire to trim the long, tall, wide hedge around our property and tend to the trees on it. He wanted to know if he could come the next day — today — in the afternoon to cut down the big spruce tree near the house that seems to be sickly. You can see it in the photo above, along with other trees in the yard. It really is too close to the house, and it's being crowded out by the cedar and the linden.

A few minutes earlier, when the dog and I came back into the house after the walk, Bertie was waiting for us on the landing at the top of the stairs. He let me take the photo you see here. I think he was hoping for some cat treats.

Gratin de choux de Bruxelles

People in France grow and eat a lot of the cabbage variety called choux de Bruxelles — Brussels  "cabbages" or sprouts. I love them, along with all sorts of cabbages, including kale, collard greens, cauliflower, broccoli, and sauerkraut. I grow some of these varieties in our vegetable garden.

Late yesterday afternoon, I started feeling hungry and wanted to eat something green. Something warm and comforting. I remembered that there was a bag of Brussels sprouts in the freezer. Usually I buy them fresh, but you can always fall back on frozen vegetables when you haven't planned your meals in advance. This made a good supper.

You don't want to cook the sprouts too long, because they start to get a strong flavor rather than a fresh flavor. But you do want the sprouts to be tender. It's a delicate balancing act for a delicate vegetable. I made these into a gratin by cooking some flour and milk into a sauce béchamel. Or sauce à la Béchamel, named after Louis de Béchamel (or Béchameil), a famous gourmet during the time of Louis XIV (17th century).

La béchamel is a white sauce (une sauce blanche) made with milk or cream instead of water or stock. In America, we would make what we call "gravy" the same way, but using broth or meat drippings. For this gratin de choux de Bruxelles, add some grated cheese to the béchamel. Pour some sauce over the cooked sprouts in a baking dish and sprinkle on a little more grated cheese. A grating or pinch of nutmeg in the sauce (don't overdo it) is always good when you are making it with melted cheese.

Jacques Pépin gives this simple recipe for making sauce Béchamel. I think he learned it from his mother.

You can easily make a smaller quantity by using half the butter, flour, and milk.

Adjust the salt and pepper to taste.

6 Tbsp. butter
6 Tbsp. flour
2 U.S. cups milk (475 ml)
½ tsp. salt
½ tsp. pepper

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the flour and mix well with a whisk.
Cook for a few seconds and then pour in the cold milk all at once.
Turn the heat up to high and keep stirring until the sauce thickens
and comes to a strong boil (about 2 minutes).
Remove from heat and stir in salt and pepper.

Saint-Aignan, weather, and memories

It was so windy yesterday that it felt dangerous to walk into or even close to the wooded areas around the vineyard. Over the past five years, a lot of trees have fallen around here. There's no reason to tempt fate. I'm not sure what kinds of wind speeds have been recorded around the Saint-Aignan area, but they haven't been quite as violent as in the U.K. I'd estimate gusts of at least 60 mph, and maybe 75 mph. Down in Corsica, a wind gust of 219 kph was recorded yesterday. That's 130 mph.

I don't have a lot to write about or a lot of photos to post, since I've been mostly housebound for the past few days. My walks with the dog are pretty short, given the dangers presented by howling winds, falling tree, intermittent rainfall, and hordes of hunters (only on Saturdays and Sundays).

I also have had the misfortune of contracting a virus. No, my health is fine — it was a computer virus. It was either a virus or a bad video card driver. I found an undated driver (for the video card I bought in December and then installed in my new computer last week). I also found instructions for the complicated removal from my computer of an infection called the Segurazo virus. I'm not sure which fix was the good one, but whichever it was I'm glad my computer has stopped locking up while idling.

The pictures here are some panoramic shots I took of the château and other buildings in Saint-Aignan on June 21, 2003. We had arrived with our suitcases and our dog Collette exactly two weeks earlier, on June 7, to start cleaning the house we had owned since April. It was a lot of work and the weather was very hot. It was the summer of the great heat wave, la grande canicule, in all of northern France. Our container-load of furniture and other possessions wouldn't arrive until July 10 or so. We camped.

The cleaning up must have been complete. The yard was especially a mess. Wet and warm weather since mid-April that year meant that the grass had grown knee high all around the house. Walt spent many days, first with a weed-eater ("strimmer") and then with a lawn mower, both of which we had to buy immediately upon arrival, while I carried junk out of the house and garage and piled it up in preparation for repeated trips to the dump over on the other side of the Cher River. I scrubbed floors and focused especially on getting the kitchen ready to use.

Anyway, that was nearly 17 years ago. Our house has changed more in that time than has the "skyline" and riverfront of the town of Saint-Aignan (pop. about 3,000). We live about 2 miles from the château and church. The town hasn't grown much either — in fact it has lost population over the past 10 or 12 years, though the area overall has grown. That's not true of our hamlet, however. There are still just nine of us living here in the nine houses that make up the neighborhood. Five of the nine houses are not being lived in by anybody right now. One house is home to four people, a young couple with two small children.