Why Walnuts are a Cracking Good Idea

  I'm sitting here in the kitchen with a pot of chicken soup for lunch simmering on the stove. It's nippy outside, drizzling, and most of the delicate annual plants have withered and flopped because of the frost we had the night before last. Pleasant to be here in the warm, and think about walnuts.
   Walnuts--or noix as they're known here--hang in a bag in the storeroom, and fill the bottom layer of the hanging vegetable rack in the kitchen. Some were a present from friends lucky enough to have a walnut tree in their garden. Others, the ones still in their black, fleshy skin, I've picked up from the street that runs along by the presbytery.
    I crack a jarful at a time, and keep them in a drawer beside the matching Bonne Maman jars of raisins and currants.
    Dismantling yet another batch this morning, made me think about what useful little things they are.
    They go into salads of spinach, clementine segments and avocado chunks.
    And salads of beetroot and goat cheese.
     I add them, in fairly small morceaux, to tinned tuna tarted up with celery and preserved lemon, both finely chopped, and loosened with mayonnaise. Spread it thickly in a split baguette or scoop it over lettuce leaves. Lunch.
     Walnuts boost the nut content in the granola that goes over the morning yogurt and fruit.
     They love to get together with raw endives especially with goat cheese crumbled over.
     And I haven't even got to the sweet stuff....yet.
   
   

Free! Free! Free!

   This has been a bumper year for fruit. We don't have any trees of our own but neighbours and friends have been very generous with windfalls. The freezer is stacked with flat-packed plums, greengages and apple sauce. Our one little red currant bush produced an astonishing amount. And then there's all the free stuff quite literally lying around, free for the taking.
   Here's yesterday's haul. The walnuts came from a huge tree that hangs over the street opposite the school. Unless I'm quick, cars crunch the nuts into smithereens. The hazelnuts are from a piece of waste ground near our house, as are the quinces and windfall pears.
Can you make out the figs? I picked two kinds, the purple ones next to the place where we take our bags of rubbish, and the green ones from a tree hanging over the road on the way out of the village.
    Opposite, on another piece of waste ground, a plum tree has dropped kilos and kilos of purple fruit. It's all lying in the ditch waiting for me to go back with a bigger bag.

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.

Free Gourmet Compote

What caught my eye, as I walked back into Léran this morning after a short amble into the countryside, were what looked like blue eggs in a dry ditch by the side of the road. When I say "blue", I  mean only a couple of shades away from the blue of a Gauloises cigarette packet. Turns out they were windfall plums so fatly ripe and juicy that their weight had detached them from the tree. 

I always carry a plastic bag with me for finds, so I was able to bring home half a dozen. Two nights ago, on our way to the café for a Sunday evening glass of wine, I noticed the walnut tree in the presbytery garden is laden, and a few had fallen into the street. Little ones, not as long as the first joint of my thumb.

So, simmering on the stove right now is a small pan of chopped plums and walnuts. I'm thinking of spooning it over our breakfast yogurt or on top of vanilla ice cream.