Back to Two Bakers

 Hot news! A new baker has taken over the premises 'up the hill' that was shut when the Pichard family business went into liquidation.

 So far we've tried the baguette and the banette -- both crispy crusted and chewy inside -- very good. At the moment he's not up to full baking capacity, so the bread runs out very quickly in the morning. I noticed the locals commenting on the cakes approvingly, but my guess is that Aurélien 'down the hill' will remain the town's favourite pâtissier.

The exterior of the shop looks no different but they have cleaned and painted the interior and it is all sparkling clean. They are open Tuesdays to Sunday mornings.

Capital Chaps

 A crouching man.

 A bearded man holding a bell.

 A monsterous animal.

These medieval carved capitals are in the 12th century church of Notre Dame de Fougeray hors les Murs Abbaye.  The name of the church means Our Lady of Fougeray outside the Abbey Walls. This church was constructed for the local parishioners on the orders of the huge Benedictine monastery in Cormery, now ruined and incorporated into later village buildings. Niall and Antoinette wrote about the monastery and its history on Chez Charnizay, but they didn't visit the parish church, which is the largest and highest in the Indre Valley.

Georges Clemenceau

A statue of Georges Clemenceau stands at the end of the Petit Palais in Paris, on the Champs-Elysées near Métro Clemenceau. In our time, he has been overshadowed by de Gaulle -- almost literally in the case of these two statues. De Gaulle sashays across the square out in the open in full view. Clemenceau is relegated to the shrubbery on the side of the road.

Clemenceau was an energetic, clear-sighted Republican, determined to pursue policies that were right for France and for the French. He deserves to be remembered more often, as the sort of man you want on your side.

 As a young man he spent several years in the United States, just after the American Civil War, effectively exiled there because his political activism in France meant that the authorities had imprisoned him once, and would clearly do so again if he remained in the country.

He was a close friend of Claude Monet, encouraging him to finish the waterlily paintings that now hang in the Orangerie.

Clemenceau was one of the most effective campaigners for Dreyfus when he was falsely accused of espionage. Emile Zola's open letter accusing the government of the time of anti-semitism and false imprisonment was published on the front page of Clemenceau's newspaper.

He was vehemently anti-Church and is largely responsible for the fourth tenet of the French Republic (after liberty, equality and fraternity) finally becoming law. Church and state are now strictly separated and France is officially a secular state.

He was Prime Minister of France twice, with his second term beginning in the final year of the First World War. He became very popular with the troops due to his regular visits to the front line and his practical measures to end the war. He was open about the fact that France had been shattered by the war, and pointed out that in the industrial heartland of France, the northern coal and steel producers, would need extensive rebuilding. Germany, on the other hand, was virtually undamaged, and Clemenceau knew that whilst France and her allies had technically won the war, Germany had won economically, and would be the first to recover. Although a great advocate of the idea of a co-operative Europe, he was sceptical about the newly formed League of Nations, commenting that it would only work in a utopian world.

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There is a Marché aux truffes (Truffle Market)  at Marigny-Marmande on Saturday 12, from 9 am to 1 pm. There will be a gourmet market and truffles with everything! Ungraded truffles are affordable, with a walnut sized tuber costing about €20, an egg sized one about €30. If you buy one, do allow the vendor to choose one for you, or take their advice about which one to buy, so that you get the best value for money. Worth going to just for the all pervasive smell of truffles in the air.

Weather and Wildlife 2012

If you just look at the statistics, 2012 comes out looking like a nearly normal year -- just about average temperatures, only slightly more than average rainfall, average hours of sunshine -- but look more closely, and the details show an anything but average year.

For 2 weeks in February we were sparkling white -- it was beautiful.

Only February, April and July were colder than normal -- but that's quite a big 'only'. These are months that are important for the survival and reproduction of many species. February was particularly cold, for an unusually long time. Fortunately late summer was rather warm, making up to some extent for the feeble July temperatures. The only extreme of weather we didn't experience in 2012 was a full on hurricane, although there were some very windy days in October and December, with gusts up to 85km/hour.

A 2012 Winner -- Snakeshead Fritillary Fritillaria meleagris wasn't bothered by the snow and flowered before the hot dry March could dessicate its riparian habitat.

January was unusually mild and dry, but the extremely cold spell in the first half of February meant that we had the coldest weather since January 1987 to begin the year. The temperature didn't go above 0°C for a fortnight. I have been told that it reached -27°C in some of the more exposed places around here, but officially the lowest temperature was -18°C (which is unusual, but not exceptional for here). Despite all the snow, February was even drier than January. Many garden plants were killed, but the blanket of snow saved the young cereal crops and the vines, insulating them so their roots did not quite freeze. A particular plus has been that most of the Pine Processionary Thaumetopoea pityocampa caterpillars were killed in their nests, and the population has not yet recovered.

Winners -- Bee Orchids Ophrys apifera in the orchard in May.

March continued the unusual weather, in that it was the sunniest month since 1950, downright hot and worryingly dry. I remember thinking 'oh no! another year like 2011', with no rain at all in the winter and spring. I needn't have worried -- April was cold, wet and grey! The month never got warm enough or dry enough for me to do what should have been my first butterfly survey of the year, but at least it redressed the rain deficit. May was more normal, but still rather wet. There were late frosts and several hailstorms, which damaged vines along the Loire, and put paid to most peoples' fruit crops. STERF, the French butterfly survey programme, could tell right from the beginning of the season that it was so bad that butterflies numbers would not recover for 2012, and announced it was the worst year for this group since 2006. Many birds abandoned attempts to breed due to lack of shelter (late leaf burst) and poor weather (nests washed out). Small mammals such as voles, and reptiles (lizards and snakes) suffered flooding of burrows and food shortages. The combination of winter cold and 2011's extended dry period meant low numbers of amphibians breeding.

I saw a number of species of medium sized longicorns attracted to flowers, like this Stictoleptura cordigera, from mid-summer onwards.

June continued in much the same vein as May, and into July, which never satisfactorily warmed up. The good news was that the orchids loved these cool, but not cold, rather damp conditions, and had an excellent year. The orchids in the orchard were taller and more floriferous than I have seen them previously. Several of my butterfly survey sites got so overgrown that I had to abandon them. On the other hand, moths and butterflies (both Lepidoptera), bees and wasps (both Hymenoptera) and flies (Diptera) continued to have low numbers and in general pollination of vines and fruiting plants was poor because of the rain and low temperatures restricting insect activity.  Finally, August was hot, dry and sunny, with a proper heatwave mid-month (although nothing like 2003 or 2006).  Dragonflies (Odonata) were one of the few groups of insects that had a much better year than the previous one. Common wasps Vespula and Dolichovespula spp were in very low numbers, but hornets Vespa spp (both native and alien) did relatively well. The later emerging species of beetles (Coleoptera), such as longicorns Cerambycidae, and flies like horse flies Tabanidae also managed a reasonable year.

Fungi as far as the eye can see on an outing in October.

September presented as a nice normal month, with pleasant temperatures and average rainfall. October, although overall was mild (only a single frost), was also very wet, and there were some very windy days. November and December were mild (no frost!), bringing a lot of rain, with some flooding and standing water in fields. Larger mammals (everything from squirrel size up)  seem to have done rather well, being better able to withstand the flooding, even if they were burrow dwellers. It turned out to be an excellent year for fungi too. Bush-crickets (Tettigoniidae) seem to have had a fairly good year, but grasshoppers (Acrididae) a fairly poor year, presumably due to different habitat requirements (bush-crickets live in scrub and low bushes, whereas grasshoppers need open grassland that is not too overgrown). True crickets (Gryllidae) didn't do very well, as it didn't warm up soon enough for them.

Kings in Grass Castles

 The view from Simon's brother's house.

A Day Trip to the Great Wall

 A streetside market on the way to the Wall.

On 11 December last year we were returning from Australia via China. Because we had a long wait between flights at Beijing we took a hotel (Air China provides a free hotel room if you know to ask). We had obtained a 72 hour transit permit when the plane landed for a couple of hours in Shanghai before continuing to Beijing and Simon had booked a guide and driver for the morning. Part of the Great Wall is about an hour from Beijing and our guide was confident he could get us there, spend an hour on the Wall, then get us to the airport in plenty of time to get through security (we'd checked our hold luggage all the way through and only had hand luggage with us). The big advantage of taking a trip to the Wall rather than the Forbidden City or Tianmen Square is that you are not having to cross the city, with all its traffic problems,  to get back to the airport. It all worked swimmingly, and we are very glad we did it rather than sit around at the airport.

It was cold, and we had to be a little bit creative with our clothing. Simon had forgotten to pack long underwear, so wore two pairs of trousers. Luckily, I had been given another pair of my friend Margaret's hand knitted socks while I was in Australia, so they got their first outing on the Great Wall!

Simon has created an interactive map*  of our day trip, with photos added for the highlights. If you would like to follow our trip, each of the symbols on the map can be clicked to bring up a photo.

View Route to the Great Wall in a larger map

A frozen waterfall on the way back.

*click this link if the embedded map doesn't work for you.

Chestnut Cream

This is the easiest possible seasonal dessert, but be warned - it is very sweet and very rich. I first encountered coupe mont blanc (creme de marron chantilly) at the now somewhat discredited restaurant Chartier, a 19th century dining hall in Paris, where the waiters are famously rude and you get to share a table with strangers.

Ingredients for Chestnut Cream.

Usually Chestnut Cream is made by the simple expedient of combining creme chantilly (sweetened whipped cream) and confiture de chataignes (sweetened chestnut paste), but I prefer something a little more sophisticated. It takes a couple more ingredients but cuts down on the fat content. It takes a few more minutes to prepare but even so, is still super quick to put together.

Combining the cream cheese and sweetened chestnut purée.

Ingredients:
1 jar or can of sweetened chestnut purée
1 box of cream cheese
2 egg whites
3 tbsp sugar
A handful of marrons glacés (candied chestnut) bits (optional)

Add the marrons glacés bits.

Method:

1. Tip the cream cheese into a bowl and beat until smooth.
2. Stir in the sweetened chestnut purée and then the chestnut bits.
3. Whip the egg whites until stiff, adding the sugar at the end.
4. Fold the beaten egg whites into the cream cheese / chestnut mixture.
5. Spoon into glasses and sprinkle with a few more chestnut bits.

Don't forget to save some chestnut bits to decorate...

Marrons glacés are considered a tremendous seasonal treat, with their distinctive mealy texture and caramelly sweetness. You can purchase them at great expense in fancy boxes like chocolates at Christmas time, or you can buy broken ones at slightly less expense, also packaged in fancy boxes. The best is if you can buy broken bits at half price from the post-Christmas excess confectionery shelves in the supermarket.

Yum

Susan

Bursting (River) Banks

 The Claise at the boat ramp in Preuilly, with the island made by the foundations of the 'Roman' bridge on the left and the weir for the Moulin de Chanvre downstream (above, photographed on 17 December); the Vienne at Nouâtre (below, photographed on 28 December). All the rivers are very full due to all the rain, but apparently the levels are stable. There is a lot of standing water in fields and the young wheat crop is struggling.

Bursting (Grain) Banks

I don't know what happened here. We encountered this ruined silo last Friday at Maillé. Was it the strong winds two days before or did the grain explode? Did the silo just fail? Nothing appeared in the local news until Sunday. The company who run the silos, Durand, are closed for the holidays and nobody seems to know what happened. It is assumed the silo collapsed for some reason Friday evening (so it can't have long happened when we saw it). No explosion was reported and no one was hurt in the incident.

My first reaction was to feel sorry for whoever has lost their grain (not sure whether the farmers or the silo owners will take the brunt here, although it is presumably insured). The price of wheat skyrocketed in 2012. Bakers were paying €176 a tonne in February, but by October it was €260 a tonne. Interestingly, the price of oats is similar, at €250 a tonne. The reddish colour of this spilt grain tells me it is wheat.

Bonne Année 2013

A l'aube de 2013 nous vous présentons nos Meilleurs Voeux!

 A classic touristic shot to start the year off -- looking down the Champs-Elysées towards the Arc de Triomphe, with the Grande Arche and la Défense beyond.

Making the Biscuits

 On Christmas Eve Simon suddenly went into a baking frenzy and produced crispy thin gingernuts, walnut studded chocolate brownies and sugary macaroons.

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Watching a French movie is a great way of gently improving your French language and cultural comprehension. Ideally, I like to watch the movie in French with no subtitles, then read a review of it to see how much I understood. Generally there will be some subtlety of the relationship between two characters that I won't have got. If I remember, I like to watch the movie again in 6 months time. It's fun to feel like you are understanding much more of the dialogue second time round.

Movie Suggestion: Les Visiteurs, a time travelling comedy from 1992 which I'd never heard of before, but seems to have become a bit of a cult. The costumes are great, the story is amusing, the characters clear (although Jean Reno did strongly remind me of our friend Stéphane -- fortunately only mildly disconcerting).

Aerial Sunrise

The sun rises above the horizon, but is not yet above the clouds -- photographed from the plane leaving Beijing.

UPDATE from Simon: This photo is actually sunrise over Townsville (Australia) At the moment the photo was taken the sun appeared to be trapped between the horizon and a cloud layer and we were looking down on it (In fact, we could well have been seeing the sun due to refraction, and it probably hadn't even risen above the horizon)

On the Tarmac

Our plane being loaded at Beijing airport.

It Could be Worse

The weather may be dismal here in France, but it wasn't as if we had unrelenting scorching sunshine in Australia. Here are some pictures of days when it was less than tropically balmy.

Following an ambulance down Brown Mountain on our way to the coast.

Even thicker fog on the winding Brown Mountain road.

A Manly ferry rocks and rolls its way past Sydney Heads on a squally, extremely windy day. We were on the ferry going the other way.

A tall ship at anchor in Sydney Harbour. The day before we had seen a sailing ship out to sea in the sweltering heat, off the coast at Bondi.
UPDATE: Simon tells me that this ship is the James Craig, moored at the Maritime Museum. There is a lightboat in front.

Malgré la pluie...

 A reduced nectarine. Recognise the tool, on its new long handle Martine?

Despite the rain, which has been more or less constant since we returned from Australia, and is forecast to continue for days, if not weeks to come, there has been the occasional break in the weather. Sunday morning when I checked the Météo de France site it said, to my astonishment, that the afternoon would be sunny!

 These are Chasselas grapes for the table, so pruned much less severely than wine grapes.

I leapt at the chance and since it was indeed feebly sunny, I spent the afternoon in the orchard pruning. I've done the grapes and the big old nectarine by the potager gate. I don't really know what I'm doing with pruning fruit bearing plants, but the worst that can happen is that we miss out on a crop for one year I guess.

 These spindle berries are a bit past their best, but they brighten up a corner of the potager.

The grapes I aimed to reduce to 5 buds on spurs that looked like they were growing in a sensible direction. The nectarine needed to have some nuisance branches removed (too low over the gate) and a lot of weight taken off. It's a 20 year old tree, and I reduced the top by about half, by taking out branches that were duplicating one another or too low or too high. It's a work in progress, but I won't reduce it any more for this year. Maybe I'll tackle it again next year or the year after, once I've seen how it responds to this prune.

Cows not Planes!

This banner has recently gone up on the side of the road into Preuilly. The landholders are our local organic orchardists and market gardeners, and the issue is the plan for a big new airport near Nantes. Their banner says 'Supporting the country folk of Notre-Dame-des-Landes'.

In support of the fight against the airport project at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, a new group has been created in the Loches area, to lobby against what they have dubbed 'Big Pointless Projects' (les grands projets inutiles).

The idea to construct a airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes (30km north of Nantes in Loire-Atlantique) dates from 1965. Originally the idea was to create an airport suitable for Concorde. But the plan wasn't scrapped when Concorde stopped flying and ever since, the protests against this largescale project (€561M) have continued to grow -- even more so in the last few weeks, as work is finally expected to begin in 2013 to put in place the infrastructure envisaged for 2017.

On the site, a group known as the 'zadistes'* occupies the area, encircled by tractors to protect themselves against intervention from the police. All over France support groups are proliferating. Many of the individuals involved are farmers or rural residents. In Loches, they are not only concerned about the airport, but even closer to home, the future of the grand 19th century Palais de justice (courthouse) in Loches, the sous-préfectural (county services) office move and the closure of Alfred de Vigny school, a lovely old building in the centre of town.

The protesters point out that the airport project will seal under concrete an area the size (2000 ha) of an average commune (local authority) in the southern Touraine, and that this land is prime agricultural land. Protests on the site have been fairly roughly dealt with by the CRS** ('violence insupportable en démocratie') and the cost of police action (€1.5M) considered unjustifiable in these straitened times.

The protesters' website is here (in French, but well worth looking at for the maps showing the scale of the project even if you don't read French).

*ZAD = Zone à Défendre. They take their name from a twist on the project's own ZAD acronym (= Zone d'Aménagement différé). In other words, rather than a Deferred Development Zone, the protesters have created a Defended Zone.
**Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité = the specialist riot and crowd control squads of the police force.

Source: La Renaissance Lochoise 19 - 25 December 2012.

Christmas at the Beach

Most Australians will have a family meal on Christmas day and exchange presents. It probably won't be a barbecue, and it is most unlikely to be on the beach. Instead it will be somewhere cool and shaded, indoors with the airconditioning on possibly, but perhaps outside in the garden under a shade sail.

A decorated tree in Manly, a Sydney beach suburb.

Seafoods, salads and sparkling wines are likely to feature strongly on the menu, especially if you are near the coast with access to good prawns and oysters. If your family is of British ancestry, as mine is, then the meal is likely to contain some remarkably similar elements to that which your cousins in the Old Country are enjoying --  a large roast of some sort and a steamed Christmas pud.

Joyeux Noël 

wherever you are and whatever your Chistmas tradition is.

Le Relais du Dolmen

Le Relais du Dolmen is the latest incarnation of the restaurant in Charnizay. When we first bought our house, the restaurant was called Le Gargantua and was a lunch stop of très bon rapport de prix et qualité. Then the lease was sold to someone else, who lasted a couple of years, but didn't really impress the locals. Earlier this year the place abruptly closed. It looked like it had been abandoned, but in the autumn the decorators moved in. Now it has re-opened, with a new name, and a young local woman at the helm.

The new restaurant sign.

Antoinette, who writes Chez Charnizay, thought she should try the place out and invited us and mutual friends Tim and Pauline along to lunch on Friday. We also thought it would be a good idea to try it out and accepted with alacrity.

The meal was a simple, 12€ no choice set menu of paté en croute, chile con carne with salad, cheese, apple and banana cinnamon crumble or moeulleux de chocolat with creme anglaise for dessert and wine. Coffee was extra.

Tim and Niall outside the bar.

The young woman was managing the kitchen, the tables (3 occupied and a total of 11 customers including us) and the bar all on her own. As a result our bread, water and wine were a long time coming, and she clearly needs an assistant. She asked us if chile con carne was OK for mains and assured us it wasn't very spicy. Someone on the next table opted not to have it, and was given something that appeared to be mostly mashed potato (maybe brandade de morue?). 'Not very spicy' turned out to be a considerable overstatement. I think it had been shown a chili in the kitchen, but that none actually came in contact with the carne. It was a perfectly pleasant and satisfying mince and beans dish though, served in big square bowls so you could help yourself.

The cheese platter was a simple offering of camembert and Sainte-Maure-de-Touraine. I thought the camembert was particularly tasty. The crumble was pronounced very good by those that had it, and my moeulleux was good too. The red table wine was soft and black curranty and very drinkable. It went perfectly with the carne sans chilli. A coffee rounded things off nicely.

The restaurant has stiff competition from restaurants serving similarly priced meals at lunchtime in the villages less than 10 minutes either side of Charnizay, so she may struggle to match them for quality. However, it seems a nice place to drop into every now and then, and definitely worth patronising on the grounds that if you don't use it you will lose it.  If you want a quick simple meal, the food isn't bad and I am sure the restaurant will evolve and develop as the new manager gains experience. Or you could just drop into the bar at other times for a coffee, beer or a snifter. I imagine it could be quite convivial.

Pauline, Antoinette, Simon, Tim and Niall, happily installed in the newly refurbed little restaurant.

We hope that the enterprise goes well and that the summer brings a boost in passing traffic. And as a place to be when the world ended it was perfectly adequate.

PS: We thought that next year we might organise a Touraine Bloggers office Christmas party, with a Secret Santa (€5 limit) gift exchange, maybe in Loches. Hands up all those who would be interested?

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There is a Marché aux truffes (Truffle Market)  at Marigny-Marmande on Friday 28, from 9 am to 1 pm. There will be a gourmet market and truffles with everything! Ungraded truffles are affordable, with a walnut sized tuber costing about €20, an egg sized one about €30. If you buy one, do allow the vendor to choose one for you, or take their advice about which one to buy, so that you get the best value for money. Worth going to just for the all pervasive smell of truffles in the air.

Meditation Station

This rest and relaxation station was popular with transit passengers in Beijing airport.

A Chinese Fountain

 This fountain, with its carved stone guardians, sits in the centre of Beijing airport.