Summer Wine...

   With a forecast ranging from 30 to 36 degrees over the next days, I foresee a lot of sitting around--and sipping. Litres of water, sometimes with a jolt of elderflower cordial and then, once the church bell has rung six times (in the evening) an apero. Okay, the occasional glass of rosé with lunch but the problem is that wine plus heat sends you straight to bed for a three-hour nap. Oh right, that's called a siesta.
    French winemakers aren't snooty about what to drink in warm weather. The cool tipple this summer is a combination of rosé and grapefruit juice with an alcohol level of about nine or 10 percent.

   "Very Pamp'" (pamplemousse being French for grapefruit) comes in a three-litre box--and isn't that the girliest packaging?

    Or you can buy Esprit Fruité by the bottle. I've tried this brand but find it a bit too sweet.

    Then there's this...Rosé specifically designed to be drunk around the swimming pool or on the terrace. The label says so. And that little thingy on the top right that looks like a postmark reads "absolutely with ice cubes."
    You can pick all these up at our local Intermarché, lug them home and tuck them in the fridge.  Just look to the left of the produce section, and round the corner from the bed sheets.
  

The Vegetable Garden of Oddities...

   After a couple of years of trying to raise veg in shady conditions, it came to me in a flash of brilliance that the sunniest spot in the garden is right in the middle of the lawn.
   I truly hate lawns, the horticultural equivalent of tasteful beige, so it was with some gusto that I set to with a spade a couple of months ago. What's there right now are two beds, one each side of the bowling alley path (that has to go too, at some point). The soil here is beyond fertile and completely free of stones so digging is a real, and easy, pleasure.
      These beds aren't huge but they're jammed with vegetables that you don't normally see at the market. At the back are yard-long green beans grown from seeds I brought back from Chiang Mai. In front are white aubergine plants (from the same source), and bronze and green fennel. Mixed in with these, in no particular order:

 Can someone please tell me what this is? I bought it from an organic grower at Mirepoix market, but forgot to ask its name. It's quite pungent, and a little works well in salads and stir fries.

The Espelette pepper that is one of the basics of Basque cuisine. I picked up a little plant at a market in St. Jean de Luz when we were there in June.

 Gorgeous crimson-stemmed chard, one of four plants that just keeps producing and producing. Again, bought at a local market.

   The best euro I've ever spent was for this tomatillo plant. I've never even seen tomatillos for sale in France so this was a real find. I'm thinking salsa (and margaritas) some steamy night soon. Tiny when I first brought it home, the plant now stands at least a metre high, measures the same wide and is absolutely dripping with fruit.
     Also growing lustily are Asian greens from seeds I bought while we were in the UK, (which reminds me it's time to write some posts about travels earlier this year).
    Time to cook up some of those greens, grill some slices of pork belly that have been marinading all afternoon with chilis, soy sauce, garlic and sesame oil, and crack open the jar of homemade kimchee.

Meanwhile, back in the potager....

   I hadn't actually planned to grow courgettes but when someone gave us a seedling a few months ago, I stuck it in the large flower-pot-that-was-formerly-home-to various-ornamental-grasses-that-died-in-the-winter.
    The courgette plant is now producing at warm speed.

 Here's the second one I harvested (along with the one I won at boules for size comparison).

 Here's another one that I donated anonymously this afternoon to a neighbour.

     And here are more coming down the production line. Time to cook up a batch of soup, bake a cake, and freeze some for later in the year.

A Tale of Two Courgettes...

   Last Thursday we played boules with some friends. Sixteen of us were split up into teams of two. I'm still a bit hazy on the rules but basically you play another team and the first one to reach a score of 11, wins.

  A great deal of measuring goes on, and standing around in the shade...

   The winners walked away with bottles of bubbly. Our team was awarded consolation prizes of truly enormous courgettes. Mine--as you can see--is bigger than Peter's forearm. It's colossal, and so heavy that my little electronic scale gives out whimpers of despair when I try to guess the weight.

L'Amicale des Léranais = rough translation: The Léran Association

   OK, two months since the last post. What can I say? A huge amount happened in that time so what I'll do, movie style, is start in the recent past--the weekend just passed--and, through a series of (shot of calendar pages being returned to the calendar) flashbacks, tell you a little about what we've been up to.
   So, Sunday. L'Amicale des Léranais is a new association formed by a group of people in our village. Its aim is to share memories, stories and--this being France--food and wine. We missed the first lunch event but heard that it was terrific so we were quick to sign up for yesterday's meal to "Fête la Saint Jacques".
   http://amicaledesleranais.centerblog.net/ is the new go-to site for news in French about village life.
   Simple deal. The day began with a morning walk round the various oratoires--which the dictionary defines as "small chapels" and "wayside shrines". We didn't make that on account of a long dinner the night before that concluded with Irish whiskey. But we did manage to show up at noon for the aperitif offered by the Association. It never ceases to amaze me how frequently mairies and associations stump up for bottles of pastis and muscat, and crisps.
   The pamphlet that had shown up in our letter-box, hand-delivered like most village news, has asked us to bring what we could and to share it. Our basket held marinaded red peppers, chick peas with chorizo and a kilo of haricots verts roaring with garlic. The recipe basically is "steam beans just till crisp, soften tons of chopped garlic in olive oil, and combine. Because we're so close to Spain, I reckoned I could get away with tapas-y things.
   The street in front of the old mairie (soon to be the new library) had been barricaded at both ends, and long trestle tables and benches set up. About 70 people had registered. Baskets were unpacked, plates and cutlery set out, platters of fresh melon (impossibly sweet and juicy at this time of year) and tomato salad distributed. Sunflowers and scallop shells decorated the tables.
   Aperitifs, chat, a look at a photo of village children taken in 1936, and we all sat down to eat. Platters and bottles of wine went up and down the table. Cheeses were shared. Ladies brought around their homemade desserts--a gorgeous tarte au citron, flan, tira misu...the coffee urn was carried from table to table. A wine bottle with a hand-written label announcing "eau de vie" may have prompted the singing in Occitan, French, Spanish, English and a verse in Swahili. And then we all drifted home for naps and, in our case, a drive to a cricket match and a concert.
   I wish you could all have been there but, because you couldn't, here are some snapshots...

Give me a long table under the trees, quiches, salads, company and vases of sunflowers and I'm one happy girl.

Meet Monsieur Portet who will be 86 years old this coming October. He's a fluent speaker--and singer--of the regional dialect, Occitan.

 Village events involve all ages. Dressed in old-fashioned attire, these little sweethearts brought around slices of tougnol, a fennel-seed-spiked bread.

   Sunday ended here at our friends Perry and Colline's place about half an hour north of Léran. You're right, that is an Airstream trailer converted into a bar. Nearby, another Airstream has had its end opened up and made into an open kitchen. If this shiny bulbosity tickles your fancy, go to www.belrepayre.com/  and read how you can rent one of these beauties for a week. On the top of a hill with amazing views of the Pyrenees, they're in the most sublime spot you can imagine. Not to mention one of the quirkiest. Red double-decker bus, tick. London taxi, tick. Hot tub with mountain view, tick. Etch A Sketch games on the bar....

    We got there just as the cricket game was winding up. No big deal as we'd mostly gone along to reconnect with friends. Two of them--both from our village--are in the photo. On the right, singer and songwriter Fraser Anderson, just returned from a hugely successful six-week tour of the US and Canada. More about Fraser at http://monochrome-records.co.uk/ 

    On the left, Alan Simmons who, as well as creating and nurturing our village choir, is a highly respected singer and writer of choral music. http://www.alansimmonsmusic.com/ In fact, he'd been featured on the front page of La Dépêche, our local newspaper, that very day. 

    And yes, those are empty beer bottles in the foreground.

    Just realized that I never told you about the golden chair I've bought. Next post....

   

Yet another vide grenier...

   Twice a year, our village holds a vide grenier. Strictly speaking, I should be out there behind a stall given the amount of stuff we've accumulated. But no, instead I'm Madame Super Shoppaire, out there as soon as I've had my breakfast, racing down past the church and the school to where the first of the stalls are.
   Here's what I managed to find this time.

   I cannot resist vintage postcards. Not sure if it's the photographs, or the tiny, perfect hand-writing or the way that the stamp is sometimes stuck on the picture side. This little lot cost us about three euros.

    A medieval painting. Genuinely medieval. Must be. Cost me all of three euros.

 Almost none of our plates match. Instead I collect those made by the Sarreguemines company, which feature different flowers. One euro.

  A present for my sister (and now she's got it, I can blog about it). A classic black beret with this glorious label inside. It was made in Carcassonne sometime in the 1950s or 60s, I'm guessing. Also one euro.

Rhubarb, rhubarb...

   Our garden is always a work in progress. A couple of years ago a good friend gave me some rhubarb crowns. Sorry but, as we're about to celebrate the Queen's Jubilee and we've just been in the UK, which is rife with red-white-and-blue everything, the idea of a rhubarb "crown" makes me think of...probably safer if I call it a "root."
   By the time I'd read that you can't move rhubarb roots around willy-nilly, I'd planted them in the wrong spot in a mostly floral border where their neighbours are iris and, well, last year anyway, sunflowers. There they stay and I've come to love their early emergence in spring after what professional gardeners call the "depressing brown slime" period.

   They're quite sculptural really.
   The sad thing is that I've never harvested them because their green stems never did turn the reddish-pink of the rhubarb I know and love. (No prizes for guessing I've just discovered how to change type colours).
    And then I read about green rhubarb...so out I went with my little knife...

  
     The leaves went in the compost (yes, although they're poisonous, you can compost rhubarb leaves) where, true to form, they've turned brown and slimy. The green stalks have been cut and frozen to be made into chutney sometime soon. Two whole kilos worth.