Sunday, May 30, 2010

home

After a flurry of Parisian posts from the easy comfort of our friend's apartment in the 7th arrondissement, we have been away from the desk as it were.  We have arrived home.  Coming home at the beginning of May to a growing season that is about three weeks ahead of itself, plus re-opening the restaurant and recovering from jet lag has kept us running to catch up with everything around us.  Usually when we return, the buds are just starting to show a green haze on the trees and the daffodils are still blooming and the forsythia has just started.  This year, because of the warm weather in March and the beginning of April, we arrive to lilacs and fruit trees blooming, bud-break on the vines.  And everything is green.  Green, green, green.

So, the last three weeks have been very full.  And while I hope to return to some stories of days in France, we are now confronted with the stories that have begun at home.  It is sometimes difficult to shuttle so much back and forth like a transatlantic itinerary.

In the last three weeks, there has been spring cleaning at the restaurant, and opening to a busy first weekend.  And despite the mid-May cold snap (what the old farmer's in New England call Blackberry Winter, or their European counterparts call The Frost Saints), Caleb has planted lettuces, tomotoes, carrots, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, radishes, onions, peas, beans, beets, root chicory, daisies, and nasturtiams.  We sweated out 30 degree nights hoping the tender leaves on the vines would survive, and worrying about the flowers and buds on the apple trees.  Vines are incredibly resiliant.  Some of them took a good hit from the cold.  But with vines you get two shots at fruit, and three for foliage.  Each bud has its own  primary, secondary, and tertiary buds to give it every fighting chance if you loose the first round.  So now everyone in the vineyard has happy looking leaves that are unfurling proudly.  It's still early days, but we'll see if there will be any fruit this year.  Just last night, I saw one tiny bunch. 

The orchard has not faired quite so well.  The fruit set is thin.  Some trees don't even show fruit, just the remnants of brown blossoms.  Other trees show a modest inclination.

We have had a hot, dry spell immediately following the cold snap.  90 degree days just like mid-July.  Everything is growing rampantly, and then the past few days things have slowed down because we've had no rain.  The roses, which started out with a profusion of leaves and imminent buds, have now acquired a yellow, thirstiness about them.  Caleb has been watering his seeds and new plantings at night when we get home from the restaurant (always water at night when the plants get the most benefit.  If you water during the day in hot sunlight, the leaves can scald, and the water evaporates too quickly in the sun), but we've let everything else fend for itself.  We live on an acquafir, so water has never been a problem.  But roses need both water and sun.  That's why they love those English summers so. 

Just last night, a balmy evening, I watered the roses looking the most sweltered from a row of buckets we use to collect rain water off our roofs just as lightening started to flash in the darkening sky.  Thunderstorms had been predicted for the afternoon and night.  As we puttered around doing final chores before going into a late dinner, we saw the moon rise golden over the tree line.  It seemed like a good idea to sit for a moment outside with a glass of wine and watch the show.  While the moon climbed higher, dark, menacing clouds rolled in occassionally obscuring the moon.  The lightening continued to flask and strike, the thunder rumbled.  Lightening bugs sparkled in the trees and meadow.  (We never see lightening bugs until the 4th of July).  Finally, we felt the first drops of rain, thankfully.  We laid market umbrellas down, and protected garden furniture and ran inside just before the deluge.

--Deirdre

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

degustation!












Having friends in Normandy is kind of like finding a hundred, unexpected dollars in your wallet.  We have friends in Normandy--Denise and Hughes and their two rapscallions Josephine and Georges.  We went with our good friend Meg for a visit a week ago (was it only a week ago?) on the Friday train just in time for apero in the back garden.  Kir Royale, olives, and chips.  Some of us couldn't stop eating the chips.  Denise is from Australia and Hughes is French and grew up in the village in which they live.  Denise coordinates a film festival (she's worked in film for a long time) and Hughes is an artist.  He can paint anything.  Trompe l'oeil, portrait, landscape, abstract, surreal.  You name it.  He can paint it.  They own a really beautiful, really old house with a walled garden. A really high wall.   Ancient espaliered pear trees, flowering, thick-trunked wisteria, a hedge. Some roses and lilacs.  If we didn't love them so much....

The weather was perfect.  Just warm enough to have drinks outside while the light was fading, then cold enough to come inside to sit by a roaring fire while Denise prepared a delicious paella.  The red wine went down easy.  Did anyone keep count of the bottles?  We finished dinner with tarte au citron and pears poached in wine.  Then we had Hughes' father's calvados, followed by two bottles of after-dinner stuff that we had made and brought: Caleb's nocino and a wild blueberry liqueur I  made inspired by a French perfume.  There were a lot of glasses on the table.

While Caleb has a fascination with choucroute garnie, I have a fascination with things apple, things like sparkling hard cider and calvados.  I'm trying to learn how to make Normand-style cidre and calvados, the old way.  Having friends in Normandy whose father makes calva is like finding a second hundred, unexpected dollars in your wallet.  So, with so much good fortune, we woke in the morning to ride our bikes (because one should ride bikes in Normandy--the roads are perfect, well, almost perfect, as in perfectly flat) to Hughes' parents house for a formal degustation.


Colette and Roger are gems.  They sparkle with such good cheer and hospitality.  We sit down to the table with bottles of local Normand cidre and poire, and of course the calva.  Colette has made delectable hors d'ouevres for us to have with our tastes: toasts with rillettes, tiny, shaped goat cheeses, and petite lasagne.  I am delighted there are more chips just like the kind my grandmother used to serve for similar occasions.  We have also brought some of my liqueur as a gift.  Roger is keen to try it with the poire like a kir.  We have never had poire, or perry in English, which is a pear cider.  It is elegant, lighter than the apple cider, and dryer in taste.  Sublime.  Caleb is hooked, so we begin thinking of who we know back at home who has pear trees (ours are too small to bear fruit yet).  We decide the jointly made kir--the poire and my wild blueberry liqueur--is rather fine and would make a very nice aperatif at the restaurant.  Roger's calvados, which we have sampled over the years, is at least thirty years old, and once again on this tasting is full of smooth and happy fire.  Suddenly, there are many glasses on the table.  Delicate, etched glasses for different styles of drink.  Coupes for kirs and bubbles, and very small cordial glasses traditional to drinking calva during a meal.  Colette tells us that it was always taken after the first main plate and before the second (think pork and fish) to help settle the meal. 

Other decanters of calvados come out, some with gigantic pears in them.  Roger tells us how the calva is made and how the cider is made.  I am furiously taking notes.  He brings out these incredible old-fashioned glass hydrometers that you used to buy at the apothecary to make sure your cidre and calva had enough alcohol in them, that you weren't being cheated by your local, favorite farmer.  We could have sat there all day, but because we had lunch to eat, and a train to catch, we adjourned to the cellar to see the barrels, and then had a quick lesson about the old stone apple presses.  In our imaginations, or perhaps through the gauzy view of calva, we can just see the old work-horse turning the wheel, and pitchers of sweet cider ready for fermentation.

--Deirdre 

























































  

















Thursday, May 6, 2010

choucroute garnie


My husband is infatuated with choucroute garnie.  For as long as we've been coming to Paris, Caleb has been on the hunt for the perfect choucroute.  We've tried it at various small-time brasserie, and every visit, we always say, "Oh, let's try Lipp this time."  But somehow, we never get there.  Other restaurants beckon, or markets seduce.  We came quite close to eating there just the other night, but instead went to another very, very small Parisian institution La Pied de Fouet.  But that's another story.  Or stories.

There is no set recipe for choucroute garnie or "cabbage cooked and garnished".  The cabbage is actually fermented, just like sauerkraut, and that stands in for the cooking.  Classically, the dish can be any preparation of hot sauerkraut served with meat and potatoes, but there are a few key rules to follow.  Traditional recipes call for three types of sausage: Frankfurters, Strasbourg, and Montbeliard.  Fatty salted cuts of pork like ham hocks, pork knuckles, shoulders, or fat back are a must.  Very occasionally, you'll see fish or goose meat, but this would be rare.

The sauerkraut is usually heated up with a glass of Riesling and goose or pork fat.  It some recipes, especially in mountainous areas, you may find it cooked with onions and sliced apples.  Every authentic sauerkraut recipe includes black peppercorns, cloves, garlic, juniper berries, onions, bay leaf, and wine.  In autumn, in Germany, they prepare the sauerkraut in special crocks to sit and cure over the winter. 


Choucroute garnie, while a typically French dish found in every brasserie worth it's salt pork (brasserie means beer brewing in or brewery in French, hence choucroute is always served with beer), hails from more Germanic or eastern European tribes.  It became part of the French lexicon when France absorbed Alsace et Lorraine on the German-French border so many years ago.

This time in Paris we forgo Brasserie Lipp one more time, and our choucroute is procured at the Motte-Piquet Market.  There is a notorious, as in flirtatious, butcher there specializing in pork.  He has one of the largest booths on the street.  He quips, tosses, smiles, winks.  There, we see all the makings of classic choucroute.  We stand on line and wait for the butcher--or is it the butcher's wife?--to wait on us.  We ask for choucroute garnie for two.  She sets us up right: the white, almost transluscent sauerkraut flecked with juniper berries and whole peppercorns, Frankfurters, Alsation sausages, and fatty salted pork shoulder.  We'll make our own roasted potatoes.  At the apartment, we already have Kronenbourg chilling. 

The butcher's wife, if that's who she really is, does not like that I've taken my camera out to photograph the scene.  I don't like posed pictures, so I'll be the first to admit, I'm a little sneaky, though my camera is too large to be inconspicuous.  I watch another American woman in the line ahead of us ask to take photos and the butcher's wife smiles and strikes a pose with her knife.  That's not what I'm looking for.  I only know that she is not pleased with me and my Sony Cybershot, the last of its kind with a Zeiss lens, when we say "Bonne Journee" and make to leave.  She pierces me with a rather deadly stare.  Guilt quickly sets in on my part as I think of good manners and politesse....

At the apartment that night, we set the table, light the candles, and heat up our prize.  Maybe we'll get to Brasserie Lipp the next time we visit, but I rather think that we may never get to Lipp as if we are holding it out as the quintessential choucroute experience that we never want to spoil by actually eating there.  Perhaps we've created too much of a temple out of the notion.  Or maybe it will be saved for the last meal we ever have in this great city.  A send off of nostaligic proportions.

Caleb thinks his fascination began when he read somehwhere about the traditional Parisian brasseries that were opened by the influx of Alsations that came to Paris for work in the 19th century.  But it's been a fascination for so long, he can't quite remember why.  Other than the dish just tastes so damn good. 

Here's to the butcher's wife,,,,

--Deirdre

Sunday, May 2, 2010

les fleuristes








In Paris, there are always flowers.  On a hot morning, there are extravagant,  fresh, and fragrant bouquets of lilacs, peonies, muguet--or lily of the valley--given for the May 1st holiday.  We have several favorite flower shops dotting the city, and every visit we plan our walks to delight in the explosion of blossoms behind plate glass windows.   Ever since we came here many years ago, the first time together and shortly after we were married, and bought a clutch of white and pink ranunculus for only a couple of sous for our narrow 4th story hotel room where the patroness would deliver hot coffee and hot milk with two croissants to your room every morning (that alone could make one fall in love...), one of the first things we do upon arriving in this city is to go buy flowers.

Here, they are so inexpensive in comparison to home, you can can go a little crazy, a coup de foudre almost, and arrive back at your vacation apartment or hotel room with arms full of flowers.  This visit, I buy a plump bouquet of fragrant lilacs from a gypsey standing out on the rue Cler with here offerings.  We buy a little muguet for our friends who we go to visit in Normandy at my favorite flower shop of all--Eric Chauvin .  Tucked in between a Greek restaurant and one of the great bakeries of Paris--Poujerain--is a small, brick-walled room stuffed full of what's currently blossoming.  Arrays of snow-white tulips, coral-colored peonies that defy explanation, chartreuse viburnum, white, lavender and dark purple lilac, more lily of the valley, and as always in this shop, in the center, is a towering bouquet of flowering tree in a vase as broad as a redwood.  I have seen quince, forsythia, or apple blossom in this arrangement, but this visit, we are embraced by flowering almond.  In the back, is an outdoor courtyard with boxwood and ivy.

Sometimes, I dream of moving to Paris and taking over this shop where I would still sell such beautiful flowers, along with natural wines made by hard-working vignernons a d vigneronnes we find out in the countryside.  I believe flowers and wine are inextricably bound together.  We'd bring back our spoils, these cases of wine from small, unknown vineyards, and share them in the city.  In my dream, on Friday and Saturday nights in good weather, we open the back courtyard which has been strung with lights, and cook simple dishes to be served at one long table.  We open new or old vintages of new or old favorite vineyards, and we sit down with guests for a proper degustation....

--Deirdre