Sheep aren't smart but they can jump!

WWOOFer Kate arranges the onions, garlic, and shallots to cure
Wednesday, June 25, 2008


The second day of thistle removal has made a real visible difference in the hayfield and since 1) young thistles will pull straight up out of the ground root and all and 2) a nice breeze kept us somewhat cooler today I thought, maybe I could handle having a 5 acre hayfield. All it would take is one spring and summer of walking regularly through the field every other day and hand pulling thistle until you’d eradicated it, and then checking carefully once every spring after that.

We’ve also learned about fencing for goats and sheep. These are all things we could read in a book or ask my dad about, I’m sure, but there’s nothing like hands-on experience, right? You’d think sheep would be more docile but no – they’ll push over or jump over or trample a wire fence to get to the grass that’s greener on the other side, so the only way to keep them from doing that is to make the fence posts very strong, the fence fairly tall, and with a wooden rail on the top AND a couple lines of barbed wire to keep them from pushing on it or climbing up on it.

I got up early this morning by this house’s standards – 7:30 – and got the animals fed and watered and weeded some more onions before breakfast. The five adolescent chickens have taken to following me when I’m weeding because they can find lots of tasty bugs where I’ve pulled up weeds. They’re starting to feel like my little pals and I certainly enjoy their company and their soft little clucks. There is also a mother hen with 6 young chicks in the yard; she is the model of a mother hen, too. The other day the old cat – not a threat to the chickens at all – was sitting too close to something the hen wanted her brood to be able to eat and she puffed herself up and flew at the cat like a fire breathing dragon. And who would have guessed that baby ducks will eat mice? One of the ten young ducks in the yard is quite a hunter, the other day he had a mouse, a slug, and a snail, not to mention all the bugs and grass normally on offer at the lawn buffet.

Thistles in the Hay

Walt and Rosie after the weeding
Tuesday, June 24, 2008

We both worked on the thistles this morning in the heat and humidity, some of the hardest work I’ve done for a while. Slogging through an uncut hayfield and then gingerly trying to gather – wearing two pairs of gloves - the thistles that Walt has cut with his loppers and put them onto a tarp to drag up the long slope back to the goat and sheep fold… there’s still quite a lot to do, it feels like we hardly made a dent in almost 3 hours. An important lesson learned here, that at Chateau Lasalle was just theoretical knowledge: don’t buy more land than you need. Walt asked me how I would handle this thistles in the hay problem and my first reaction was, sell the field! My next reaction was, mow it for a whole year multiple times without harvesting the hay, and then, get some donkeys to add to the sheep and goats and let them keep it trimmed after the haying.

At the bottom of the field is a fairly big stream, with lots of trees keeping it in the shade. Right now because of all the rain it’s a little muddy and a little too big for Reed to putter around in, making dams and such. But maybe it’ll come down later in the week.

I’ve started several projects and haven’t finished any of them but I guess that’s par for the course here. The onions are partially weeded, the thistles have been started, the chicken house cleaning out project has started, and we mowed some of the lawn this afternoon with the small mower since the riding one is still out of commission. The grass catcher fills up after just a couple minutes so it really takes two of us to mow, one to mow and the other to fill up the wheelbarrow with clippings and take them to the compost and the various animals.

Our lovely meals continue here, lots of fresh tomatoes with balsamic vinegar and olive oil, homemade mayonnaise and hummus, Kate’s seed bread and lemon bread and macaroons and jam tarts, lamb ribs, roast new potatoes, roast duck, etc. etc! Our hosts were in town today and I got dinner and managed to overcook the roast duck but it was still edible, fortunately.

I’m going to try to get up early to weed, since I usually wake up at 6:30 anyway and then just lay in bed for a couple hours, not wanting to disturb Reed. Tomorrow I’ll just sneak out quietly and hope he sleeps late. It’s hard to get him to bed before 10 or even 11 with the light lasting so long.

Deux Sevres

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Happy Birthday to my brother Doug and also to my friend Gretchen in Sitka!

Summer heat arrived here yesterday after a long, cool, wet spring. Now it’s hot and humid, with the grass and weeds gone crazy and everywhere the nettles and brambles trying to claim back this farm. It is a 15 acre place just a few kilometers from the nearest villages, with a medium sized old stone farmhouse and several stone outbuildings. We’re just about an hour east of the Atlantic ocean, and the weather here is relatively temperate, as evidenced by the artichokes in the garden.

The owners have made a nice sized potager/kitchen garden, and have quite a few chickens and ducks. Right now there are 10 young ducks, 5 half-grown chickens, and a mother hen and her 6 chicks who have free range of the yard, plus another couple dozen adults in the poultry house and fenced in area. There are also 3 goats, some sheep – one ewe has triplet lambs - , and 2 young pigs who are eating and growing fast, destined for bacon. We give everybody some grain in the morning and stale bread from the boulangerie. They don’t really need it, since there is plenty of grass, but K explained that it’s nice to keep them in the habit of coming when you call, in the event they break the fence yet again. The mother hen comes into the kitchen when she thinks it’s time for her and the family to get their grain ration. Altogether with the two dogs and 3 cats there are 60 some animals here.

I learned that it is possible to milk a goat that hasn’t had a kid. Maid milking, K called it. Ella the goat is giving a couple of cups a day now and I’m sure her production would increase rapidly if Kate started milking her twice a day instead of once. Reed had her milk on his cereal for breakfast and I’ll start having it too unless she wants me to try to make cheese.

We have been enjoying our sunny room upstairs in the farmhouse and fabulous cooking by both K and K. She makes pies and cakes and cookies and bread and he makes everything else and so far we’ve enjoyed fresh tomato soup, quiche, potato salad, tomato salad, artichokes with butter, lamb stew, jam tarts, macaroons, ginger cake, and lots of good bread and cheese. We were offered the whole weekend off work but I feel funny about eating meals and not doing any work so on Friday I did a little weeding in the strawberries and yesterday I weeded most of the day, getting through the artichokes and asparagus and starting in on the onions, and also picking strawberries. Last night was a huge thunderstorm but today is sunny again – I’m taking Sunday off while Walt works on cutting down the thistles out in the hayfield before it’s time to make hay this week or next.

Petanque

Our favorite chat de la brousse
Eric taught us how to play petanque, or boules, while we were at Hameau de la Brousse. The balls are made of metal and heavy, and about the size of a baseball. There is a smaller wooden ball called the cochon, or something like that, something to do with a little pig. There is some minimum and maximum distance that the wooden ball has to be thrown from the playing line, and then you try to get the metal balls as close to the wooden ball as possible. There are several kinds of throws, one just to get the ball in there, one to knock another player’s ball away and replace it with your own, and another to drop your ball in to a specific place without hitting someone else in front closer to the pig. Generally you hold the ball in the curve of your palm with the ball facing the ground and throw by lifting your arm and flicking your wrist and hand upward. Whoever has the ball farthest away has to go next, so whoever is winning gets the last play. Whoever gets the closest metal ball to the pig wins a point, and if that person or team has another 1 or 2 or however many balls close to the pig without someone from the opposite team having one closer, they’ll get another point for each ball. But if the 2nd closest ball is someone else or another team, the winner just gets the 1 point. The perfect ground is a little sandy but not too soft; we played on the gravel driveway fairly well although it was tricky because of the varying amounts of gravel and the slope too. Petanque turned out to be the perfect game to play while we were waiting for dinner to be ready – you can drink a little wine, take your turn, talk. No wonder we see retired people playing petanque in the early evenings in so many places. I guess we learned it just in time, now that both of us are above the age of 40.

We had some pretty wonderful meals our last few days at la Brousse: stewed chicken in tomato herb sauce with polenta; cabbage gratin; Normandy style crepes (by Eric) with sautéed mushrooms, ham, grated gruyere, sautéed leeks, and eggs; lots and lots of leftover borscht; couscous with a Moroccan style vegetable stew and merguez sausages on the side; pre-cooked quinoa sautéed with olive oil and diced onions. The strawberries ran out – kaput – so we ate Helene’s cheesecake for dessert for a while, and then I made a North Douglas Chocolate Cake, my favorite from the Fiddlehead cookbook, which was well received but it could have been better because the tournesol oil I used instead of canola was too strong, I should have used melted butter instead. So when the subject of gateau des carrottes came up and I offered to make one, I used melted butter and was not sorry. The recipe came from Sheila Lukin’s international cookbook, and the cake was called Berthe’s creole carrot cake or something like that. I left out the coconut and the pineapple, since I prefer a simpler carrot cake, but Walt and Eric saw the walnuts in the ingredient list and quickly measured them out and chopped them up for me quite finely. I also had to substitute the light brown sugar that we had at la Brousse with the white sugar called for in the recipe, and I didn’t precook the carrots, as Helene recommended just using fresh grated carrot instead.

You might think with all the changes a disaster was in store, but the result was absolutely spectacularly good – we served it without frosting with a crème fraiche and mascarpone mixture on the side. Eric could hardly stand it; he applauded and was almost moaning in pleasure as he scarfed down two big pieces, and Amandine gave me a hug and said MERCI!! When I get ahold of the cookbook I will definitely put the recipe into my favorites file, and post it in this blog. North Douglas chocolate cake too, it’s wonderful when made correctly. Of course, it always helps when you have Brittany butter at your disposal, there’s nothing better.

We said our sad goodbyes yesterday morning to the other WWOOFers who remained (Ragi, Phi Lee, Amandine, and Eric), Iva and Yuki having left the day before already, making a hole in our la Brousse lives. We left the last pieces of carrot cake for Eric to eat, and waved goodbye to Helene as Michel drove us down the driveway and on to Angouleme to the station. It was a short train ride, just two hours in total on two trains, and happily, our new situation in Deux Sevres is very very pleasant, and the bed more comfortable. Reed is thrilled because there are baby chickens and ducks everywhere, plus goats and sheep, and two little pigs, and he has a bunk bed in which to sleep, that he’s already turned into a tent using extra blankets.

Tranquil Again

Views at Hameau de la Brousse



It feels like the end of summer camp; all the Le Printemps sans Chapiteau actors, technicians, musicians, and organizers packed up with our help, kissed us all on both cheeks, and left yesterday after a very successful, well-attended performance of La Mouette on Friday night. La Mouette means The Seagull, it is one of Chekhov's most famous pieces, I think, full of people who are in love with the wrong person. The show started around 9 pm on Friday night and I helped take tickets. Fortunately it didn't rain, but it did get pretty chilly by the time the show was over around 11 pm. Everyone was wrapped in the blankets that Michel and Helene keep just for this purpose. But nobody minded; the play was riveting, the actors were funny, tragic, and compelling, and the setting was absolutely magical. The director used the entire park surrounding the stage for some of the action and it was very dramatic to have lights out in the trees and on the limestone cliff walls below the hameau where the amphitheatre is set. They had 3 curtain calls to a standing ovation.

Reed stayed up to watch the play too, and although he was cold and thirsty and couldn't understand a word he wouldn't leave or let one of us take him back to the room, because he wanted to see it. After watching the rehearsals on Thursday from his little rock platform on stage right, he was tickled when he recognized bits of the action and he especially wanted to see them use the big spot lights on the metal towers behind the bleacher seating. I think it was pretty magical, too, to see the people we had been eating with all week transformed into their characters. There was also a neat technical feat of making it rain outside the big French door type windows at the back of the stage which Reed was pretty excited about. Afterwards, we all hurried back to the main building where Helene had a huge pot of hot borscht waiting for us, followed by cheesecake, which we were eating at 1 a.m. with everyone, basking in the post-performance glow and the expansive good moods of all the actors. Fortunately Reed was quite happy to climb into bed as soon as the play was over.

We were nearly at the capacity of the kitchen, dining room and the dishes and silverware and so on, feeding this group lunch and dinner on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday; the dishwasher was running constantly to keep up and all of us were peeling and chopping veggies for hours before each meal, it seemed. Fortunately Reed discovered on Tuesday that he loves loading and unloading the dishwasher so he was always checking the machine to see if one load was done so he could put all the dishes on the shelves, add the soap, and then push the buttons. Sometimes there is something like this that he'll take to wherever we're WWOOFing which kind of makes up for the extra work he creates at times. He's also been helping Walt with some of the landscaping and gardening which always perks up the exterior of wherever we're WWOOFing. And again, I'm amazed at what he'll eat when I haven't cooked it, there's nothing else, and when he's really hungry from the lack of snacks: Waldorf salad heavy on the celery, lentils, squid in cardamom sauce, anchovy spread, spicy merguez sausage, fig crisp, curry etc. Of course there was lots of stuff he loves anyway like quiche, spaghetti bolognaise, cheesecake, rillettes, stewed peaches with honey, and walnut cake.

This afternoon Eric took a group in his yellow Kangoo to some place on the river to swim and Walt and Reed went with him; it's just now starting to rain so hopefully they got a chance to get in the water before the weather got wet. We're tired from all the work this week and also from the hard work we've been doing to learn French. But we've made progress - last night Eric was talking for several minutes at his normal speed to other French people about bicycles in various cities like Paris, Lille, and Amsterdam, and I understood almost everything he said. And I've learned the difference in pronunciation for "vu," "vous," and "veux"!!

It's all highbrow in France...

Walt stayed at the hameau with Reed the other night and ate with the technicians while the rest of us piled in some cars and drove to a nearby town where there was a kind of potluck buffet meal (repas) of mediocre quiches and pizza and then a poetry reading of two poems that had to do with bulls and maybe Picasso written by one of France's most famous poets. Of course I can't remember his name but one of the poems was called La Corrida. I didn't understand much but I enjoyed the setting - in the garden of a beautiful little chateau - and the performance; it was more of a dramatic reading than just a poetry reading. For La Corrida, they passed around glasses of red wine before they started. Since the performers were wearing red and black and had red cloths to drape on the chairs and the candleabras were full of red candles burning brightly, it was all very dramatic. Even better were when the bats started flying around because of all the insects attracted to the lights. Afterwards the twilight view over the hills dotted with lights from hamlets and villages was really beautiful, I could see how a nobleman surveying his territory would have felt like a king in that chateau in the evenings.

This is all part of a Open Skies (Ciel Ouvert) series of summer artistic events in this region held in unusual outdoor spaces that Michel and Helene have helped facilitate. The next night we quickly washed up the dishes after dinner and piled in the cars again, this time for a film being shown inside an actual old quarry, or carriere. It was immense, and once we got inside, a little chilly; cave temperature of course. If I'd realized I would have worn socks. The film was a collection of 5 short films made by one director; a couple of them it was easy to understand the gist of it but a couple of them were absolutely inscrutable unless you understood French well. The funniest one was a couple about to get married, who suddenly were confessing to each other all the things the other person didn't know. The man doesn't like meat, he broke a vase on purpose, etc. etc. Then the woman admitted - and in this part I was so excited because I could understand it all and I could even laugh - that everything she had ever served him to eat she had bought at the deli or traiteur; the worst part was getting rid of all the packaging. And the final blow - she was brunette, not blond. Completely brunette. The look on his face was priceless.

Eric, the WWOOFer from Lille, told me he was looking forward to seeing the film because he hadn't been to the cinema for a long time; he also said he hoped it wasn't too highbrow, although he didn't use that word because there isn't a translation for highbrow in French. Then, just as I was about to say facetiously, but isn't everything in France highbrow? he said but of course, everything in France is like that!

The actors and musicians are pretty pleasant to have around, many of them are downright friendly and will in good spirits correct your French nicely and others are simply pleasant. Last night their dress rehearsal was delayed by the rain and everyone was gathered in the big room downstairs where a few of us were playing a dice game called Yams and Reed was painting with watercolors and loading dirty dishes into the dishwasher and putting away the clean ones. Tonight is the big spectacle, a piece called La Mouette based on something by Chekhov. I'm very curious to see everyone in their parts. We will eat dinner early tonight and then have borscht afterwards. Today the person who seems to be the person in charge of all the paperwork, Cecille, presented Helene with a big bouquet of flowers and she gave us WWOOFers a couple of chocolate toolboxes. Everything in finest chocolate, the box, the wrenches, the tape measure, bolts, etc. These are tucked safely away in the pantry for us to share later.

Let the excitement begin...

This Friday is a performance of some kind by a touring theatre troup called Le Printemps sans Chapiteau. A chapiteau is a big tent and apparently they used to use a big tent but now they don't, therefore, they are sans chapiteau. They'll tour all summer and finish up at the Avignon festival in July. Well, yesterday the big truck with all the gear arrived, and for dinner we had 15 people at the table. Helene cooked a feast: caesar salad, white fish (hake) baked on a bed of leeks, and of course we had strawberries for dessert. This morning our work was helping unload the truck. Reed sat off to the side playing peek a boo inside two big plastic tree pots while the rest of us hauled staging, bleachers, lights, electrical cords, speakers, etc. etc. out of the truck and then assembled the bleachers. We stopped at 10 a.m. for coffee, or water with almond syrup, no food, no potato chips, no donuts, no croissants, (the French don't really snack, that's why they don't get fat) before getting back to it until about 12:30. That took us up to lunch, for which Helene had once again cooked a treat, for 22 of us. Salad of regular buttery lettuce with vinaigrette, frittata with potatoes, anchovy spread to go with the bread, squash in a spicy sauce, cheese platter, and for dessert, strawberry apple tart. Mmmm.

I just have to take each moment as it comes, because I have no idea what's going to happen next - will the performers arrive? Who is this guy with the long hair and pale skin who looks like a musician who just arrived? Will we be 30 at dinner? Will I be working in the garden, the kitchen, or helping the roadies? I never know until it's time, since my French isn't good enough to catch the logistics discussions. I don't worry about it though. Eric is very helpful with his English, and my consolation is that Stuart, a fellow Welshman who lives here at the hameau ("fellow" because I have Welsh blood too) understands even less.

I've been feeding Reed early and getting him to bed by 8 or 9 since we haven't been eating until then or even later. Last night he was homesick and sad about our decision to let Fiona stay with her current caretaker (who will give her a home where she can nap on the furniture), so I made him pancakes which he ate with strawberries and strawberry jam. But tonight I think we're all going out to some small performances in some villages and then having a picnic. That's all I know. After lunch Yuki and I helped Helene make a salad with beets, zucchini, carrot, parsley, fennel, and quinoa, and she is also making some kind of savory bread pudding that also has beets in it. She's working on a Russian theme - thus, the beets. Oh, because the theatre thing on Friday has something to do with Chekhov! I'm sure I'll understand more as the week progresses.

Not a weed

Views of Hameau de la Brousse



And more about what we eat...

The lettuce in the garden at La Brousse isn't quite big enough to harvest yet but no matter, the dandelions have been up for weeks and when their leaves are small and tender they are good to eat. A little bitter, yes, and also a diuretic, but high in vitamin C I think, kind of a spring tonic, to drink a lot of water and eat a salad of "pissenlit" (literally translated means pee in the bed). It amused me on Saturday morning in the garden to be given a basket and instructed to harvest dandelion leaves from the row of them growing in the garden. Of course they're everywhere else too and if we get hard up for the cultivated ones we can always just go around and harvest them from the strawberry beds.

Charlotte aux Fraises

Helene slices the charlotte
Eric (French), Ragi (Norwegian), Regis (French), and Amandine (Belgian)
Michel cleans up the charlotte
Saturday night, late dinner of delicious pizza - nothing like Pizza Hut, it was agreed, and all were happy to hear Reed had never been there - and the crowning glory, a strawberry charlotte constructed by Amandine from the strawberries that Eric, Amandine, and I had harvested Saturday morning in the blazing sunshine.

As Walt and Reed and I were hungrily waiting around, having helped make the charlotte, prepare the pizza toppings, gone for a walk, read for hours, with still no sign of dinner being served, I realized that the key difference between the US and France is that for the French, dinner IS the entire point of the evening, there is nothing more important, in general, that will come after it except conversation. Whereas in the US, usually dinner is something we do first in the evening, followed by other things: a movie, reading a book, playing cards, watching t.v.... so when the pizza was finally served at 10 pm it was with a palpable sense of drama and lots of bravos.

The dessert was cheered, and second helpings taken all around, until finally Michel provoked a lot of jokes by continuing to cut tiny slivers, just a bit more, over and over again.

Hameau de la Brousse

Hameau de la Brousse

We’ve moved on to our next WWOOF host after Chateau Lassalle, after we said goodbye yesterday morning to the Cutts family in Aignan. It’s never easy to go after sharing peoples’ lives for a couple of weeks, doing the dishes, dealing with cranky kids, enjoying good meals and staying up too late, worrying about the weather… but we consoled ourselves with the thought that we’ll be back in the Gers in a few years, hopefully.

Steve took us to the train for what was for us a very easy 3 hours of train travel from Mont de Marsan to Bordeaux to Angouleme. Helene picked us up and ran some errands with us in the car and then we came back to Hameau de la Brousse, which is out in the rolling countryside very near the border between the Charente and the Dordogne. Hameau means hamlet, and this hamlet, a group of houses and barns, is owned entirely by three artists who have slowly renovated the whole place into houses, a gite, artist studios, performance spaces, etc. There is a huge garden and a park area in which there is a sort of natural amphitheatre, a river, a pond, limestone cliffs, and old quarrying caves that go into the cliffs. We’re out in the middle of nowhere and don’t mind at all, it’s so interesting.

There is quite a community of people here, several other WWOOFers, all younger than us of course, one from Austria, one from Japan, one from Norway, one from Belgium, a couple of friends of the owners, some paying guests, a resident artist, all of whom add up to a lot of mouths to feed. But with so many WWOOFers we get a lot done and the dishes don’t take too long. Things are surprisingly clean and organized for a place that gets so much traffic in the kitchen – this must be due to Helene and Michel’s skill at making lists of things for their WWOOFers to do immediately after breakfast. They are easy going and friendly and also organized and efficient – which is great, because it means meals are on time and the bed sheets are clean.

We’re eating very well – all the food appears to be organic and so far it’s been vegetarian although I’m told that only one of the WWOOFers is vegetarian. Last night it was sautéed carrots, millet mixed with bulgur, dandelion salad with vinaigrette, and strawberries and cream for dessert. Lunch today was scalloped squash, dandelion salad, leftover bulgar/millet, cheese, and more strawberries. And dinner this evening, spicy red beans and squash, rice, dandelion salad, and even more strawberries with cream. And always lots of sourdough bread and butter. And no, I’m not tired of the strawberries yet – they are fabulously fresh and delicious, straight from the garden. Helene isn’t tired of the strawberries either, tonight I saw her brazenly licking her plate after she’d eaten her dessert. Everyone rushed off after dinner to the theatre event happening down in the hameau’s park, something about “And Zeus created his woman…” but Reed was tired enough that he took himself to bed to read so I stayed in the room with him to help him get showered and ready to sleep. He’s having to adjust to being the only child again after having Ella to play with for the last two weeks. But there are plenty of friendly cats, a couple of dogs, and some chickens that he can visit with, and an amazing amount of really varied and interesting outdoor space complete with sculptures, caves, woods, stone steps, and numerous paths to follow. You can visit the website by clicking on the title of this post above.

Auch Kosh B'gosh

Street in Auch
Cathedral in Auch
Chateau Lassalle

Life has been lazy since the vernissage since I worked up a credit of my hours, leaving me only 6 or so to work over these past couple of days. Sunday I sat around reading and felt guilty when we were fed roast potatoes and lamb chops for dinner after having done nothing all day long except washed some dishes; and Monday I weeded in the vegetable garden for a few hours, washed dishes, tidied up the kitchen, and then cooked a huge quantity of baked macaroni and cheese for dinner, since we had thawed out a very large block of cheese on Saturday which somehow did not get served on Saturday night.

Steve had offered to take us somewhere and today he had business in Auch, the departmental capital of the Gers, so he knocked on the gite door at 9:30 and asked if we wanted to come along, which we did, since he also offered to take us out for lunch! Auch is about an hour drive away, to the east, and we drove through a couple of lovely towns on the way there and back, including Vic-Fezensac and Barran.

In Auch we parked in a big shady parking area under plane trees and walked a block down to the front of the massive Cathedrale de Sainte-Marie – from the 15th and 16th centuries, mostly gothic but with some Renaissance elements. The impact of it was slightly muted by the scaffolding obscuring half of the front façade, but the right upper façade had been restored recently and it was interesting to see the contrast from the older, dirtier and more pitted surface to the newly cleaned and renovated stonework. We discovered that this cathedral – an Unesco world heritage site - is on the pilgrim route to St. Jacques de Compostelle in Spain, and I was excited to see a real hiker come up the stairs from the river towards the cathedral on the marked pilgrim route; a woman probably in her 60s, all alone, with walking stick, back pack, dirty boots, and obviously tired knees.

We ate a good lunch at a café near the cathedral courtesy of Steve – Walt and Steve had the menu du jour with potatoes, turkey or beef, and haricots verts (green beans), and I had a tartine – basically a big piece of toasted bread – covered with goat cheese, ham, and honey, and then broiled until the cheese is all melted and warm. It came with a green salad and some roast potatoes. Reed ate a little of both Walt’s and my lunches and plenty of bread, and of course helped Walt eat his dessert, a big waffle with some raspberries and whipped cream. I’m told we’re to have confit of duck for dinner, which is an unexpected treat: duck thighs that have been preserved in their own fat, with potatoes sautéed in said fat.

In America the fact that the French people drink lots of wine and eat plenty of fatty food yet are still very healthy is known as the French paradox, but in Europe this phenomenon is called the Gascoigne Paradox, where the traditional specialty food and drink are red wine, armagnac, foie gras, and confit.. I hope that the Gascoigne Paradox applies to visitors like us, because I love confit and Steve does not stint on the red wine at dinnertime. It’s easy not to stint on the wine because you get it from the local “cave,” filling up your own gallon or larger containers with the stuff out of big tanks like at a gas pump. It is easy to drink, inexpensive, and good. You transfer it into your own empty bottles at home for serving at the table.

La Vernissage

Sunday, June 1, 2008
Chateau Lassalle

Sometimes in the early morning the sun streams through the bedroom window of the gite directly on to me in bed so that I throw off the covers and just bask there for a while like the sun-loving little green lizards that are everywhere in France. The birds are singing in the trees out in the pastures and gathering bits of wool from the fence to line their nests, and if it’s sunny the sheep are up early too, baa-ing for who knows what reasons.

The other morning I was awakened by insistent and persistent baa-ing; it went on for such a long while that I finally decided someone was in distress. I went out in my pajamas into the dewy grass between our terrace and the sheep’s new pasture, expecting to see someone tangled in some wire, to discover a big lamb had climbed onto the concrete cover of what I’m guessing is a septic tank and he was stuck there, about 2 feet above the ground, too scared to jump and ignored by all the other sheep who were probably thinking, just jump! I made a purposeful move towards him without knowing what I was going to do and the lamb, more scared of me than the distance between him and the ground, suddenly leaped, landing without any harm. I went back inside to bed and enjoyed the calmer baa-ing that followed.

The sun shone in this morning and I luxuriated in it, knowing that the vernissage went off fairly successfully last night although the crowds were not quite as large as hoped. But the weather really has been quite unseasonably cool and rainy and people are not getting into the festive summer going out kind of mood that they normally would be in by now. Apparently there is even some flooding that affected Nanette’s home, the friend who came to cook the curry on Friday and who did so much in the kitchen last night for the vernissage. Her husband Geoff, on his way home at 2 a.m., drove down into a dip in the road that turned out to be as deep as the windows of the car, which is now ruined.

Steve and a journalist at the vernissage

I spent the whole day cleaning out refrigerators and preparing the temporary “kitchen” workspace out in the big shed where the exhibit and party was held. Steve created a counter by strapping a large tabletop onto an antique single metal bedstead (the head and foot “boards” were level with each other), and I scrubbed down one of Steve’s wooden workbenches as a place to dish up the food. We filled up the sparkling clean fridges with tabbouleh, drinks of all kinds, Thai chicken curry, and sausages and smoked duck and pate and then I swept and swept until the concrete floors in the work area and around the “bar” were presentable, while another friend of Karina’s arranged flowers in old steel florists’ buckets for the tables and the children made themselves useful for a short time by following my directions to unstack all the chairs and put them at the tables.

Karina at the vernissage

I spent all Friday afternoon baking brownies for the vernissage in the new oven in the chateau kitchen which was tricky because the heat only comes from the bottom and I was having a hard time regulating the temperature, which caused more than one batch to be burnt on the bottom before the top was even done. But I eventually got them done and they were delicious, made with rich French butter, dark cocoa powder, and type 45 flour which is meant for gateaux, or cakes. Considering how much work the brownies were and how essential they were for the meal I was quite surprised that the person given the job of bringing out the double-stacked and foil-wrapped trays from the chateau to the party kitchen was 4 year old Ella. She squeezed them a little but didn’t drop them, so kudos to her.

Ready for the vernissage

I’ll see if I can remember the recipe, it’ll be in weights since that’s how the French and English measure for baking instead of using volume.

Carol's Chateau Lassalle Brownies

115 grams butter (1/2 cup I think)
7 g sugar (2/3 cup I think)
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla

1 g dark unsweetened cocoa (1/3 cup I think)
2 g all-purpose or pastry flour (1/2 cup I think)
¼ tsp. salt
¼ tsp. baking powder

Melt butter. In mixing bowl, mix sugar and eggs, add melted butter and vanilla and mix well. Combine dry ingredients in separate bowl and mix well, add to butter mixture and whisk gently until just combined. Spread in a buttered 8 x 8 baking dish and bake at 350 degrees F (175 C) until just barely done, probably 25 minutes. Don’t disturb the pan while baking. The top will look shiny and not quite done but will spring back if you touch it very gently and won’t sink when you take it out of the oven. Let cool in the pan, or let cool for just a few minutes before slicing into squares and removing gently from the pan while still warm, with a flexible spatula.