Autumn 2018 Southwest France Walks: Asnières-sur-Nouère

The Calm One and I have resumed hiking in our departement of Charente because as autumn approaches, conditions for country walks improve to the point where we can't pretend it's OK being pallid lumps staring at pixels. Now if they were pixies, that would be fine since such a splendid sight certainly would bring roses to our cheeks. We have since bought a recently published guide for trails in our area but for this time, The Calm One chose off the Web a fairly short stroll just north of Angoulême on undemanding terrain so we can become acclimated to tougher ones as the season progresses. Since the info gleaned was not current, the directions did not take into account the recently extended LGV (high-speed railway) interfering with best laid plans along with our lovely electric car's (Renault Zoe) GPS. The Calm One needed to take off his figurative hat and don one of his many others, that is, The Pathfinder . . .

The Pathfinder stopped here to have a think, rustle through a road map whose upper limit just grazed where we wanted to go, and for me to take a photo of a harvested field & a church steeple

The Pathfinder was relentless as pathfinders are. Drive for a while, then pull over for a while. Where is Asnières-sur-Nouère? Why is there not a single signpost for it? he mumbled while I noted that we were parked by a cemetery where a grave's stone cross could be seen peeking over the wall under the most blue of skies. 

The Pathfinder has a shining past: he has got us through a cross-country trek across America; tramping through Oregon coastal forests; meanderings in the Alps; bouncing around the Cornish peninsula; roaming the Scottish Highlands; ploughing through congested cities throughout Europe. So I let him do his thing, though I could not refrain from saying, Hey, look a path going into a forest, why don't we just go and explore? He snorted and shortly after we arrived at our destination. And a very intriguing one it turned out to be. This village's population except in the first three quarters of the 1900s where it was halved has managed to stay the same since the late 1700s (the village however dates back to medieval times) at around 1200 inhabitants. Way back then, they raised donkeys, hence the village's name is derived from the word for donkey (âne) and the villagers were called Les Garobiers because they grew la garob (carob pods) to feed the donkeys. Confusion still addled us because as we walked past a small square to an ancient lavoir (a long, communal, washing stone-basin) we understandably did not notice the tiny, faded, coloured mark placed close to the ground that the path started here so we headed in the opposite direction into the village proper where we passed a stone house, though deeply fissured along one side . . .

. . . has stood the test of time and nowadays gets to sport both an electric lantern and beginning-to-colour Virginia creeper.

We continued further into the village and spotted another beauty of a stone dwelling with a curved edge . . .

. . . and its wooden door with a slightly bent lintel . . .

. . . along with its rounded window shutter.

As we were traipsing along narrow streets, it occurred to us that the path must be by the lavoir, and it was. Soon we were out in the countryside . . .

. . .  and passing by vineyards . . .

. . . and getting close to grapes, in all their delicate colouring, warm chartreuse, cool lime-green, with a touch of rose here, a tinge of violet there.

Upon returning when we passed the side of the house smothered with Virginia creeper, this time, I noticed a shuttered window partially obscured with the climber and a fine dusting of rust-coloured, fallen leaves along the gutter. The season surely is changing. 

À la prochaine!

RELATED LINKS

French Wikipedia article for Asnières-sur-Nouère
Official site for Asnières-sur-Nouère 

Late Summer: Harvest's Lead Into Autumn & Recipes

Though The Calm One prefers his raspberries sugared and smothered with whipped cream, these fresh-from-the-garden berries are pretty good on their own. After the first raspberry crop came in about late June which were born on previous season's canes, the patch was weeded, fertilised, mulched, and faithfully watered to encourage a copious second cropping on new canes. There are probably two more bowls to be had before harvesting will be complete. The tops of these canes will be pruned, leaving the rest of them to overwinter so they can produce berries for the first crop come next June.

The carrot crop promises to be abundant though it will be at least a couple of weeks before it will be ready to harvest. Until then, the rows which were thickly sowed will be thinned to provide some lovely baby carrots. These can be be trimmed, scrubbed, and simmered whole with some butter in a covered skillet.

Beefsteak tomatoes and romas continue to be harvested. About 36 kg (80 pounds) so far! Since we have a large freezer, all I have to do to keep on top of this red deluge is to wash and dry them, then to throw them into large ziplock freezer bags. Once frozen, if run under cold water, the skins can be rubbed off with your hands. Most of them will be made into concentrate (for soup) and sauce (See related links below for recipes).

The beet harvest is done and processed. They were scrubbed, tops trimmed, tails left on, boiled till tender, placed under cold running water so their skins, tops & tails could be rubbed off with my hands, and packed into ziplock freezer bags. An easy and simple way to serve both tomatoes and beets is to place slices, thin or thick (we like ours thick!) on a bed of couscous and then top with tuna/shrimp/chicken salad. For tuna salad served with beets, crème fraîche is a much better 'lubricant' than mayonnaise because beets and sour cream is a match made in heaven. Your favourite dressing and spices/herbs could be sprinkled over the salads.

There's enough in the freezer for borscht with scrumptious beef and onion dumplings all year round. Detailed instructions to make this fabulously satisfying meal in a bowl can be found here (some of the photos got corrupted in this ancient post, but the text remains intact). Though it takes two days to make it, there is plenty left over which can be frozen for many a meal. However, to lessen the work involved, canned beef broth can be used along with minced beef instead of homemade broth and simmered stewing beef.

Stir in a bit of crème fraîche for a ravishing raspberry-pink colour punch. Its slight sourness is a nice foil to the natural sweetness of the beets.

A couple of months ago, Daifla variety of potatoes, looked like this:

When their haulms (above ground foliage) are completely spent, they are ready to harvest.

This variety may be a prolific flowerer and a high yielder but the actual taters are not pretty. But what texture, flavour, and colour! These potatoes, made into a simple soup . . .

. . . shimmer with a golden glow as if a certain percentage of their flesh contains cream. They are exceedingly delicious with a smooth, rich texture.

Here are basic instructions to make this soup: A large potato per person should suffice (I usually make enough for eight servings). Saute a minced onion till soft, translucent, and yellow, which takes about 5 minutes. Add cubed potatoes. Barely cover with boiling water (an electric tea kettle is perfect for this) or with water right from the tap and bring to a boil, and then a simmer till potatoes are fork tender, about twenty minutes. Remove half of them and reserve. Using a stick mixer, blend smooth right in the pot. Add milk to get desired consistency. A couple of heaping tablespoons of crème fraîche ups the creamy quotient. Return the reserved potatoes to the pot. Salt to taste. Unabashedly plop some chunks of Bleu d'Auvergne into the serving bowls. Soup will keep in the fridge for several days, but can not be frozen as freezing changes the texture of the potatoes into something unrecognisable. 

À la prochaine!

RELATED LINKS

Have lots of tomatoes? Make estratto (tomato paste)! Second paragraph includes links to instructions for making tomato-sausage sauce and stewed tomatoes.

You Grow Food To Process . . . (Harvest 2017), includes instructions to make tomato concentrate to be used in soups

Summer Break 2018

Frenzied spring gardening has morphed into mostly watering and pulling some beets and carrots from time to time. 

Front garden / foreground: lavender, plum tree, abelia, shasta daisies, spirea; background: asters, Japanese anemones, ivy, rose of Sharon

So there's lots of time available to lounge under our ivy-covered pergola overlooking the potager while consuming vats of Banana Agua Fresca (recipe) as temperatures approach 36 degrees C (97 degrees F) in the coming week . . .

. . . and reading these books (reviews to follow) as summer unfolds:

Notorious RBG: The Life And Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon

Against Empathy: The Case For Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom

The Intimacies Of Four Continents by Lisa Lowe

The Calm One recently got us some solar lamps. They are lovely on their own, but with a full moon and stars blinking in a clear night sky overhead, all is enchanted.

View is from the back of the garden towards the patio

May your beaux jours (literal translation: beautiful days, that is, summer) be enjoyable, interesting, and most of all relaxing! Souped-up Garden will return in August.

The Cool Banana: Nog, Smoothie & Agua Fresca

See those almost too-ripe-to-eat, brown-spotted bananas in your fruit bowl? Pop them in the fridge so they can get very cold. With a stick mixer and additions of different proportions of milk, crème fraîche, and water, three different summer beverages are yours for the taking. Ice cubes and a dusting of cinnamon come in handy too.

Let's commence with the one with the thickest consistency which is the banana-nog. For two small servings, and this could be presented for dessert, break off chunks of one medium, peeled, exceedingly almost embarrassingly ripe (remove any fibrous strings) banana that is well-chilled into the stick mixer's cylindrical jar.

Cover half-way with cold milk and add a large dollop of crème fraîche  (sour cream could be substituted).

Blend until smooth. Our 750 watt jobbie did it in about twenty seconds.

I deliberately included a few chunks that was discoloured to give it a slight fermented edge to simulate alcohol so the nog looked more on the amber side then the yellow. Just imagine that's really added whiskey that was aged in ex-sherry casks. The banana seeds look like nutmeg! A little mound of crème fraîche could be put on top.

For two  medium-sized glasses of smoothies, add enough cold milk just to cover the banana chunks. Blend till velvety.

 Top with banana slices and cinnamon.

To make two largish glasses of aqua fresca, cover the banana chunks with an inch (2.5 cm) of milk and then add another inch (2.5 cm) of  water. Get those ice cubes clinking by adding quite a few.

Tumbling the ice cubes into the glasses causes a creamy head to form which is delightful.

Though sugar, honey, or maple syrup could be added, they were all fine without added sweetening. Remember, the bananas are RIPE, much more than bananas that are eaten out of hand. I love all three, but the agua fresca is my fave.

À la prochaine!

Summer Is Right Around The Corner . . .

In about a week, it will be officially summer. There has been consistent rains for the last month which has delayed garden tasks that would have been best done before June such as sowing annual flowers like varied-coloured, long-term-flowering cosmos and zinnias; the last of the edible crops, graceful, stylish Tuscan kale with its smoky green-black leaves; fast-growing cover crops like mustard and tansy to revive the completely harvested pea beds (they provided about 5 litres of pods!). Hopefully, if we can believe the forecast, the next week will be sunny and the soggy soil should be workable fairly soon so those postponed tasks can be eventually completed. Regardless, the garden is humming along, with beloved-by-the bees, aromatic lavender, punchy poppies that reseed themselves through the years, and haughty Queen Elizabeth roses.

The potato variety, Daifla, flowers profusely. (That's the raspberry patch in the background, and if you look closely you will see the berries.) Potato blooms signify that the tubers are being formed. In about two months, when the haulms (the growth above ground) have wilted yellow, it will be time to harvest.

The dark green of ivy makes a good backdrop for rhubarb and potatoes. In the upper left, a drooping branch of a Mirabelle plum tree can be seen with its immature fruit looking like green olives. When ripe, they will be a glorious gold flushed with red.

Most of our potato blooms are pure white but there are a few which are tinted mauve. An interesting aside is that Marie Antoinette, a passionate lover of flowers, was known to have tucked some potato blossoms in her hair during the time Antoine Parmentier was trying to convince the movers and shakers that the New World upstart wasn't poisonous. 

Every other day, there's enough raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries to fill up the dessert bowl. Since blueberries must have acid soil to flourish, our bush is grown in a pot with the desired potting mix.

The rambunctious wild area which harbours lizards, hedgehogs, birds, and insects is festooned with bramble blossoms. The middle bed is filled with bushy Roma tomato plants and in front of them are beets which since have seen the trusty cultivator tool which has cleared away the prolific clover.

During a month these well-established daylilies put out many blooms, each lasting just a day. There are cultivars which are everblooming from early summer to autumn which will soon find a place in our garden.

David Austin climbing rose, Falstaff, is beginning a second round of flowering.

In the front garden, yet more lavender and also Shasta daisies are just starting to bloom. The other day, our neighbour across the street told me that she loves seeing, as does her visitors, the small green haven in front of our home. After all this time, it is known by a few that je jardine comme une folle (I garden like a madwoman). The English lavender is putting on the show right now while the late-blooming French lavender waits to take the spotlight in about a month.

From the vantage point of a reclining, cushy chair under the pergola, this is what I get to see: foliage of mums, rose of Sharon, calla lilies, ivy, two enormous, neighbouring spruce trees, and the imperious blooms of a Queen Elizabeth rose. All of this exuberant growth exists in an urban space. Though I can hear the distant din of traffic, I pretend that it's the sound of ocean waves.

À la prochaine!

Book Review / The Tulip by Anna Pavord

Ms Pavord's tome, coming to 439 pages, contains many intriguing and beautiful colour illustrations. Much beguiling information derived from extensive research is divulged. Tulips which 'broke', that is, became variegated, were highly sought after. However, it was much later that the reason for the flaming and feathering of different colours was discovered which was a virus transported by aphids. Before then, one method was to put the desired colours in powdered paint on their tulip beds, expecting the colours somehow miraculously to transmute the flowers.

Species tulips naturally abound just in Central Asia and the Caucasus.  It was only in 1451 that the first known cultivar was found in the garden of Sultan Mehmed II. So when did our globetrotting floral subject begin its travels? Based on the flowers in medieval paintings before the 15th century, as in the Portinari Altarpiece which shows no tulips, but red lilies, white and blue irises, and violets, tulips stayed in the east until that time.

Goodness! I have water glasses similar to the one in the painting!

Though the Dutch may be historically entangled with tulip mania which lasted just a few years from 1634 to 1637, they were not connected to many significant developments in the adoption of tulips by Europeans. Most likely the first introduction of the bulbs was accomplished by a Frenchmen. The first shipments of tulip bulbs arrived in Antwerp from Constantinople and the first known tulip bloomed in Augsburg, Bavaria. As for the Dutch tulip mania, there was much confusion as to legal settlements regarding complicated ownership since more than one person could have dibs on a single tulip bulb along with the increasing involvement of marketplace futures causing a tangled chain of interactions encouraging the government to put strictures on trading tulips. There are several explanations why the mania took off in the Netherlands and one was that the Plague which happened shortly before raised wages because there was a sharp decline in workers, therefore allowing extravagant purchases.

Criticism has been levelled at Ms Pavord for not translating French from which she often excerpts. Sometimes she summarises in English the untranslated section, but mostly she doesn't. She does that a bit with Latin and additionally quotes early modern english. This latter aspect puts her style in perspective for me: she is trying to transport us back into the 16th century without the help of period costumes and speaking actors. It's a bit off-putting but worth the inconvenience because if you let yourself go with the flow of the different languages, you get a sense of the type of interconnected linguistic world in which European horticulturalists lived at that time. 

À la prochaine!

RELATED POSTS

Early-Spring Garden 2018
Tulips, Irises & Sweet Violets
The Tulips Keep Coming . . .
Tulip Season Draws to a Close

OTHER BOOK REVIEWS

Book review / The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt by Robert I. Sutton

Book Review / Florike Egmond's An Eye For Detail: Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science, 1500-1630

Book Review / Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook: Artisanal

Baking From Around The World by Jessamyn Waldman

Rodriguez with Julia Turshen

Book Review/The Confidence Game: The Psychology Of The Con And Why We Fall For It Every Time By Maria Konnikova

Book Review / The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates

RELATED LINK

Amazon listing for The Tulip by Anna Pavord

French Cheese: Comté

Ah, the confusing world of Gruyère! It seems, and that verb is the best to use in the realm of perplexity in which such a venerable cheese finds itself, Gruyère is a cheese made in the eponymous town in Switzerland. Simple, you say? Get ready for a wave of undulating nuance. A similar cheese made in France is called the same name. Additionally there are several French cheeses that are considered to be Gruyère but have different appellations like Beaufort, Emmental, and the subject of this post, the gorgeous and glorious Comté, one of the finest cheeses in the world. Being a mountain cheese, and since salt was not the easiest commodity to drag up steep inclines, it was used sparingly. Because of less salt its meltability increased. Comté's versatility will cheer up a cheese platter as well as dishes like fondue, croque-monsieur (grilled cheese), and savoury tarts.

There are two grades, the brown label which denotes possible holes and the green label which means that the texture will be more smooth. The latter is preferred for cheese platters. The affinage is rather broad and can be anywhere between a minimum of 4 months to 18 and longer. My beauty is aged twenty months and has the green label so I am going to use it on platters besides cooking with it.

Based on the age, I am guessing that the cows whose milk produced it did not dine on summer pastures. If they did, the colour would be more golden because of the higher carotene content.

When first moving here all those years ago, I sampled a bit of Comté on a platter presented by our dinner hostess. The other cheeses were way more impressive to my tastebuds and from that time on, I got my hands on every other French cheese I could. My conjecture is that our host must have served a less aged version, because when I tasted some the other day, I was impressed to an embarrassing degree. What degree would that be, you ask? I climbed up on our roof and yelled, Eat aged Comté. Now. Please. Thank you. (Note to The Calm One: our roof badly needs repairs.) The flavour hovers between tangy and sweet tinged with caramel, and I mean hover, you're never quite sure which of those two tastes will dominate, keeping your palate awake. The texture is similar to the richest nougat, unctuous beyond belief with a touch of gooeyness before giving way to an umami cloud pervading every nook and cranny of my very fortunate mouth. It is essential to bring the cheese to room temperature to get the full sensory experience.

Spying some leftover pastry dough along with several leeks and crème fraîche in the fridge, I created Comté Crème Fraîche Leek Pastry Bites to celebrate the serendipity of having those ingredients at my fingertips.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Slice leeks lengthwise almost but not cutting through the root end. Splay the leek layers while rinsing under water to get any dirt or sand out. Slice thinly, discarding the root. Gently saute with a bit of butter and water in a covered skillet for about five to ten minutes till translucent and soft. Put just enough crème fraîche along with the leeks in a bowl in order to use a stick mixer to get a rough blend. Salt to taste.

While the leeks are simmering, roll out dough and cut into five-centimetre (two-inch) circles. Pierce with the tines of a fork to prevent puffing up during baking. Bake about ten minutes. Remove and switch oven to broil function.

Put a dollop of leek mixture on each round.

Top with a small square of Comté, squishing it into the tiny mound of leek puree.

Broil for just about a minute, fairly close to the heat. Remember Comté melts fast. The smokiness of aged Comté finds its match with a Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Such a pairing made for a lovely late supper. Their small size allows an easy pop into the mouth without crumbs so they would be great for stand-up buffets. They could be put together ahead of time and then placed under the broiler when needed. Small rich crackers mostly likely would be a fine substitute for pastry.

À la prochaine!

OTHER FRENCH CHEESE POSTS

Coulommiers 

Pont-l'Évêque

Maroilles

Reblochon
Bleu d'Auvergne
Cantal
Bresse Bleu

RELATED LINKS

Comté flavor wheel & wine pairing infographic
Basic Information on Comté 
Two part article by David Leibovitz regarding his visits to 1) Comté  fruitiéres and 2) ripening caves