Dry, dry, dry

And I'm not talking about the wine (though it's dry too). I'm talking about the summer of 2009. Everything around Saint-Aignan is parched. The water holes (les trous d'eau) scattered around the vineyard are either dry or nearly so. The level of the little pond out back is very low.

It's not so much that it's hot. Our high temperature did not go above 27ºC/81ºF yesterday afternoon, and it is cool this morning — 14.5ºC/58ºF. It's true that Saturday and Sunday were 90º days (or close), with temperatures near 32ºC. The weather report on TV right now says it will be that hot again today.

The pond is very low and the fish are at the surface, gulping
for air. It has also been invaded by a non-native weed. (Here's
a link to a picture of the pond in winter a couple of years ago.)

But this is nothing compared to the summer of 2003, the year of the great canicule or heat wave, when so many died of dehydration and exhaustion in France. But it is probably just as dry this year as it was back then, our first summer in Saint-Aignan.

I just looked back at rainfall statistics we've kept since 2005. Summer precipitation totals, for June, July, and August, look like this:

It seems obvious that a normal summer's rainfall here would be between 4 and 5 inches. Look at 2007 — that explains our failed garden that year. The surprising year is 2008, because looking back on it, it seemed like a cool damp summer. Maybe it was humid and cool, but it wasn't all that rainy, according to the figures. The impression depends on whether the rain falls steadily and often, or hard and infrequently.

Callie us used to getting a drink from this water hole
in the vineyard. But right now it is pretty much dry.

And August 2009 isn't over yet. The weather might change. We are probably due for a rainy spell. September is often a dry month, however, and that's good for the grape harvest.

Hot but still green

We're having a string of 90º days here in mid-August. It hasn't rained in I don't know when. It's great for the garden, but the ground is very dry and we have to water our plants for the first time in several years.

The vineyard is very green still. And the grapes are really filling out. Our routine of walking Callie twice a day continues. Each of us goes out with the dog once every day. Walt went this morning. I'll go this afternoon and tomorrow morning. Then he'll go out tomorrow afternoon and Wednesday morning. It keeps us busy. We walk a couple of miles each time.

The vineyards are carefully trimmed and beautifully green.

Callie sees deer and rabbits several times a week and of course takes off after them, chasing them into the woods. But she never stays out of sight for more than a few minutes. I call and whistle for her a couple of times and here she comes, running back. She is pretty much bonded to us and doesn't like to lose sight of us either.

This part of France is like a big park, with trees planted
in straight rows and neatly manicured.

A few days ago I was walking along a path that passes by a stand of fruit trees, a little orchard, not very far from the house. Callie was walking along ahead of me, nose to the ground, taking in all the interesting scents. I looked off to the right and saw two adult roe deer bounding away from us. We had startled them. They were probably feeding on fruit in the orchard. Callie never even noticed them. I was glad of that.

In Touraine, rows of vines appear to hug the rolling hills.

If you're American, you might wonder about racoons, opossums, and skunks here. Well, we don't have any of those (except at the zoo). The animals we do have around Saint-Aignan are two kinds of deer — smaller roe deer and bigger white-tailed deer — rabbits (hares, actually, I'm told), foxes, badgers, and red squirrels. There are no American gray squirrels in France. We have moles, but no gophers.

Our yard is fenced in, so rabbits and deer don't
get to munch on our garden plants.

There are a lot of little mouse-type mammals — more kinds than I can keep track of. Dormice, for example, which the dictionary says are "squirrel-like," and shrews, which are insectivores, not rodents. Little red mice I've seen too, but don't know what they are. There are frogs and toads, of course, and there are snakes, including poisonous vipers and harmless garden snakes. And lizards. Hedgehogs. Snails and slugs. I won't even try to start naming birds.

Stuffed tomatoes again

To make stuffed tomatoes, first you need tomatoes. Those we have got. Then you need stuffing. They sell that at the supermarket, in butcher shops, and in charcuteries in France. That makes it easy.

The stuffing is ground pork with seasonings already in it: garlic, parsley, salt, and pepper. You can add some more, of course. I added dried thyme, fennel seeds, and some more garlic and black pepper when I made tomates farcies the other day. Chopped onion would be a good addition. The stuffing is sold as farce à tomates. Or you can buy chair à saucisses — sausage meat, which is just ground pork. Fancier meat stuffings — farce fine, for example — might include some ground veal.

Tomatoes for stuffing

Anyway, I've been reading that there is a tomato shortage on the U.S. East Coast. A lot of fields of tomatoes and back-yard gardens have been affected by something called "late blight,"which can also infect potatoes. It's a kind of mildew, I think — mildiou in French — and it attacked our tomatoes here in Saint-Aignan in 2007 and 2008. It attacks the grapes in the vineyards whenever conditions are warm and humid.

Stuffed and ready for the oven. Drizzle olive oil over all...

For once, our tomatoes are completely healthy. The weather is extremely dry. Our yard is brown and crispy. We don't water it. We do water the vegetable garden, as much as we have to. On TV, they said we are under water restrictions here in the Centre region, but we have gotten no official notification of that.

After an hour in the oven

This text is designed just to "frame" my pictures of the stuffed tomatoes, which are the best I think I've ever made ... or eaten. Fennel seeds give the stuffing a really nice anisy flavor. Put the stuffing in raw, with a little raw rice in the bottom of each hollowed-out tomato. The rice will cook and soak up some of the tomato and meat liquid.

Ready to serve and eat

Cook the stuffed tomatoes in a low oven (325ºF/160ºC) for an hour or so. Turn up the heat for a few minutes at the end of the cooking if you want the tomatoes to brown a little.

It's the sugar pectin!

I only recently became aware of the fact that you can buy special sugar for making jellies, preserves, and jams — gelées et confitures — at the supermarkets in France. It costs more than plain granulated sugar, but then it contains pectin, which helps thicken the jelly. The other ingredient in the product, besides sugar (98.7%) and fruit pectin, is citric acid.

Too much jelly, but it is so good.

I had thought about trying to buy some pectin, so that my jellies and jams would be less runny, but I hadn't seen any in the supermarkets here in Saint-Aignan. I was also being kind of a purist about it. Me, need pectin? No, there's plenty in the fruit I'm picking. A few years ago, I made quince jelly — gelée de coings — and the first batch didn't jell sufficiently, in my opinion. The next batch I made, I boiled until it reached a temperature of 225ºF (107ºC) and it jelled perfectly. I concluded that cooking it until it reached that high temperature was the key to good jelly-making.

Jelly-making sugar, with pectin and citric acid in it

But when I tried it later with other jellies and jams, the end product was still too liquid. I made a huge batch of apple jelly a couple of summers ago, and it came out great — thick and jiggly. They say apples contain large amounts of pectin, and I boiled not just the apple pulp but the skins and seeds as well. That's where the pectin is. It worked great.

A couple of months ago, I made cherry preserves — confiture de cerises — using the good sour cherries from our neighborhood trees. I followed a recipe that said the way to be successful was to pit the cherries, put them in a big pot and just barely cover them with water, and boil that for 10 or 15 minutes. Then strain off the juice, put the cherries themselves aside, and make jelly with the cherry juice.

Plums from the trees in the back yard

To thicken the cherry jelly, this particular recipe called for adding a good amount of apple jelly — a pint or more, for the pectin — into the mixture. Once you've boiled the cherry and apple mixture for a few minutes, you add the cooked cherries back in and you put the confiture up in sterilized jars. The result was supposed to be a thick jelly with pieces of not-overcooked fruit in it. Mine didn't really jell, though. It stayed too liquid. And that was after I boiled the juice until it reached a pretty high temperature.

Back to square one. In July an old friend from Nomandy visited, with one of her neighbors. We were talking about jellies and jams, for some reason. The friend's neighbor asked me if I had bought special sucre gélifiant at the supermarket for my jelly-making. That such a product existed was news to me. I soon went to SuperU to check out the sugar shelves. There it was — but it was expensive. At something like €2,25/kg, it was more than twice as expensive as regular granulated sugar (€0.89/kg). I passed.

Here are the directions, in French of course.

On the way home, I stopped to buy a few things at the Ed hard-discount store. There I saw Ed's brand of jelly-making sugar, and it was only €1.50/kg. I wasn't even planning to make any more jam or jelly until autumn, when the apples will be ripe. Apple jelly is easy to make. And if I could get some quinces, I'd make quince jelly too. Now the neighbors' tree is covered in quinces, and they've said I can have an many as I want.

The fruit and sugar macerate together for hours
before getting cooked.

I ended up buying 4 kg of Ed's sucre gélifiant, figuring I would use it soon enough. And soon enough came sooner than I thought, when the plums on the trees around our garden shed started ripening. I was determined to ignore them, thinking there weren't that many of them anyway. And I had already made two batches of plum sauce this summer. "No more jelly!", I told myself.

One afternoon — it was when Susan and Simon visited recently — I made the grave mistake of tasting one of the plums off our trees. It was amazingly sweet and succulent. How could I possibly ignore such luscious fruit? Well, by just letting it all fall to the ground and get eaten by ants and wasps — that's how. It turned out I wasn't capable of doing that.

It's only six jars. Well, six more jars, in addition to
all the other ones already in the pantry.

A couple of days ago I went out and picked two kilos of the delicous ripe plums. I carefully pitted them, cutting away any soft spots. Some were excessively ripe, but they were in good shape. They smelled incredible. I kept thinking of the jar of perfectly jelled, sweet plum jam that Caroline's mom brought us when they came over for apéritifs a couple of weeks ago. How did she accomplish that? Is it some Dutch secret?

This time, to make the plum preserves, I followed the directions on the packages of Mi Perla sucre gélifiant. Mix together equal weights of the sugar and of ripe fruit, the package said. Do nothing but wait until the sugar completely dissolves in the liquid rendered by the fruit. (I ended up leaving the sugar on the fruit for nearly 24 hours, stirring it three or four times during that period.) After that, what you do is boil the mixture on high heat for 5 to 7 minutes, stirring constantly. That's all the cooking it needs.

At the end of the 5 to 7 minutes, skim the foam off the top of the jam. Ladle the jelly into sterilized jars and screw on the lids. Turn them upside down and let them cool that way. You'll hear the lids pop when they seal.

The resulting jelly is thick and... well, jelled. Now that it's had a chance to cool overnight, it doesn't move at all in the jars when I turn them upside down. Who knew? It's not magic. It's that pectin sugar. It works.

Now I have to persuade myself not to make any more jam or jelly. We have plenty. We don't even eat that much of the stuff.

Nice August

Enjoying a nice month of August: As you can see, the tomatoes are growing like crazy. Now the big round ones are ripening. This morning: stuffed tomatoes, using farce à tomates (seasoned sausage meat) that I bought at the supermarket.

I just went out and did a fairly thorough watering of the garden. The white eggplants are getting big. There are dozens of little purple eggplants. The ears of corn continue to fill out, as do the lima, wax, and pole beans.

This week, I found the car I want to buy. Here's a picture of the "old" car — it is nearly 9 years old now — the Peugeot 206. It's a good car that we will probably keep, at least for a while. We can always sell it later if we decide we really don't need two cars.

The Peugeot 206 has been a good little car.

Walt spends an hour or two every day sawing wood for the winter. This week we set up the tent in the yard to see what shape it is in. It had been 3 years since the last time we put it up. We slept in it night before last. It was nice a cool out there, compared to the house.

Nice campground

I keep hoping these little green tomatoes will ripen.
The little "artichoke" plants are doing well.

A hot August sunrise over the vineyard

I bought two rabbits at the supermarket on Wednesday. I plan to make rabbit rillettes (potted meat) again. Or maybe lapin à la moutarde (rabbit in a mustard sauce). After the stuffed tomatoes, of course, which I'm off to prepare now.

Eyes on a Citroën

Walt and I have decided we need a new car. Well, not a voiture neuve, but a nouvelle voiture — a used car, une voiture d'occasion. For the small amount of driving that we do — 6,000 km, or 3,600 miles, over the past 12 months — we don't need to buy a new car and suffer the depreciation costs.

What we need is a slightly bigger vehicle than the Peugeot 206. We've been thinking about a station wagon — a used Renault Mégane Estate, a Peugeot 307 SW, or a Citroën Xsara or Xantia wagon, maybe. Out here in the country, I think it's better to stick with a French car, because all the mechanics know how to work on them and parts are easy to find.

The other body style that would be appropriate would be what they call a monospace here in France: a Renault Scenic, a Citroën Picasso, or an Opel Mériva, for example. There are a lot of Opels, a German make, on the roads in France. And VWs, for that matter. The monospace vehicles are a sort of minivan or station wagon — they are bigger than hatchbacks. I think examples of this kind of car available in the U.S. might be the Toyota Matrix and the Nissan Versa.

I'm leaning toward buying a Citroën. In fact, in 2003, when I bought the Peugeot 206, I really had already decided I wanted a Citroën. But the Peugeot is the car I found, and I needed to buy a car fast, because the rental car we had was costing us a lot of money. The 206 was a used car, and it was just sitting there on the lot at the Garage Danger in Saint-Aignan. It had a one-year warranty on it, and the price was reasonable given its relatively big diesel engine, automatic air conditioning and windshield wipers, and general good looks.

My nine-year-old Peugeot is a little hatchback and the back seat is a tight squeeze. There's almost no leg room. It's really a two-seater, as my mechanic said to me. So what we want now is a real four- or five-seater car, with greater cargo capacity. We think we might try to start going camping again in the summertime — in California, we did that a lot — and we don't see how the Peugeot 206 could accommodate the dog, ourselves, the tent, sleeping bags, coolers, clothes, groceries, water, wine and all the other stuff we'd want to haul along on a camping trip.

I want a Citroën just for the fun of being able to say I drive one. For a lot of Americans, Citroën is synonymous with the old 2CV, but the fact is that Citroën makes a full line of modern, innovative vehicles. The company was bought out by Peugeot years ago, so a lot of Citroëns and Peugeots share engines, transmissions, and other components.

My mechanic has had a very nice-looking Citroën Berlingo on his used-car lot for a few days now. He's closed this week for his annual vacation, so I haven't been able to talk to him about it yet. But it looks like the ideal vehicle. I've been reading about it and reviews say the Berlingo drives and handles more like a car than like a truck. It's definitely spacious for its size, as you can see from the pictures. It sort of reminds me of the Jeep Cherokee Sport W. had in California, but it's smaller. We loved that Jeep and kept it for 11 years.

One of my requirements for a car is that it have a diesel engine. A majority of French cars do nowadays. My Peugeot 206 is a diesel and I like it. Diesel engines are poweful, with a lot of torque for getting up hills at low speeds. They are much cleaner, quieter, and peppier than they were 30 years ago. Diesel fuel (gazole or gasoil in French) is available everywhere, and it's 20% cheaper than gasoline/petrol (essence in French). A diesel engine gets 25% better mileage than an equivalent gasoline engine. And a diesel engine will last about twice as long.

When the garage opens for business again on Tuesday, I'll be going over there to talk to the owner. We're leaning toward keeping the Peugeot and becoming a two-car household again, as we were from 1983 until 2003.

The fruit of the wild carrot

Did you know that the plant we in America call "Queen Anne's Lace" is known elsewhere, including in France, as the wild carrot? It actually is the wild carrot, as Susan of Days on the Claise has pointed out. It grows wild in Asia, Europe, North America (where it was introduced by humans), and elsewhere around the world. It reputedly originated in Afghanistan.

The wild carrot is in theory edible, but the root turns woody very early in the plant's development cycle, and that makes it a lousy food. The "domesticated" carrots we eat were developed in Holland in the 16th and 17th centuries by a process of careful selection to emphasize the root's desirable culinary characteristics: sweetness and tenderness.

Lots of wild carrots out in the vineyard

Here in Saint-Aignan, wild carrots grow everywhere, including around the vineyards and along the roads that run through them. Carrots, including wild carrots, are biennial plants. They flower in their second year. And then the flower becomes a big cluster of seeds — which are little fruits, in reality.

The Queen Anne's Lace flower in its later stages of development

In French the flower cluster is called the inflorescence and, in its later stages, it becomes the infrutescence, or fruit cluster. According to the French Wikipedia entry on the subject, « Les fruits sont des diakènes qui portent des côtes munies d'aiguillons participant à leur diffusion par les animaux. » That's a mouthful.

The fruit cluster of the wild carrot

"The fruits are diachenes with needled ribs that facilitate their diffusion by animals." In other words, the seeds stick in animals' fur. We cavalierly call them seeds, but it fact they are little fruits with a single seed in the middle. Did you know that carrot seeds have been used as a contraceptive? Take a teaspoon of them for birth control; Hippocrates supposedly prescribed them for that purpose more than 2,000 years ago.

A field of Queen Anne's Lace

Be careful if you handle wild carrot plants. You can have a reaction called "phytophotodermatitis." That's a reddish rash that can turn into blisters on your skin. The blistering is caused by hypersensitivity to ultraviolet light, so get indoors as fast as you can if you get the rash.

L'inflorescence de la carotte sauvage

What a wonderful world we live in! Danger is everywhere.

Sliced eggplants and tomatoes au gratin

Yesterday we picked the first eggplants (aubergines) from the 2009 vegetable garden. There were four of them and they had gotten pretty big — just right, actually. I was impatient to make a dish we've really enjoyed in past summers: a casserole of eggplant, tomato and cheese au gratin.

This gratin is easy to make but takes a little time because the eggplant needs to be pre-cooked. That is, you cut the eggplants into rounds, or slice them the long way, about ¼" thick. Then you oil a baking sheet — if you have a silicon baking pad, that's a good thing to use, as parchment paper would be, to keep the slices from sticking — and arrange the eggplant pieces in a single layer, making sure both sides of the slices are oiled. Olive oil, or a mixture of olive and other vegetable oil, is the best. Sprinkle on a little salt.

Tomatoes from the garden

Put the baking sheet in a hot oven (200ºC/400ºF) for about 15 minutes or until the eggplant slices are sizzling and start to take on a golden color. Repeat the operation as many times as necessary to cook all the eggplant slices you're using, or arrange them on several pans and do them all at once. In our little oven, we needed to cook three batches.

Meanwhile, slice 6 or 8 tomatoes fairly thickly. There are no precise quantities here. As the eggplant slices come out of the oven, layer them in a baking dish and then put a layer of tomatoes slices over them. Sprinkle on salt and pepper, and then put a layer of grated or crumbled cheese on top of the tomatoes. Add herbs — basil is really good, but parsley works too — and sprinkle on some paprika if you want. A combination of smoked and hot paprika is delicious.

Sprinkle on some paprika — sweet, smoked, or hot

Repeat those steps one more time, and then put on a final layer of eggplant slices on top. Drizzle some olive oil over all, and then put on a final layer of cheese. Bake the casserole in a 350ºF/180ºC oven for an hour or so, covering it with foil if the cheese on top starts to get too brown.

What cheese to use? Ricotta and mozzarella come to mind first, but other cheeses, including Swiss Gruyère or French Comté or Cantal would work. Jack cheese would be good. Yesterday, we used "ricotta" in the middle of the layers and mozzarella on top.

Sliced mozzarella cheese on top

About that "ricotta" — I made my own, using a recipe contributed by David Lebovitz and published by Elise on Simply Recipes. Let me say that it was easy to make and turned out to be really delicious. It uses 2 quarts of whole milk and a cup of whole-milk yogurt with a little vinegar and salt. You can add ½ cup of cream if you want — and I did want to, using French crème fraîche épaisse. The recipe worked perfectly. If it needed any modification, it would be the addition of just a little more salt.

Here's the finished casserole

However, the resulting cheese is not really ricotta. It's cottage cheese, and I'm really glad to know how to make cottage cheese because, as far as I know, we can't buy it here in Saint-Aignan. We can often find ricotta, but not always. The cottage cheese worked very well with the eggplant and tomatoes, but it has a consistency that is different from the smoothness of ricotta.

Cooked eggplant slices, raw tomato slices,
and crumbled cottage cheese

Here's what Marcella Hazan says about ricotta in The Classic Italian Cookbook (1980):

Ricotta is a soft, bland, white milk product made from whey, that watery part of the milk which separates from the curd when this is made into cheese... A passable substitute is the more long-lived whole-milk ricotta readily available at most [U.S.] supermarkets.

Perhaps because they are so similar in appearance, some authors suggest that ricotta and cottage cheese are interchangeable. This is a most grievous error. Cottage cheese is completely un-Italian in taste, and should not be contemplated as a replacement for ricotta.

Marcella Hazan states her opinion without beating around the bush, ça c'est clair. At any rate, I thought the cottage cheese was very good, but it was certainly different from ricotta. Judging from what M.H. says, I've never tasted authentic ricotta, which is by-product of cheese-making and is made only in certain parts of Italy.

By the way, good additions to this kind of dish, replacing part of the eggplant or just added in, would be some roasted red bell peppers, or some slices of zucchini treated the same way as the eggplant slices. Here's another idea using the same ingredients from 2004, and one from 2008.

Eggplants and other produce

Today we are going to pick and cook our first eggplants of the summer. We have plenty of tomatoes and even a zucchini to cook them with. And I'm going to make ricotta cheese, thanks to a recipe by David Lebovitz, published by Elise on Simply Recipes. All that should make a good gratin or casserole.

A long purple aubergine, splashed with muddy water

We planted a mixed packet of eggplant (aubergine) seeds in the spring, starting them in little pots. They all — about 20 of them — came up and have now started producing fruit. All the fruit looks the same except on one plant. The eggplants are long and purple, but that different plant is covered with little (for the moment) round, white eggplants, with just a slight purple tint on them.

The fruit of the eggplant

Our summertime routine has kicked in now. We don't have any visitors on the schedule until September. The regular routine means walking the dog twice a day, doing laundry, picking vegetables from the garden, and cooking and eating them. Taking a lot of pictures is always part of my daily routine. Walt is sawing wood for the winter. He cuts the grass whenever it needs it. I do a lot of cooking.

Tomatoes ready for the picking

Yesterday I again spent a few hours in the garden weeding — it seems impossible to keep up with the weeds. I watered everything thoroughly and that made it easier to pull the weeds out of the soil. I'm trying to make sure the corn, rhubarb, and collard greens are getting enough water. Then I spent a good hour just tying tomato plants and vines up to their stakes and poles, to try to get as many tomatoes as possible up off the ground. If the weather turns damp, tomatoes touching the ground will rot.

Tomatoes and a stray black-eyed Susan

It's a lot of dirty work, but I'm sure we will be glad we did it all when winter comes and we start enjoying the produce we will have processed. Not that we are not enjoying it now too. As I said yesterday, you can tell that the season is changing again, and that makes you want to get ready. Pretty soon it will be two months since the summer solstice.

I thought the corn had worms but they turned out
to be little pieces of the corn tassels stuck to the leaves.
(Click the pictures with your mouse to enlarge them.)

After all the watering and weeding I did yesterday, we of course had a couple of good rain showers late yesterday afternoon. The rain poured down for an hour or so in all, but the sun kept shining. It was warm and pleasant out on the front terrace.

Meanwhile, here's what the wine grapes are doing out in the vineyard.

All this is probably a little monotonous and boring, but that too is life in Saint-Aignan. It's not nearly as monotonous as it will be in November, December, and January, however. So we are trying to enjoy it to the maximum. Spending time outside is part of that enjoyment, even if it means doing manual labor and getting dirty.

Summer > autumn

Do you suppose that insects, like bees, can have allergies to pollen, the way humans and other mammals can? I hope the one just below isn't allergic to the pollen it is coated in. The bee was moving very slowly. I didn't hear any little sneezes, however.

A bee on an artichoke flower

That was a summery moment. Yesterday and the day before, though, I started noticing signs of fall. Maybe it's because the weather has been so dry that some of the leaves are turning brown, red, or gold — autumn colors. Or maybe it's because the mornings are cool and the afternoons are still very warm, or even hot.

Browns and yellows

Maybe it's because the days are getting perceptibly shorter. That full moon we had a couple of days ago might have had something to do with it.

Reds and purples

Sometimes I think I might just be getting used to having seasons again, after nearly 20 years on the California coast without them. You end up looking forward to the next one.

« Petit à petit, l'oiseau fait son nid », goes a well-known French saying. "Little by little, the bird makes its nest." That's what's happening here.

Now it's time to go out and water the garden.

Canning, cutting, and cavorting

I spent a good part of the day processing tomatoes, as you might imagine. I used about two thirds of the harvest, I'd estimate, and I ended up with about 4 liters/quarts of puree. It cooked pretty much all day: a couple of hours in the morning before we sieved the seeds and skins out, and then at least a couple of hours in the afternoon, on low heat, so that it would reduce and thicken.

Once I sterilized some jars, put in the hot tomato puree, and put the tops on them, the lids all popped down, meaning they were sealed. I planned to put the jars in a boiling-water bath to process them for long-term storage, but I neglected to ascertain in advance that the jars would actually fit in one of our big stock pots.



They wouldn't. They are too tall. So this morning we ended up opening the jars, pouring the purée into plastic containers, and putting it all in the freezer after all. The jars will go to the recycling center. They're of no use to us.

Yesterday afternoon Walt started sawing wood for this coming winter's fires in the wood stove. He has to cut each meter-long log into three pieces, because that's what will fit in the stove. Below is a picture of our wood storage area, which is a carport we don't use otherwise.

The woodshed and the chevalet

Under the carport, you can see not only Walt's impeccable organizational skills on display, but you can also see his new chevalet. It's the thing he puts the logs on so that he can cut through them with the chainsaw. I think in English it's called a tooit. I figured that out because Walt said he would start cutting wood as soon as he got "a round tooit." And sure enough, as soon as he got the chevalet, he started. It doesn't look very round, but sometimes arcane technical terms have unintuitive meanings.

Up the hill and through the woods

When the tomato puree was in the ill-fated jars, I took Callie out for the afternoon trot through woods and vines. We headed north, down through the woods to the bottom of the hill, a few hundred yards on a flat path, and the west along another path through woods, up the hill to a paved road.

Callie alongside "her" rows of vines

The narrow paved road (about 9 feet wide) is the Route Touristique mapped out for people — tourists — to be able to drive through the vineyards and admire the neat rows of grapevines. Callie hates the paved road, so she hurries along, wanting nothing more than to get to a place where she can jump over the ditch and run down a row of vines to a place where cars can't go. We didn't see a single car along the half-mile of road we walked on, actually.

Callie in the tall grass

We cut across a field that is lying fallow. It is overgrown with various grasses and a lot of carottes sauvages — wild carrots. They're what we call Queen Anne's Lace. Isn't it very French to call a wildflower by a culinary name?