April showers bring May flowers … but what do you do when it rains all of May as well?
From the above headline, you can see what kind of May we had in Narbonne (the headline reads: “Most rotten May in 58 years”). For a part of France reputed to get 300 days of sunshine a year, after the March and May we had, it should be clear sailing for the rest of the year. (Ye gods of weather: I’m joking. Of course I don’t want to invite your wrath … pleeeease be nice to us in June, July, and August?) Add to the weather the fact that we had guests for three weeks out of the four and you can see what a challenging month it was.
Which is not to say that we and our guests—soaking, moldy, coughing, and sometimes grumpy (us, of course, not the guests)—didn’t make the utmost of it. When the sun came out, we all but exploded from the house and drove off for picnics and sightseeing. Granted, we usually came home in a roaring downpour, but it was worth it.
BUT FIRST ...
Anne and fellow Canadians Eitan and Denny among the vines
... we shared our last couple of meals with Eitan and Denny in May. These folks, introduced to us by a mutual Torontonian friend, came to France in October and left at the end of May. We were grateful to have them nearby, these sometimes-prisoners on their windy hilltop aerie, and shared many memorable meals with them. Eitan and I came awfully close to making a truffle roadtrip together to Perigord, but illness got in the way, and I regret it.
Come back to the Languedoc-Rousillon Eitan Cornfield, Eitan Cornfield will be the name of my future truffle memoire.
We had a great lunch with the two of them at L’Hospitalet at the beginning of the month, dinner at their place mid-month (my god, duck a l’orange!) and then a final send-off dinner at home near the end of the month, the latter two feasts with Renald and Doreen. More gracious minds, at least in English, will be hard to find here with them now gone. We wish them great new adventures in Montreal and have but one question: why the hell didn’t you stay for the summer?
DOWN UNDER IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE
Rewind to the beginning of May and our Australians from the April post. Nick and Sarah, after a short 35-hour hop from their home in Brisbane, came for a wet, but fun week in Narbonne. Nick, a well-known author and three-time Queensland Yahzee champion graciously pretended to lose to Maxime a number of times (see him pretending to be upset that Maxime whupped his ass, repeatedly, below), and Sarah … well, Sarah ate cheese. I know this doesn’t sound like much of an accomplishment, but once you learn how profoundly lactose intolerant Sarah is, you’ll understand. Cow-milk cheese bad, goat’s-milk cheese good.
When we took Sarah to our favourite fromagerie in Les Halles and showed her the thirty cheeses she could eat, I thought she was going to vault the counter and push the owners out of the way. So it was a massive joy to see Sarah eating cheese. For breakfast on baguette. For lunch as dessert. And for dinner. Just a big wheel of brebis with a glass of water.
Nick, on the other hand, can eat anything, and often will. We ate a lot, too, just to be polite, and then we all walked it off with long hikes at Bages and at Chateau Peyrpetreuse, where the wind threatened to carry the boys off. We spent the end of that windy day at Colliore, a place I never tire of despite its being a tourist magnet, and Ben and Max collected rocks while Anne showed our guests that lovely town. Which had milk-free gelato, so guess who did what. On our way out of town, I made everyone stop so I could finally visit Antonio Machado’s grave, whose lost poems Jim Harrison has come twice to northern Catalonia to find. While Nick and I stood over the great poet’s memorial, we tried to think of a poem we should say, but could only come up with something having to do with Nantucket.
Two green authors
One dead one. (Not from Nantucket)
Nick & Sarah
This was also the last week before the cherries became truly, memorably delicious, but that didn’t stop us from eating some underripe ones. The birds were at it too, so Nick and I acted like men and swung a couple of nets over the tree to protect the fruit from the birds. It worked: by the end of the month, we’d collected at least ten kilos from the tree and had put them to work in the form of cherry cobblers, cherry pies, and at least two magrets de canard à cerise. The second one of these, in which I stewed cherries in balsamic vinegar and chicken broth, and then violently boiled it down with some Banyuls, was pretty damn memorable. Memorable, too, was the three or four nights Anne and I sat her parents at the kitchen table pitting cherries in two-kilo bunches and putting them in bags to be frozen for future fancies.
Real men do net cherries
ALP, WE'RE TOO BUSY
We had a couple free days when Sarah and Nick left to continue their Continental-European adventure, so of course we got in our car and drove five hours to the Alps. Because we don’t like to sit still, we Redhill-Simards. It’s fair to say I didn’t want to go on this particular trip after Italy and Australians, and it was an invitation to go to Bernard and Francoise’s place in Colmar Villars, in the lower Alps, which meant finding brain power I sorely lacked to talk French for three days solid. And yet, somehow, this little mad interlude in a month of madness turned out to be a perfect weekend, no small thanks to Bernard and Françoise’s warmth.
Happy boys in the mountains ...
Just an aside here to say: planning to spend a couple of years in the south of France and having it work out in as consistently lovely a fashion as it has is enough, but to have a landlord like Bernard, who just might be one of most kindhearted people we’ve ever met, is really above and beyond the call of karmic duty. I know he can’t read this, but if we ever told him how lucky we are to have fished him out of the universe of landlords he’d just shrug it off anyway.
And, his lovely partner has a 500-yr-old stone house halfway up a mountainside, to boot. We ate, drank, gabbed and also trekked, ie, 25km in two days with our rather game sons in tow, up and down a couple of mountainsides. Rather incredible experience, especially the second walk, which saw us hiking along the serpentine edge of a rushing river, then up to a waterfall for lunch, followed by six more km along the sheer, stone-scattered face of a mountain canted at a 70º angle, only a path worked into the rock keeping us from sliding 600 metres to our deaths. I ain’t joking: see the pics. And yet, apart from one or two extremely scary little bits, we felt safe. You tend to believe in surroundings this gorgeous that nothing can go wrong, and the fact is, nothing did. Except we ran out of red wine.
Not joking about the danger.
Scenes from two days in the mountains ... sun, cool air, lots of exercise and GOOD FOOD
A LITTLE BOY FROM OTTAWA ...
Next stop on the tour of love was a much- anticipated visit from Nanny, Grandpapa, and Cousin Jacob. Jacob had never been overseas before, so this was a big jump for him, and he seemed to adapt wonderfully. And of course his young cousins were over the moon to see him, even if he’d somehow grown four inches in ten months. The three boys ran around, played soccer, went to the beach for dips in VERY COLD water, watched movies, ate awesomely, and bickered. A little. It was great to have Jacob in the house. Nanny and Grandpapa had gotten through a pretty stressful spring, with Renald’s knee-replacement surgery, and although the knee threatened to be mean to Renald on a couple of the days, overall it was a great two weeks with him able to be up and about.
An intellectual moment at St. Guillaume le Desert
Mmm, Nanny's chicken-asparagus lasagna!
The last supper ... two days before Denny & Eitan go "home"
We spent a great, hot day at the Pont du Diable, where the beach was mysteriously busy with English highschool students. The water was DAMNED COLD, and some of us managed to get into the water for two or three minutes.
Charlot: not a waterdog
Perfect ice cream moment
But this visit wasn’t about sightseeing so much as it was about being together, and that we did. Lots of nice meals, including some much-needed Nanny-cookery, and those nights spent pitting cherries resulted in a big batch of delicious homemade cherry jam (of which, one month later, we have almost none left). There was also a great deal of cards, which, with no bias at all, I have to say the team of Renald-Redhill was more or less unbeatable. I frankly don’t know why those women even bother, but I have to salute their pluck.
And there you go: jam! That was easy. (Don't believe what they tell you
about lemons having enough pectin to set jam. The buggers don't. Use pectin, dammit.)
At the end of ten days in Narbonne, Anne and the boys went up to Paris with Nanny, Grandpapa, and Jakie for a three-day adventure in Paris. Yours truly locked the door and worked as Narbonne once again treated its patient citizenry to three straight days of astonishingly violent rain. At one point, the morning after everyone left, the skies were so dark at 9am that it would have taken a flashlight to find the car. Hey, you don’t see that every day.
Anne may well insert some details of the Paris trip, but as a second-hand witness to it, all I can say is that it paid off for me in a rather large package of pastrami from the Rue de Rosiers and some bagels, so I assume it went very well indeed. That won’t stop me from putting some pics up though!
THE GREEN REPORT
It’s been a while since I’ve updated you greenthumbs on the garden, and because our digital camera has cacked (thanks Canon -- I just discovered the problem with the camera is the object of a class-action suit against you -- glad I spent $500 on this bloody thing) I can’t show you pics of the yard, which is really something else. While our Ontario visitors were here, I dug up about 2kg of new potatoes from the potato patch, which gave me the real-life sensation of one of my only recurring dreams, that of finding a trail of coins on the ground. The potatoes, which as you well know, grow in the rootball under the plant, are irregularly spaced, and if you want to harvest from a live plant without actually uprooting it, you have to dig into the mound the potatoes are planted on and find the little treasures yourself. So you root around and clear some dirt, and there's a glowing yellow ball, and then, look, there's another beside it, and one underneath them ... Man, they were wonderful: delicate, sweet, and so fresh. In a couple more weeks, I’ll take up the maincrop (which will probably be the same size) and we’ll have a second feed on them.
I just put in the last crop for now: watermelon. They call it pasteque here, and it’s a smaller, greener melon, but it’s basically the same fruit. The melons join cucumber, zuccini, snap peas, peppers, green beans, the potatoes, artichokes (done for the season), cocktail tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes, and something called "russe," which is supposed to be like oxheart tomato, but whose blossoms are all falling off, leeks, onions, radish, carrot, three types of lettuce, basil, and something we call a “Cape Gooseberry” if we call it anything at all -- most people have eaten it, but don’t know what it is. It’s the orange berrylike fruit that comes in a papery Chinese-lantern-type skin. There's often one on your plate as a dessert garnish in shmancy restaurants. It’s called Physalis peruviana, although they just call it physalis here. It’s related to tomato and tomatilla, but it’s used much more as fruit. I love them, and since they’re available to grow here, I thought what the heck.
So that’s the vegetable patch. The fruit trees are in full fruit now, although the cherries are done and nothing else is quite ready. We have some big peaches and apricots, but they’re still hard, and the summer figs are enormous, but hollow-feeling and hard, and I’ve been told they’re not that good to eat. We have to wait for the ones that will form in August and be ready to eat in October. I'm discovering how strange and ancient fig trees are. For one thing, many people believe that fig trees fruit without flowering, but the strange fact is that the fig fruit itself is the flower; it's an "involuted" flower, which is to say the flowers grow inside the fruit. The little hole at the bottom of the fig is actually the entrance to the flower, which is pollinated by tiny wasps specialized to figs. These wasps go inside the fig to lay their eggs and often die inside the fruit. The acidic fruit dissolves the wasp's body, but the prevalence of maggots (larvae) inside figs is a result of the wasps' life-cycle. Bet you were wondering why they were so crunchy, huh? Also, fig trees produce a milk-white latex that, in ancient Egypt, was used to make coffins for mummies! Mmmm, crunchy mummies. And local folk cure has it that the sap that comes off the stem of a unripe fig cut from a tree is good for soothing burns.
More on all of that anon, but for the meantime, he’s some sexy shots of cherries just dying to be popped into your mouth. Don’t worry, we did it for you.
And that was May. We’re well in to June now, and it’s been lovely and quiet and often very warm. I made it out to Lyon for a few days last week to do some research on something I’m writing, and I found our May weather lying in wait for me in Lyon, but I escaped and drove down the Rhone, which is half wine, half nuclear power plants. Depressing, in fact, in places. But there was a lot to see, and some really lovely unexpected towns, like Vienne, which was packed with Roman history and was gorgeous to boot (less so under lowering skies) and Valence as well, where Napoleon lived as a sixteen-year-old army lieutenant. And I ended up at Aix en Provence, a town I hadn't yet seen, and I fully understand now why people love it. Outside of Paris, it’s probably the most beautiful city in the country.
Next week, we’re joined by friends from Canada, with their excited children in tow, and the twelve (!!) of us head down to Spain to spend a week in a stone farmhouse. (Check it out!) Hopefully we’ll have the camera fixed by then! But until then, some random May images. So long until July ...
A typical Charlot moment. Shows at 1, 3, 5, and 7pm.
A very dark, brooding flower we saw both at Peyrpetreuse and in the Alps.
Fragile, growing alone or in small groups, black-cowled with bright yellow faces hidden underneath. Stunning plant, no one knew what it was called.
Finally, we found frogs in France. In St. Chinian ...
The very last picture our $499 Canon SD800 digital camera took before cacking.
On the road below Lyon. Maybe it had something to do
with my choice of subject matter?
From the above headline, you can see what kind of May we had in Narbonne (the headline reads: “Most rotten May in 58 years”). For a part of France reputed to get 300 days of sunshine a year, after the March and May we had, it should be clear sailing for the rest of the year. (Ye gods of weather: I’m joking. Of course I don’t want to invite your wrath … pleeeease be nice to us in June, July, and August?) Add to the weather the fact that we had guests for three weeks out of the four and you can see what a challenging month it was.
Which is not to say that we and our guests—soaking, moldy, coughing, and sometimes grumpy (us, of course, not the guests)—didn’t make the utmost of it. When the sun came out, we all but exploded from the house and drove off for picnics and sightseeing. Granted, we usually came home in a roaring downpour, but it was worth it.
BUT FIRST ...
Anne and fellow Canadians Eitan and Denny among the vines
Come back to the Languedoc-Rousillon Eitan Cornfield, Eitan Cornfield will be the name of my future truffle memoire. We had a great lunch with the two of them at L’Hospitalet at the beginning of the month, dinner at their place mid-month (my god, duck a l’orange!) and then a final send-off dinner at home near the end of the month, the latter two feasts with Renald and Doreen. More gracious minds, at least in English, will be hard to find here with them now gone. We wish them great new adventures in Montreal and have but one question: why the hell didn’t you stay for the summer?
DOWN UNDER IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE
Rewind to the beginning of May and our Australians from the April post. Nick and Sarah, after a short 35-hour hop from their home in Brisbane, came for a wet, but fun week in Narbonne. Nick, a well-known author and three-time Queensland Yahzee champion graciously pretended to lose to Maxime a number of times (see him pretending to be upset that Maxime whupped his ass, repeatedly, below), and Sarah … well, Sarah ate cheese. I know this doesn’t sound like much of an accomplishment, but once you learn how profoundly lactose intolerant Sarah is, you’ll understand. Cow-milk cheese bad, goat’s-milk cheese good.
When we took Sarah to our favourite fromagerie in Les Halles and showed her the thirty cheeses she could eat, I thought she was going to vault the counter and push the owners out of the way. So it was a massive joy to see Sarah eating cheese. For breakfast on baguette. For lunch as dessert. And for dinner. Just a big wheel of brebis with a glass of water. Nick, on the other hand, can eat anything, and often will. We ate a lot, too, just to be polite, and then we all walked it off with long hikes at Bages and at Chateau Peyrpetreuse, where the wind threatened to carry the boys off. We spent the end of that windy day at Colliore, a place I never tire of despite its being a tourist magnet, and Ben and Max collected rocks while Anne showed our guests that lovely town. Which had milk-free gelato, so guess who did what. On our way out of town, I made everyone stop so I could finally visit Antonio Machado’s grave, whose lost poems Jim Harrison has come twice to northern Catalonia to find. While Nick and I stood over the great poet’s memorial, we tried to think of a poem we should say, but could only come up with something having to do with Nantucket.
Two green authors
One dead one. (Not from Nantucket)
Nick & SarahThis was also the last week before the cherries became truly, memorably delicious, but that didn’t stop us from eating some underripe ones. The birds were at it too, so Nick and I acted like men and swung a couple of nets over the tree to protect the fruit from the birds. It worked: by the end of the month, we’d collected at least ten kilos from the tree and had put them to work in the form of cherry cobblers, cherry pies, and at least two magrets de canard à cerise. The second one of these, in which I stewed cherries in balsamic vinegar and chicken broth, and then violently boiled it down with some Banyuls, was pretty damn memorable. Memorable, too, was the three or four nights Anne and I sat her parents at the kitchen table pitting cherries in two-kilo bunches and putting them in bags to be frozen for future fancies.
Real men do net cherriesALP, WE'RE TOO BUSY
We had a couple free days when Sarah and Nick left to continue their Continental-European adventure, so of course we got in our car and drove five hours to the Alps. Because we don’t like to sit still, we Redhill-Simards. It’s fair to say I didn’t want to go on this particular trip after Italy and Australians, and it was an invitation to go to Bernard and Francoise’s place in Colmar Villars, in the lower Alps, which meant finding brain power I sorely lacked to talk French for three days solid. And yet, somehow, this little mad interlude in a month of madness turned out to be a perfect weekend, no small thanks to Bernard and Françoise’s warmth.
Happy boys in the mountains ...Just an aside here to say: planning to spend a couple of years in the south of France and having it work out in as consistently lovely a fashion as it has is enough, but to have a landlord like Bernard, who just might be one of most kindhearted people we’ve ever met, is really above and beyond the call of karmic duty. I know he can’t read this, but if we ever told him how lucky we are to have fished him out of the universe of landlords he’d just shrug it off anyway.
And, his lovely partner has a 500-yr-old stone house halfway up a mountainside, to boot. We ate, drank, gabbed and also trekked, ie, 25km in two days with our rather game sons in tow, up and down a couple of mountainsides. Rather incredible experience, especially the second walk, which saw us hiking along the serpentine edge of a rushing river, then up to a waterfall for lunch, followed by six more km along the sheer, stone-scattered face of a mountain canted at a 70º angle, only a path worked into the rock keeping us from sliding 600 metres to our deaths. I ain’t joking: see the pics. And yet, apart from one or two extremely scary little bits, we felt safe. You tend to believe in surroundings this gorgeous that nothing can go wrong, and the fact is, nothing did. Except we ran out of red wine.
Not joking about the danger.
Scenes from two days in the mountains ... sun, cool air, lots of exercise and GOOD FOODA LITTLE BOY FROM OTTAWA ...
Next stop on the tour of love was a much- anticipated visit from Nanny, Grandpapa, and Cousin Jacob. Jacob had never been overseas before, so this was a big jump for him, and he seemed to adapt wonderfully. And of course his young cousins were over the moon to see him, even if he’d somehow grown four inches in ten months. The three boys ran around, played soccer, went to the beach for dips in VERY COLD water, watched movies, ate awesomely, and bickered. A little. It was great to have Jacob in the house. Nanny and Grandpapa had gotten through a pretty stressful spring, with Renald’s knee-replacement surgery, and although the knee threatened to be mean to Renald on a couple of the days, overall it was a great two weeks with him able to be up and about.
An intellectual moment at St. Guillaume le Desert
Mmm, Nanny's chicken-asparagus lasagna!
The last supper ... two days before Denny & Eitan go "home"We spent a great, hot day at the Pont du Diable, where the beach was mysteriously busy with English highschool students. The water was DAMNED COLD, and some of us managed to get into the water for two or three minutes.
Charlot: not a waterdog
Perfect ice cream momentA pictorial guide to making cherry jam in four steps:
And there you go: jam! That was easy. (Don't believe what they tell youabout lemons having enough pectin to set jam. The buggers don't. Use pectin, dammit.)
At the end of ten days in Narbonne, Anne and the boys went up to Paris with Nanny, Grandpapa, and Jakie for a three-day adventure in Paris. Yours truly locked the door and worked as Narbonne once again treated its patient citizenry to three straight days of astonishingly violent rain. At one point, the morning after everyone left, the skies were so dark at 9am that it would have taken a flashlight to find the car. Hey, you don’t see that every day.
Anne may well insert some details of the Paris trip, but as a second-hand witness to it, all I can say is that it paid off for me in a rather large package of pastrami from the Rue de Rosiers and some bagels, so I assume it went very well indeed. That won’t stop me from putting some pics up though!
THE GREEN REPORT
It’s been a while since I’ve updated you greenthumbs on the garden, and because our digital camera has cacked (thanks Canon -- I just discovered the problem with the camera is the object of a class-action suit against you -- glad I spent $500 on this bloody thing) I can’t show you pics of the yard, which is really something else. While our Ontario visitors were here, I dug up about 2kg of new potatoes from the potato patch, which gave me the real-life sensation of one of my only recurring dreams, that of finding a trail of coins on the ground. The potatoes, which as you well know, grow in the rootball under the plant, are irregularly spaced, and if you want to harvest from a live plant without actually uprooting it, you have to dig into the mound the potatoes are planted on and find the little treasures yourself. So you root around and clear some dirt, and there's a glowing yellow ball, and then, look, there's another beside it, and one underneath them ... Man, they were wonderful: delicate, sweet, and so fresh. In a couple more weeks, I’ll take up the maincrop (which will probably be the same size) and we’ll have a second feed on them.
I just put in the last crop for now: watermelon. They call it pasteque here, and it’s a smaller, greener melon, but it’s basically the same fruit. The melons join cucumber, zuccini, snap peas, peppers, green beans, the potatoes, artichokes (done for the season), cocktail tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes, and something called "russe," which is supposed to be like oxheart tomato, but whose blossoms are all falling off, leeks, onions, radish, carrot, three types of lettuce, basil, and something we call a “Cape Gooseberry” if we call it anything at all -- most people have eaten it, but don’t know what it is. It’s the orange berrylike fruit that comes in a papery Chinese-lantern-type skin. There's often one on your plate as a dessert garnish in shmancy restaurants. It’s called Physalis peruviana, although they just call it physalis here. It’s related to tomato and tomatilla, but it’s used much more as fruit. I love them, and since they’re available to grow here, I thought what the heck.
So that’s the vegetable patch. The fruit trees are in full fruit now, although the cherries are done and nothing else is quite ready. We have some big peaches and apricots, but they’re still hard, and the summer figs are enormous, but hollow-feeling and hard, and I’ve been told they’re not that good to eat. We have to wait for the ones that will form in August and be ready to eat in October. I'm discovering how strange and ancient fig trees are. For one thing, many people believe that fig trees fruit without flowering, but the strange fact is that the fig fruit itself is the flower; it's an "involuted" flower, which is to say the flowers grow inside the fruit. The little hole at the bottom of the fig is actually the entrance to the flower, which is pollinated by tiny wasps specialized to figs. These wasps go inside the fig to lay their eggs and often die inside the fruit. The acidic fruit dissolves the wasp's body, but the prevalence of maggots (larvae) inside figs is a result of the wasps' life-cycle. Bet you were wondering why they were so crunchy, huh? Also, fig trees produce a milk-white latex that, in ancient Egypt, was used to make coffins for mummies! Mmmm, crunchy mummies. And local folk cure has it that the sap that comes off the stem of a unripe fig cut from a tree is good for soothing burns.
More on all of that anon, but for the meantime, he’s some sexy shots of cherries just dying to be popped into your mouth. Don’t worry, we did it for you.
And that was May. We’re well in to June now, and it’s been lovely and quiet and often very warm. I made it out to Lyon for a few days last week to do some research on something I’m writing, and I found our May weather lying in wait for me in Lyon, but I escaped and drove down the Rhone, which is half wine, half nuclear power plants. Depressing, in fact, in places. But there was a lot to see, and some really lovely unexpected towns, like Vienne, which was packed with Roman history and was gorgeous to boot (less so under lowering skies) and Valence as well, where Napoleon lived as a sixteen-year-old army lieutenant. And I ended up at Aix en Provence, a town I hadn't yet seen, and I fully understand now why people love it. Outside of Paris, it’s probably the most beautiful city in the country.
Next week, we’re joined by friends from Canada, with their excited children in tow, and the twelve (!!) of us head down to Spain to spend a week in a stone farmhouse. (Check it out!) Hopefully we’ll have the camera fixed by then! But until then, some random May images. So long until July ...
A typical Charlot moment. Shows at 1, 3, 5, and 7pm.
A very dark, brooding flower we saw both at Peyrpetreuse and in the Alps.Fragile, growing alone or in small groups, black-cowled with bright yellow faces hidden underneath. Stunning plant, no one knew what it was called.
Finally, we found frogs in France. In St. Chinian ...
The very last picture our $499 Canon SD800 digital camera took before cacking.On the road below Lyon. Maybe it had something to do
with my choice of subject matter?
PS: want to know when the blog is up? Write to me and I'll put you on our blog group alert ...
