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.

A little bit of French heaven

Friday, May 23, 2008
Chateau Lassalle, Aignan

We seem to have landed in paradise, or at least almost paradise; here there is weeding and renovation work and I think in paradise there won’t be weeds…. But nevertheless we are in WWOOF heaven.

Our hosts are Steve and Karina, originally from England, who are the same ages as Walt and I; they have 2 boys aged 12 and 9 and a little girl aged 4 who is outgoing and well adjusted and seems to like playing with Reed just fine. There’s only been blood drawn once and that was from Reed’s nose, when he bashed it on Ella’s head when they were jumping on the trampoline. Steve and Karina moved to the Pyrenees in France in the early 90s and bought Chateau Lasalle about 7 years ago. It’s a substantial stone house with parts of it dating back to the 1500s and maybe even earlier than that. Steve does a bit of everything – taking care of the land, gardening, working on the house, running an antique business, putting on art shows – and Karina is a freelance journalist. I've put a link to their website, www.oldfrenchstuff.com, in the title of this post.

We’re staying in the two bedroom gite that used to be a concrete block pig stable that Steve transformed into a lovely and comfortable little dwelling with a view of the east pastures where the sheep and two donkeys graze. You can always tell when people have a sense of design and Steve and Karina obviously do; the gite is decorated simply but with southern French style: lovely old pieces of furniture, lots of cushions with richly colored fabrics, blue and white walls, terracotta tiles on the floor, yellow and mint and pumpkin orange trim, framed antique postcards of the Chateau and Aignan, etc. And they feed us lunch and dinner every day; lunch is usually bread, salad, ham and salami and pate, and cheese. For dinner we’ve had roast chicken with chickpeas, roasted red peppers, and sweet corn; and last night was garlic parsley mashed potatoes and stewed beef from a taureau, a bull, which was killed in the bullfight held in Aignan twice a year or so. Apparently every little town in these parts has a bullring. Steve and Karina never go to the fight itself, but enjoy the meat, which is very rich and tasty. Steve says these bulls live a fabulous life, with acres and acres all to themselves for 3 years, until it all ends in a single bad afternoon. We drink wine that they get from the local cooperative; they take their empty bottles in and fill them up from the tap, like getting gas in the car. It’s cheap and good.

All this is in exchange for Walt and I each working 30 hours a week. Next weekend is an opening – another vernissage!, for those who remember our first experience at Verderonne last September – and we are busy making the front garden and terrace look terrific, as people who come to the opening will be offered a meal for a certain amount of money and they’ll be served outside if it’s nice. I’m weeding garden beds and raking gravel pathways, and Walt is helping Steve prepare the soil and get a new hedge planted around the perimeter fence of this part of the garden which will look nice and also keep the dogs in. My back is killing me but once my muscles get back in shape for bending over I’ll be fine. Next week I’ll help Karina start to get the food ready. I think I’ve just agreed to bake a load of brownies to put in the freezer, and I need to help her think of a starter too. It’s tricky, because she doesn’t know how many people will eat. So she has to prepare loads, and then put whatever’s left in the freezer.

The vernissage is a display of about 40 posters from 1968, especially from the month of May, a time of great civil unrest in France – they even call the people who were participating in the demonstrations “sixty-eighters” – soixante-huitards, I think. Steve is framing all the posters, which Karina inherited from her parents who were quite active in the demonstrations and were in prison in 1968. Her mother must’ve gotten out sometime, though, since Karina was born in July of 68.

The weather here is warm, and yesterday we ate ripe cherries from the tree; today we had salad from the first lettuce harvest of the season. The wisteria climbing up the front pillars of the house bloomed a month ago and so did the iris, and the lavender is just about to burst into purple glory. Everything is lush and green, and this morning we worked in the rain for a while, not minding it since it wasn’t cold. We sleep with the French doors in the bedroom open and wake up to birdsong, and sometimes a little donkey braying.