Work and feasting

We’ve had our family staying for the past week – the reason why I haven’t posted on this blog for a while – and yesterday the weather was so warm and sunny that we spent several hours in the garden and had our lunch there for the first time for weeks.

Before pruning the larger of our two olive trees quite severely I took photos of the branches in the sun.

We burnt some of the old year, and the sun was so warm there was even a butterfly on one of the cold frames.

A simple lunch in the sun – olives from the tree I’d just pruned, bread, olive oil, butternut squash soup and cheese.

Flamingos

On a trip to Marseillan at the weekend we saw two groups of flamingos sheltering on the land side of the lagoon to keep out of the strong north wind.  The lagoon, which is usually calm, was quite rough.

A midwinter feast

As we do every year, at midday on 25 December we had apéritifs in the garden – olives from our own trees and sweet wine made by friends in the village.  We spent the rest of the afternoon, until it was dark, cooking and eating the various courses of the one meal we have on that day.  Here are some of the dishes we ate:

Apéritifs in the garden.	Clams cooked in olive oil, garlic and parsley, with a glass of Cava we brought back from our trip to Catalunya in the autumn.
Foie gras with black and red peppercorns.	Gambas – large prawns – sautéed in olive oil and garlic, with eau de vie added at the end of the cooking.
Pigeons with apricot stuffing.	With the pigeons we drank a bottle of the best wine produced by our favourite vigneron at Roquessels.
There was grilled bream for our one non-meat eater, roast potatoes, and broad beans (from the garden and frozen last summer).  All this was followed by Roquefort cheese, then a bûche de Noël made by the boulanger in the village.	To finish, with our coffee, we had cherries from our neighbour’s tree which I preserved in Armagnac the summer before last.

Beginning a new year, and a wine update

Some of the tomato plants weren’t looking very happy, so we picked the green tomatoes to ripen in the house and cleared the bed ready to sow peas and broad beans next week.  I always feel very excited when we plant out the tomatoes as it seems like the beginning of summer.  Today, then, may be the beginning of winter but it’s equally exciting because we’re already planning next spring’s crops.  That’s the great thing about gardening – there’s always the next season to look forward to.

Wine making

Looking even further ahead, the wine being made by our friends is progressing well.  The grapes we picked a few weeks ago have been fermenting in the vats in the cave.  Yesterday some of the wine was ready to be removed from the grape skins and then returned to the vat.  We were asked to go over to watch, take photographs and in Lo Jardinièr’s case to help.  I’m going to be writing much more about the whole process of making this wine in the future, but for the moment here are a few photos:

Looking into the wine vat (left) and the press (right)

(left) running the wine off the marc or skins, (centre) Lo Jardinièr working the press which removes the wine left in the skins, and (right) the wine running out of the press.  The wine was then returned to the vats.

and the Guardian blog…

Apparently, I had misunderstood a rule preventing links to ‘commercial’ sites and this is why my comment was deleted.  Very strange because my blog is certainly not commercial in any way and I have made relevant links to it before.  You can’t argue with the moderator, but I have suggested that the Guardian should make the wording of the rules clearer.

Different ways of picking grapes

Depending on the terrain of the vineyard and the quality of wine which will be made from the grapes, there are different ways of harvesting. In a large, flat vineyard where the grapes are intended for ordinary quality wine, to be taken to the cave cooperative to be added to grapes from many other vineyards in the area, grape-picking machines are used to save time and labour. They look huge when you meet them on the road, as we often do at this time of the year because they travel from one vineyard to another during the vendange, towering above the cars. They look big among the vines too, because they have to straddle a row of vines to remove the grapes. In small parcelles of vines, especially on hillsides, it would be impossible to get a machine in among the rows, so these grapes are usually picked by hand, as are any grapes that will be used to make high-quality wine because this minimises the damage to the grapes before pressing.

We saw this machine near Fouzilhon the other morning as it was just about to start working its way through the vineyard.

Yesterday we helped friends pick grapes by hand – a hard morning’s work, but good fun, as a group of us worked our way up and down the rows chatting in French and Occitan. For the first time this year they are making a high-quality wine and we picked the Syrah grapes for it from a vineyard in a beautiful position on a hilltop with a view all the way to the sea. Next week we’ll help pick the Grenache grapes which are not ripe yet.

Grape jelly – an experiment

We’d picked some Carignan grapes from vines which had re-grown after a friend had uprooted her vineyard. They weren’t very good for eating – the flesh had a nice flavour but they had too many pips and a strong flavour to the skins, so I thought I’d try making grape jelly. I put 500 gm of grapes in a pan, crushed them lightly with a wooden spoon and added a couple of tablespoonfuls of sugar to them. I brought them to the boil and cooked them for about 10 minutes then put them through a mouli legumes so that I was left with the juice. I returned the juice to the pan, added 250 gm of preserving sugar and simmered for 5 minutes. The jelly is now in small jars, but it has set very hard so I think I’ll try again with ordinary sugar rather than preserving sugar. There seems to be plenty of pectin in the pips and skins to set the jelly.

Mussels again….

We bought mussels this morning from the usual Bouzigues van which calls in the village, and cooked them for lunch with sweet onion, rosemary, chopped piment d’Espelette, garlic and chorizo. They weren’t quite as tasty as when we cook them like this on the barbecue, but they still seemed to have a smoky flavour.

I ground the remaining dried piments d’Espelette from last year, to store in a jar. The colour was wonderful, and the flavour will be too. These were bought in the village of Espelette. This year we have our own, grown from seed from these.

La Fête vigneronne at Faugères

Sunday morning wine tasting in a village of balconies and bunting:

 

A theatrical entrance to the old village whose narrow streets were filled with the stalls of wine producers, cheese makers, biscuit, cake and honey sellers, charcuterie producers and throngs of people tasting all this in the heat.  We found and bought some familiar produce – goats’ cheese from Mas Rolland – and tasted wines we’d not tasted before from Domaine du Météore at Cabrerolles and  Domaine Alquier at Faugères and bought rosé from Domaine Ballicioni at Autignac and Chateau des Peyregrandes at Roquessels (next door to Chateau des Adouzes where we buy wine regularly, but we’ve never ventured here before).  A completely new discovery, to us, was the Saffron syrup from the Tarn region of south-western France, which can be added to white wine to make Saffron kir and can also be used in cooking gambas or duck.  The kir we tasted at the stall tasted wonderfully spicy.

 

Crowded narrow streets and, right, a traditional still making fine de Faugères.

Our own harvest, and promise for the future

From the garden this morning:  Aubergines, a bell pepper, tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet onions, courgettes and beans.  And, right, a small pumpkin on a huge plant, just beginning to grow.  Aubergine and courgette slices fried in olive oil and sprinkled with thyme and chopped garlic went well with Mas Rolland goats’ cheeses for supper.

Climate change

I’ve just read on the website of the Guardian an editorial which will be published in newspapers all over the world tomorrow about the vital importance of the Copenhagen climate conference. You can read the full editorial here. There are difficult choices to be made for all of us, as this editorial points out:

The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

But benefits, too, can come from action on climate change:

the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives.

This conference presents an opportunity which must not be missed, as this multinational editorial says:

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it.

Let us hope that our representatives make the right decisions this week.

On a lighter note …

I think it’s been a while since this wine press was used.

This morning we went to a wine tasting at the Domaine de Saint Preignan at Pouzolles and tasted and bought some very good wines. There was a range of wines, white, rosé and red and we particularly liked the white Muscat, their top of the range Louise red and the Coteaux de Languedoc red. They have some lovely old buildings and olive trees at the domaine too.

World Food Day

There are serious food issues affecting developing countries and many parts of the world where people do not have enough to eat. According to the United Nations one-sixth of humanity is undernourished. In the developed world the issues are more to do with over-consumption and waste of the earth's resources. Sometimes it seems as though there is little that an individual can do. But I think that growing as much as we can of our own food and buying food that is locally produced are important small steps that each of us can make, to conserve the earth's limited resources and to minimise exploitation of people in the developing world. You can find out more about World Food Day here.

Big commerce is bad for food. This is my 201st post on this blog and, on World Food Day, I would like to make it a celebration of local food. In our village we're lucky to have a weekly market, an excellent épicerie (grocer's shop), a small supermarket, a boulangerie (baker's shop) and visiting vans which sell meat and shellfish.

The charcuterie stall at the Wednesday market.	The butcher’s van on Friday morning.
The boulangerie – bakery.	The épicerie – grocer’s shop, full of good food and friendly advice.

We, and anyone else who lives here, can buy all we need in the village. It is excellent quality, good value and much of it is produced locally. We find we need go to supermarkets only to buy toiletries and Italian coffee. In Roujan, a larger village 2 km away, there are two excellent butchers who sell an enormous range of good meat and, best of all, will advise on how to cook it, as well as other friendly small shops.

But the small shops in Roujan, and maybe Gabian too, are threatened by the construction of a supermarket there.

This is the site of the planned supermarket where, as in Gabian, more plane trees have been felled to make another new roundabout at its entrance.

This is bad news for food. In the UK it has been shown that when a supermarket is built on the outskirts of a town it sucks the lifeblood from the centre. The food sold in supermarkets is mass-produced and generally of lower quality than that in small shops. It is transported long distances, wasting resources and causing pollution. Because of their centralised distribution systems supermarkets cannot support local food as well as small shops can. And the profits made leave the area, feeding big business rather than being ploughed back into the locality.

And local wine …

This evening we went to a tasting to celebrate the arrival of the primeur wine at the Cave Co-operative at Neffiès. The vin primeur is the first of the year's wine to be ready to drink, a light wine which takes only three weeks or so to make. It's a good reason for a party and the tasting at Neffiès was fun, with roasted chestnuts (another seasonal local product) to eat with the wine, and live music. The cave at Neffiès has recently amalgamated with the one at nearby Alignan-du-vent (a sign of the times and the economic crisis in wine-making), but we were pleased to hear that some of the high-quality wines from Neffiès such as their Cathérine de Juery will continue to be made.

Hot roasted chestnuts to accompany the new wine.

Tuning up for the music and wine tasting.

And home to a local supper

We came home from Neffiès to a supper of roast saddle of lamb, bought in one of the butcher’s shops in Roujan, and aubergines stuffed with tomatoes, both grown in our garden. A delicious local supper! We marinaded the saddle of lamb with rosemary, garlic and lemon juice for a few hours, then roasted it, adding a glass of white wine to the roasting dish, until it was just done and still a bit pink inside. We served it with halved aubergines topped with chopped tomatoes, garlic, thyme and olive oil and baked in the oven.

Bilingual blog / le blog bilingue

Over the next few weeks I shall not have time to write my blog posts in French as well as English. I'll resume the French version as soon as possible, but in the meantime I apologise for not being able to produce a bilingual blog.

Pendant les semaines qui viennent je n'aurai pas le temps pour écrire les articles sur ce blog en français. Je reprendrai la version française aussitôt que possible, mais pour le moment je m'excuse de ne pas produire un blog bilingue.