Soleil

We’re hoping it comes back, and according to the météo, it will. To invoke and ensure its triumphant return here are some small photos of the first batch of Maffay limoncello, made with Romain’s lemons and eau de vie from Shopi and some sugar. We haven’t tested it yet but it does look glowing in the bottles and it helps to look at it on grey Mondays.

And the wasps seemed to find it attractive…so it must be good.

Framing

The goal now is that Gabriel should have a bedroom before it’s time to go back to school. That’s on September 2. So this weekend’s job, and the job for after-work, is putting up the wall that goes between the stairwell, and his bedroom – so soliciting help from Wich via email, from Simon, Jean-Luc and Gaël and Romain, the wall is going up and so far, has not fallen down. It has integrated support beams for Gabriel’s mezzanine bed, and the project for today is to put in a little window so that he can look out the skylight towards the poplar trees, which look like, he says, either an elephant or a tiger, but agrees that the nice thing about trees is that they can look like a lot of things.

So anyway there will be more pictures, but basically there are long pieces of wood that run from the floor to the ceiling where they are screwed into the rafters underneath the sheetrock, so they’re about every 40cm apart. There’s a sill plate that runs along the floor, and there are horizontal pieces that are staggered every 120 cm on center. One end is mortared into the wall with long bolts called ‘tire-fonds’, and MAP which is like a cementy sort of plaster. I have to figure out a way to make the other end a bit more solid, because a doorframe is going to be attached to it, and because an adolescent G. will one day be living in that bedroom, one must account for slamming doors in the planning phase now.

The trees are starting to change colors – autumn is beginning, and today it’s raining like November. But the tomatoes are getting red and will be perfect right when Isabella and Tiny Mo get in on Wednesday. And the weather is supposed to turn summery at last, next week. So we’ll finally be able to find out if the 40cm of insulation are doing their job.

Mon Dieu, je bande encore…

The title of this post is of course a reference to a great song by Georges Brassens. It is also the song that accompanies an apprentice drywall taper as she goes about her mudwork, and is also a delightful double entendre in French, because ‘bander’ is the verb that applies to taping drywall, and also to having an erection. So, there you have construction, music and tongue in cheekery, all at once.

Those of us who grew up in the big hair/boys with eyeliner music video-infused 1980s will also recognize the song that followed me as i was putting up the Deltareflex aluminum reflective layer on top of the fiberglass insulation. Name that song. (flex-flex-flex-flex).

The new bakery

Our small town has a new baker and of course we had to try it out very soon. They have a nice pain aux graines, which is actually a white bread with diverse grains in it, and after the Rentrée there will surely be a wider selection. What we were interested in however, of course, were their cakes. This is the one we picked: a tarte aux noix au caramel au beurre salé, which looks and sounds roughly like a pecan pie but instead of pecans, walnuts, and instead of molasses and brown sugar and butter, salt caramel sauce. So we took it home for a tasting. We did go to the store on our bikes, if that helps.

1. Exterior aspect: promising, lots of walnuts, this is good. The caramel sauce looks nice too and is it possible that the whole, seemingly homemade tart shell is filled with walnuts and caramel?

2. Cut in half – a setback. It appears that the tart shell is filled with frangipane or something similar, that almondy filling that often accompanies apricot tarts. Maybe the frangipane is infused with caramel sauce or maybe the hot caramel sauce sunk into the frangipane in gooey unison?

3. Noooooooooo! It’s just a frangipane. This is a personal problem – french people probably love this tart, but because of my genetic makeup and blue passport, I was expecting a breton interpretation of a pecan pie. Gabriel likes this picture of him eating it though. Note for a future cake test though: attempt the same, with walnuts stuck together with salt caramel sauce in a little tart shell with a third flavor instead of frangipane. (Why? because frangipane is based on almonds. Mixing nuts is all well and good, but i would propose that you should either go walnut, or go almond, but not both).

But: this is an entirely culture-specific problem with this specific tart and should in no way be taken as a negative review of the bakery, whose arrival we are very pleased to celebrate by returning to try other tarts very soon.

Ceiling!

Jean-Luc came back this long weekend and put together the pieces of sheetrock into a pleasing continuous pattern, and created special flared skylight boxes, and it’s absolutely gorgeous and all of a sudden feels like a real home except for the fact that there is white powder everwhere (snow! says Gabriel) and it still must be taped and sanded and painted, but, wahoooo!!!

ps. the little blue fingernail clippings below are actually hiding photos, wordpress didn’t seem to want to generate thumbnails for them so they get small blue lines instead.  please click away.

Stonewalling

This is the continuation of the retaining wall previously seen here:

soutenement

soutenement-bis

We have some slack time between the ‘enrobage’ of the heated floor and the continuation of the upstairs, so i’ve begun putting the rocks up in front of the cement blocks over the course of the weekend. I had considered doing it in pierre sèche, but tried a bit, and it fell down, so the rocks are mortared in with lime and sand. It really doesn’t look like a big deal in the photos but there are eight meters on each wing of the wall, so this is why it’s not done yet. Sandra came over last weekend and helped put down some rocks too, which helped; the wall has become a personal challenge though and it is lovely to go out and put rocks together like a puzzle, after dinner, as the sun sets and the cows snort over my shoulder.

And i found a small prince, while moving rocks from the piles on the ground up to the wall, but did not kiss him because we hadn’t yet been introduced.

Joyeux anniversaire Sandra (le 11.08)

Sandra a fêté ses 30 ans au Maffay! Elle le refetera encore très bientôt, et a mis en guise de bouquet sur la table une énorme tomate, fruit de son beau jardin, et tous les convives maffaiennes sont restés bouche bée débout en arrivant à la vue d’une telle tomate, comme vous voyez dans la photo, donc elle nous a offert à boire et après on s’est assis jusqu’à la tombée de la nuit pour goûter des mures fraichement cueillis accompagnées d’une sublime sauce gaëlamel, et un gâteau chocolat.  Vivement la prochaine! 

Enrobage

Voilà un mot en français car franchement je ne sais pas comment dire ‘dalle d’enrobage’ en anglais. Sylvain, Maxime et son beau-père Québriacois sont revenus pour couler la deuxième dalle d’enrobage pour le plancher chauffant, après le passage de Simon et Olivier. Nous avons donc un plancher qui est presque au niveau, il faut juste poser maintenant la chape maigre (sable et tradical 55), ensuite verser la barbotine, et poser les terres-cuites-mains par les hommes/femmes aux doigts de fée de chez Josse à Plancoët. Gabriel était ravi de l’expérience et moi aussi même si cela a voulait nécessairement dire que la lave-linge était en retraite imposée pendant une semaine, mais je viens maintenant d’être à jour dans notre lessive donc tout va bien. Les terres cuites seront posées pendant le mois de septembre et après on aura un plancher fini et habitable. Ouf.

The Academy of St Gabriel in the Fields

Conducting the cows? Knighting (dame-ing) them? Jousting? The shot could have been taken from a better angle, but it was seen through the window of the roulotte, and so this is what you get.

Also, a pic of the most hedonistic pleasure of this summer: almost entirely homemade caprese, (caprine caprese), with our goat cheese, noire de crimée tomatoes, and basil and italian parsley from the garden. The olive oil and balsamic vinegar are of course not from our garden, but in another maffaien miracle, the olive bush does has three olives on it which are currently larger than the head of a pin so perhaps next year this will be possible.

Also, a teaser for Aunty Izzy: yes, there will be enough tomatoes to eat caprese every day while you are here.

Lovely date

If only for an excuse to post on this balanced date: we forgot to put up some of these: back on the first day of July, a really funny thing happened. We woke up and came down from the house to go start breakfast, and discovered that our yard was full of cows. The ladies from the other side of the fence had found an opening, and came over to see what changes we’ve been making. As soon as i came down though, they started walking out of the yard and i had barely enough time to grab the camera and call Gabriel, just catching them as they passed the shower under the walnut tree. We called Pierre-Yves, and followed them to make sure they didn’t go out to the main road to Sens. They had a great time in the corn field, and we got behind them and were rather successfully trying to herd them back to their field when Pierre-Yves came up in his truck. It was very exciting, this never happened to us in our apartment in Rennes.

Also, this is what the cheese looks like when you put it into the molds: we call it the curds in English, and at this point you pour off the whey, which is really good for cooking pasta, as recommended on another site whose name and link i’ve now forgotten; (the pasta tastes like it is infused with goat cheese, i’ve found it works best with fettucini which you then toss with peas and some fresh tomato and either basil or marjoram, mmm), and is also really good for you because of vitamin B, and has the added benefit of tasting good too. It’s called petit lait in french. The curds are so silky and pillowy, sloppy and fragile, like solid milk that you can cut with a spoon. This is probably my favorite part of making cheese. Besides eating it, of course.