Le bar

Happy birthday to Paul and Carolina!

This is a precursor to a larger post, entitled “the 12 labors of Sean and Timothy,” to commemorate Seanie’s visit with us.  One of the things that advanced significantly during his stay is the Bar, or the large piece of wood that now separates the kitchen from the living room, and as of last night, is illuminated from underneath.  It still needs the backing (the horizontal pieces of chestnut flooring on the living-room side), but from the kitchen, it looks about 80 percent finished we can now finally organize the rices and other treats where they have been meaning to go since last January.  Ouf.

Planing and sanding, with Cip's tail.

Still summer

We’re nigh on a month without significant rain, which is astonishing, and makes July’s porcini, brought by one morning in M. Roullier Père’s tractor,

seem all the more nebulous.  The first walnuts are starting to drop now, school has fallen back into its usual morning and afternoon rythms, and our chickens berate me for not posting their photos on this little site.

Patience, i say, i still haven’t put up the pics of the fête du village in june.  Stella caught a baby couleuvre yesterday, which is a snake, and the two chickens fought over it for a quarter of an hour before it finally played dead convincingly enough so that she dropped it, and it slithered off to repair its wounds in some underground part of Maffay to which we are denied, thankfully, ingress.   It’s the opposite of Africa where the snakes slid off with chicks in their maws.  The chickens understand now that i work in the office with the glass door, so they can come and peck at the window during their explorations of the garden, and peer in to see how we live, retribution for the first weeks where we would come and look in through the chestnut spires of their fence to watch them scratch and cackle.  They follow us around like dogs ever since we began playing the worm game with them, where we would find worms with the shovel and give them to the ladies to eat.  They are the true ladies of Maffay, and Stella and Garfield will have their pictures up here soon, really.  Right now they’re taking a nap on the doorstoop outside my office.

Other belated photos from past months:  the piano tuning, back in July.  We found an old piano (from around 1910) at Emmaüs when Aunty C. was visiting, and bought it and had it delivered on the merit of its tone; it sounds round and golden, especially when played as it was meant to be played.

The tuner came for a visit and adjusted its notes to something closer to real-world harmonies, and i’ve been playing around a bit, G will start lessons in two weeks, and visiting musicians (like Jane) stop by and play feet-tapping tunes that warm up the whole house.

Happy Tet, and the X-men

We’ve not been, shall we say, exuberant poster children this month of january of the new year, and now years, with the advent of the Bull. It’s been a busy month of work and travails, and the subtext of the crisis and having to read that word every day makes one feel a little bit like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight – are the foundations of the world shaking, or is it just me?

Small things have advanced nonetheless here at Maffay. I planted finally all the jonquil bulbs and nectarine tree that Jacqueline and Jean-Pierre brought when they visited after Christmas with Mamie, Rokia, Bruno and Selyan. The tulip bulbs from the school sale in November. The iris from Mme Brugalais at the Poste, and the crocosmia as well. And some bulbs on sale from our faithful Leroy Merlin, because everyone in their right mind knows that it’s now too late to plant bulbs, but i have hope, and a need for color in our messy rainforest of a weed-garden. Cip has now joined Max in the tribe of X-men, and is nutless to begin the new year; the vet found his hidden testicle after opening up his abdomen, tucked up next to the wall of his intestines. Cip is very proud of his soft shaven belly and otherwise shows no signs of trauma at his loss of masculinity.

Politically, recent events in the United States had inspired me to halfway imagine that we would wake up on the morning of January 30 after the strike, to find that Nicolas Sarkozy had left office to be replaced by a coalition of people from Sortir du Nucléaire, proponents of ecological farming methods, bankers with lots of bonus money destined exclusively for investment in eolians, a bevy of chefs de cuisine and sous-chefs to establish a Museum of French Gastronomic History with vast wings devoted to each of the Hexagon’s colonial excursions, Patrick Chamoiseau as Housing Secretary (of my house), Mathieu from the école de Feins as Education minister, with a guidebook written by Anne T., and a Joey Starr in Secretary of the Interior. With the RASED rehabilitated and reinforced, to help everyone in the coalition to get along, and the benefits from converting the Elysee to wind power given to the Education ministry to employ ten new school professors per day. The trees that Klaus knocked down will be used as the beginning of a radical new program to replace cinderblocks, the omnipresent parpaing, with wood-framed, efficient passive low-income housing. Brice Hortefeux shines in his role as chief toilet scrubber at the Elysée, as he has shown particular efficiency at “cleaning” during his time as the Minister of Immigration and National Identity.

But it was just a dream. And here at Maffay this morning we’re listing to Buxtehude at the Folles Journées in Nantes while typing, delaying doing the dishes and grouting the shower, Izzy is waiting for her little Luca Paul to be born in California, Grandpa Paul is in Oaxaca eating seven different types of mole, and we hope that you all are all well and happy and healthy as this second new year begins.

This is what the kitchen looked like before i finished putting down the big black tiles on the countertops (which we loooooove),

and what the shower looked like a few days ago, with the first coat of impermeabilization green stuff on over the Fermacell panels.  The flames at the beginning of the post are what it looks like on the inside of the Fröling when i’ve managed to get the fire lit. All bets are being taken now as to whether or now we’ll have enough wood to last us to the sundrenched (hah) days of April, when the solar panels will take over.

Mère noël!

or: mother christmas, or ‘more christmas’ if you’re speaking in Expector Clouseau patois, as Gabriel has been for the past two weeks.

Happy New Year, a healthy joyous one, to everyone.

Happy Birthday to: Carol, Renaud, Joycie, Helena.

And a word of thanks to Anne Tanné, who we all wish we could have known better, but who leaves behind her a great burst of light, laughter and color in the world.

Santa Clause came to Maffay and was a woman, my mother, Sally, who arrived on the 21st with smoked salmon, Good Earth tea, chocolate, maple syrup, corn tortillas, tillamook cheddar, socks and warm scarves in her sack. In the past few weeks the weather has been as cold as Siberia (because météo france tells us the winds have been coming to us direct from the Steppes to our temperate meadows). But the greatest thing about the past three weeks has been Grandma Sally’s visit, which, as effectively as the cold from the Siberian steppes, shook us into action as she simultaneously:

1. got us mostly moved out of the mobile home and some cleanup initiated.

2. got lots of laundry done.

3. made lots of great meals.

4. watched lots of expector Clouseau (the pink panther series from Izzy) with Gabriel.

5. held my hand at ikea as i bought the kitchen over several torturous trips (we’ve been back a total of 7 times now and know all the shortcuts in the new Ikea at Pacé).

6. helped infinitely as the kitchen took shape: cleaning up after me, finding lost screws, giving tips on where the best parking spots are at Ikea.

7. and a little bit of gardening too, before everything froze.

Gaël would come over at night after work and do cool things like connect the water line so that we have running water in the kitchen, and connect the electrical lines so that we can plug in computers and the internet in the living room. And then Jean-Luc came over too and played Marcel Marceau, sanding and mudding the final coats on the office ceiling so that i can paint it, and have an office instead of a corner of the living room. One day there was freezing rain, and sheets of razor thin ice slid off the solar panels and floated light as ash down to the ground, where Cip hunted them as they fell. Birds, unsettled by the weather, have been flying into the windows of our house; one, we watched with Gabriel as he came back to consciousness and stumbled off drunkely into the courtyard, and managed to fly away on a different route. One day, sadly, one of them flew too fast for his own good, and fell to the ground, his final landing. And another bird flew down next to him, and waited by him, and pecked at him, trying to get him to move again. We buried him by the chapel.

We love our grandma Sally and are so grateful for her visit, because now instead of a mobile home, we have a real home, and a real kitchen, and so much space that we get lost, wandering from room to room, amazed that we now live in a house where you can jump up and down, and the cds don’t skip, nor do dishes fall from the kitchen shelves. And you can reach out your arms, and not hit something. And you can walk through a doorway straight-on, not having to turn to let your shoulders squeak through. We’ll devote another post to our darling Fröling, who has been keeping us warm over the past month, and whose firelit visits have become an anticipated daily ritual. This post is for Grandma Sally so that you all can see all the cool changes she wrought (what a great word: unsure of how to employ in the present, i’ll use ‘write’ instead, below).

And all the changes we write.

Here are a lot of pictures to make up for the silence on this little blog of the past weeks, as you can see, we’ve been a little busy. There was also of course that strange disconnection from the world that we experienced when France Télécom left us without internet for a long week after the phone line was moved into the house on the 23rd, but otherwise, our hands were full.

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.

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.

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.

July 21

Our Swedish/French/Welsh partners in crime came over for the very first dinner party at Maffay after having hosted us too many times to count at their lovely homes. And it was so cold that night, on July 21, that we dug out all the winter caps and scarves and coats and blankets, and ate coconut chicken with lots of hot pepper to warm us from the insides. It was so cold that Simon had to drink his pastis straight up, with no water. It was so cold that Jean-Jacques could barely strum a few chords on the guitar between cups of tea. Josephine and Marga were star guests from Sweden, which is fortunate, because they are used to cooler climes and Maffay that night would have frozen less-resistant guests to blue-hued crisps. We’re still not sure why it was so cold on that particular night. Luckily though good friends keep you warm.

Mystery meat

In the comments, please post your guesses as to the identity of the delicacy that you see being savored in the photos below.

The animal came to us courtesy of our very kind neighbor François, who skinned it and cleaned it and delivered it last Sunday. It was marinated in olive oil, garlic and rosemary and grilled over the coals at right-side Maffay. We ate it with rat-atouille made with the first noire de crimée tomato from Sandra’s garden, and drank a Tavel to accompany it.

Any guesses?

MAJ:  pour ma Nicky:  en gros, dimanche midi notre voisin François nous a livré une bestiole toute préparé, que nous avons fait patienter dans la frigo chez Romain/Emilie/Gaël/Ollia, ensuite lundi elle est passé à la marinade (romarin, ail, huile d’olive) et lundi soir nous l’avons grillé, et mangé avec une ratatouille, faite avec la toute première tomate ‘noire de crimée’ du jardin de Sandra.  Nous l’avons accompangné d’un tavel.  Et je demande aux lecteurs de deviner ce que c’est qu’on a mangé.