Apples, juniper and sage--and where they come from.

     That sprig of sage is from the huge bush in the garden, grown from a cutting given me four years ago.
     Trying to avoid the prickly spikes surrounding them, we picked the juniper berries in Provence last October when we visited Jean-Marc and Annick. Months later, the colours are still gorgeous, and opening that little glass jar unleashes a heady smell of gin.
      Yesterday, I bought a 2 kg bag of Chantecler apples in SuperU which, like most supermarkets here, strongly supports local producers and growers. These pommes grew in Cazals des Bayles, about 20 km away.
      All went into Nigel Slater's recipe for pork with apples and cider, nice on a rainy night. Here's the link to the recipe http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/porkchopswithapplesa_92491

Signs of Autumn in Southern France

   Recently, it's been really chilly at night to the point that last Sunday, after a terrific outdoor party, we walked home and made ourselves mugs of cocoa. As I write this, late on a Saturday afternoon, the hills are swathed in what looks like a thin layer of cotton wool but is actually rain, it's a cool 11 degrees outside, and we're talking about lighting a fire. Two cubic metres of 50 cm oak logs were delivered last week. We're ready.

   But even without all this, just by wandering around Lavelanet market, you'd still know that winter is looming. 

 For a start, all the cloches have been reduced in price.

    These are the invaluable folding covers that keep flies and other insects off food when you're eating outside. While there will be many days still when it's warm enough for pâté, salads and rosé in the garden, the long candle-lit dinners on the terrace are over for this year.

   But there are compensations. Like girolles and ceps to cook gently in butter with garlic and eat on toasted baguette, or to add to scrambled eggs or a risotto.

    Lucques is the name of a meaty and delicious olive that's grown mainly in the Languedoc. Green, with pointy ends, shaped a little like a half-moon, they're known as "Les Rolls Royces" of olives.

 And of course it's apple season...

 ...and quince season. Three euros for two kilos is a bargain.

 Best of all, this is the time when the grape growers bring their harvest to the market. Muscat grapes are dark, sweet, filled with sticky juice. Pressed and made into a sweet aperitif, muscat is the traditional tipple for madames while messieurs sip pastis. On their own, the grapes go beautifully with a little round of pungent white goat cheese, and the new season's walnuts.

There's always a queue at this producer's stall.

   You have to warm your outside too. All the flimsy cotton frocks, and tiny tops of summer have been marked down to five euros. Replacing them are long sleeves and warmer colours.

 Charentaises are the kind of cosy slipper worn by grandads in storybooks. It's easy enough to get romantic about tiled floors in the summer but the reality is that they're cold on the feet.

    Can you imagine how comforting it would be to slip your bare tootsies into these when you get out of bed on a chilly morning?

Celebrating the vendange.

  It's grape-harvesting season again, which in our region--or any other region in France--means an excuse for a party. Last Friday, I read in La Dépêche, the local newspaper, that the town of Mazères was hosting a fête des vendanges this weekend.
  Mornings this time of year are glorious, mysterious and misty when you wake up, the mist quickly burning off to reveal a flawlessly blue sky. We were on the road around 9:30 a.m. and, less than an hour later, drove into Mazères, the last few kilometres finding ourselves behind chugging vintage tractors. Old tractors are an integral part of any fête around here.

We parked under some handy plane trees and walked into the town, noting how some of the houses are built from the same pink-red bricks you see in Toulouse and Albi. 

 And, wouldn't you know it, there was a vide-grenier to slow us down too. But this was no ordinaire event.

 For a start, an accordionist wandered through the crowd...

 A fenced enclosure on a side street was home to chickens, ducks, rabbits, this impressive turkey...

And a donkey that periodically sent the chickens into a fluster of feathers. 

 No home should be without one of these sad-eyed kids. Fortunately ours is.

   I was briefly tempted by the thought of a pink flamingo tapestry for my friend Jill's Florida Room. But all (!) I bought in the end was a vintage coffee tin with nasturtiums printed on it, an old blue enamel coffee pot, and 20 Michelin maps of various parts of France for a project I want to do.

      Meanwhile, one street over, in the square beside the church, you could buy crusty bread, knobbly saucisses made from duck, or with whole hazelnuts inside, local cheeses, fruit trees, balloons and those little remote-controlled puppies that yap so annoyingly you want to kick them.

And you could gaze at the line-up of tractors. This is just a sample.

  My favourite was undoubtedly this one, because of its lavishly upholstered seat.

 Not far away was the raison d'être--or should that be the raisin d'être--of the day.

 Being pressed into turbid-looking juice...

 And poured out for sampling. This grape juice is sweet and sharp at the same time.

  Across the square, apples were being crushed into apple juice.

 Our region is famous for its dried white beans. Here's what they look like when they're first harvested.

   They're fed into machines like these which separates the shells from the beans.

 Not completely. The last stage is done by hand. This trio of ladies sat around picking out each last little piece of husk.

 Finally, they were packed into bags and ready for sale. Next step, cassoulet.
 (PS: To return to the Nutella theme of the previous post, the little café where we stopped for sandwiches also sold pizza topped with bananas, Nutella and whipped cream, as well as Nutella-and-banana paninis.)

Thinking of Curry, Apples--and Chutney

   Over the past month, Indian spicing has figured large in my life. A couple of weeks ago came a pot-luck Indian dinner and a laugh-out-loud showing of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Next was the discovery of a new Indian restaurant in Mirepoix. We ate more Indian food at a friend's a week ago, and I left with his Maddhur Jaffrey cookbook. Copious stains and stuck-together pages gave away which recipes he'd used.
   I grew up with curry, but not curry as you or I know it. Chicken tikka masala may be the UK's second most popular dish these days (knocked off its pedestal early this year by "Chinese stir-fry") but fancy dishes like that came late to the English table. In the early 1960s, "curry" was shorthand for a ring of steamed rice, not necessarily basmati, surrounding a hillock of cooked mince and onion made yellowy-brown with curry powder. It wasn't particularly spicy, but you could "cool it down" by helping yourself from the inevitable side dishes of yoghurt, cucumber and, curiously, raisins. Today, the UK has around 9,000 Indian restaurants--that's a lot of chicken vindaloo and mountains of roti under the bridge.
    Spicy dishes have never featured much in French cuisine but Indian food is slowly making inroads. When I made a batch of shrikand for the Indian pot-luck recently, I thought I might find cardamom in the local Intermarché--and I did. (Wandering off track, "shrikand" is a thick, luscious and aromatic Gujarati dessert made from drained yogurt, chopped pistachios, saffron and cardamom.)
    And, of course, you can find curry powder everywhere in France., and that was what I needed yesterday morning. A rainy Sunday, a perfect time to make curried apple chutney.

   Before she left ten days ago on her vacances, my neighbour told me to help myself to as many apples as I wanted, which I had. I peeled, cored and chopped about 1.5 kilos, added brown sugar, cider vinegar and raisins..

      ...and then spooned in coriander, cardamom, chili flakes, cinnamon and, of course, curry powder pondering, not for the first time, why so many spices begin with "c".
     Compared to making jam, chutney is a doddle. All you do is bung everything in a saucepan, bring it to the boil, simmer it until it thickens, pour it into jars, label it (one chutney looks very much like another) and let it age. Right now I've got six jars maturing in the pantry, and another half-jar maturing in the fridge. Should be nice with baguette, cheeses, tomatoes and radishes for lunch. Wonder what they call a "ploughman's" in France? My enormous dictionary says it's an "assiette de fromage et de pickles."

Aiguillettes

   At some point over the past couple of weeks (this being the season when The Duck takes precedence) I picked up a package of aiguillettes. These are fillets cut from the breast of a duck and I got eight in this particular packet for about 2.50€. 

  Aiguillettes are incredibly simple to cook. All you do is fry them in hot melted butter--not too long because you want them pink in the middle. Once they were cooked, I put them on a warmed plate, tented with foil. Then I deglazed the pan with a slosh of Armagnac, reduced that down and whisked in some crème fraîche to make a sauce. Butter, booze, cream. Got that? With them we had rice cooked with herbs and onion, and leeks braised in butter and a slug of Picpoul de Pinet (got to use up all those odds and ends of wine). The apples are there because the plate needed tarting up if it was going to appear on a blog.

A Satisfying Morning.

   Rain, wind and cold temperatures have been the norm for the past few days. Tant pis. (All-purpose French expression with many possibly translations depending on the context.)

   Yesterday, I was writing all day so what happened outdoors didn't concern me. Today, I had an enormous list of chores. Not as bad as it sounds as most were food-related. 

   Backing up a bit, last Friday I bought two kilos of beef at Lavelanet market. I can't remember what cut it was but it was deep red, muscular and obviously meant for braising. It had been sitting in the fridge for 24 hours (at least) imbibing the better part of a bottle of Libertin, a wine from Fronton near Toulouse, one of those big reds, along with Madiran and Buzet, that we start to drink a lot of as winter approaches. So, the meat and the wine and some bay leaves and garlic had been the base for a daube which I cooked very, very slowly for several hours yesterday in between word-tinkering. 

    Also in there was half a packet of lardons whose fat, I knew, would rise to the top of the daube if left overnight. It did, I got rid of it, and froze the daube for future cold nights. That was one job this morning.

   The next was to peel and chop a large number of onions to freeze. Almost every recipe uses chopped onions and, purists might disagree, but I've discovered it makes very little difference if you use frozen or fresh onions in your mirepoix. 

   I also made apple sauce. My English neighbour, Bea, gave us a large bag of apples some weeks ago. Our French neighbours, Jeannine and Jean-Louis keep us supplied with walnuts they find when they're out foraging. (Great quote from Jean-Louis: "I don't use the Internet. I go for walks in the forest.") So I cooked those plus the apples, and some raisins, and it's all destined to go on our breakfast yogurts. Not quite porridge season yet. 

   The final dish I made was soup for lunch. A bag of carrots was losing its sprightliness so I looked up recipes (on the Internet) and found one on the BBC web site for carrot and coriander soup. You hardly need a recipe because all you do is chop a pound of carrots, slice an onion and soften both in a tablespoon of vegetable oil. Add a teaspoon of ground coriander seeds, salt and pepper. Pour in, well, the recipe said vegetable stock but I didn't have any so I used plain old tap water. Cook until the vegetables are soft, whizz with a handheld blender, and, just before you dish it up, mix in a good handful of chopped fresh coriander. Delicious. 

   I also prepped ingredients for supper tonight but I'll save that for another post.

Pom, Pom, Pom, Pom....

   Last Sunday was one of those golden days that's good from start to finish. The sun shone, the Pyrenees were as sharply defined as a cardboard cutout and the trees on the road to Pamiers are beginning to show their autumn colours.

    The reason for going there, as it always is on a Sunday, was to prowl around the flea market. Out last visit was several weeks ago and I always maintain that the karma builds up the longer you leave it. 

   Sure enough, we were hardly in the square when Peter spotted the base of an old treadle sewing machine. We measured it--these days I never go anywhere without a tape measure in my handbag--and saw that it was exactly the right size to fit at the end of the island in the kitchen. The big dining table feels a little too big for the two of us sometimes. Besides, recently it's been covered with papers, projects and various other stuff. 

    The base was priced at 40 euros. We offered 30 and the deal was done. Later, after crèmes, pains aux raisins, and an hour's browsing, we lugged the sewing machine base along the street to the car park and shoehorned it into the trunk of the Clio.

Back home, we found that the chunk of butcher's block that's been following us around for years was exactly the right size for the table top.  Its grunginess disappeared under vigorous sand-papering and a coat of oil has turned it the same golden-brown as the cabinetry. 

    Last Sunday's other highlight was

Mirepoix's Apple Festival was the highlight of last weekend, the umpteenth one we've been to. Each year, there's a different theme. We've had boats, planes and, in 2009, it was music's turn. Hence the "pom, pom, pom" line on festival posters. 

   As always pommes were everywhere, , green, yellow, red, russet, streaked, strung from the 13th century beams, displayed in shop windows and, at their most magnificent, secured individually to wire bases to create giant bongos, guitar, pan pipes and musical notes.

    We milled around in the sunshine, deciding whethger the tarte sold at that stall was better than the one sold at this stall, and admiring the Corvette-red shine of the toffee apples.

    A group of men pressed apples in an old press to make the freshest possible juice. Musicians played old French songs. It was all quite splendid with the sun beating down and the outdoor cafés packed to bursting. We left with three kilos of apples, and a pie. 

     If you're wondering what happens to all those thousands and thousands of apples (each one attached by hand by volunteers) they're taken down and given to the Red Cross and to food banks.

   

Opportunities at the market.

Markets in France offer scads more than fruit and veggies. A sample of what you could have bought if you'd joined us in Lavelanet this morning.

Small tractors and large mowers--you can always get those. I've never worked out how you're supposed to get them home. Do you ride them and join all the other agricultural vehicles we see around here?

Next, takeout food. Here's the rotisserie man skewering a number of chickens. He also sells, depending on his mood, ham, pork, rabbit and quail. The pan on the left holds paella which is sold by the portion with each portion containing precisely the same amount of chicken, prawns and squid.

Elsewhere you can buy churros--we're very close to Spain--or couscous because we have lots of North African people living locally. Pizzas, I almost forgot those with a wealth of different toppings. Chinese food--nems is French for spring roll. Mussels cooked in cream. Usually a daube smelling so good you could dive right into it. If you don't want to cook, this market makes it easy.

Moving along, you can outfit yourself and your family head to toe at the market (I hoped the bra man would be there so I could take a photo but he wasn't). Current French fashion moves down to market level remarkably quickly. Here's one of the shoe stalls. These are fairly granny-ish in style but elsewhere I could have bought cute wedge 40s style sandals and smart black boots--plastic so only 10 euros. The other bargain to be had today were black jeans and blousons for three euros each. 

Beside the shoe stall, you can see the first of the new broad beans. White and green asparagus is also showing up. No fruit as yet but there are still loads of local apples around.

Wednesday Morning Apples

Sadly, the village shop closed over Christmas which is tough if you don't drive. Still, travelling vans do bring food to the village on a regular basis. You can buy quail, duck confit, sausages, pork chops, beef to make daubes, or to put on the grill.  And, on Wednesday mornings, you can stock up on mostly locally-grown fruit and vegetables. 

The woman who runs this little stall sets up shop in front of the war memorial just across from the post office. Today, she was selling different varieties of apples, pears and potatoes as well as pots of homemade apple jam. I bought a jar and am now trying to resist making toast with the sturdy loaf I just picked up at the boulangerie, slathering it with doux butter and trying out the chunky confiture.

Keeping in Touch via Internet.

       Thanks to technology, we can stay in touch with what's happening in Léran in our absence. Our friends Doug and Nancy who also have a house in the village are now back in their U.S. home. In the meantime, their blog features "guest" bloggers. Check it out at www.northofandorra.blogspot.com

Good to read about the Mirepoix apple festival, and always an eye-opener to see how these intricate, hand-assembled displays change from one year to the next. Cars, boats (including submarines) and planes--including the Concorde-- have all starred at previous fêtes.