Les Miettes de Noël

While most of the U.S. is groaning under a blanket of snow, we're getting some rain here for the first time in a long time, which is good, except that I know that there'll be a lot more in the next few months, so the mood will get a bit damp.

Christmas is coming, though, in just a few days, and I'm not looking forward to the holidays much this year because the 24th and the 31st both fall on Thursday, effectively making two four-day weekends in a row. This is not fun, especially when, as I do, you live day-to-day. I just know I'll run out of something over the weekend and, well, do without.

Other signs of Christmas are the Chinese guy, furtively looking from side to side as he illegally vends the stupidest product I've seen sold on the street. I haven't looked too closely since I don't want him to think I'm interested, but it's two chromed tubes, rounded at each end, stuck together. When you toss them in the air, they make a buzzing sound. A whopping €3 will get you one. The Eastern European guys demonstrating a top which has all kinds of LEDs in it probably get the same amount for their gizmo, but at least I can see a kid wanting to play with that. The other thing is so annoying, I can't imagine parents putting up with it for too long.

Down in the Christmas market stretching along the Comédie, canned Christmas music is playing. A lot of Frank Sinatra, and a very familiar melody with French words:

Vive le vent, vive le vent, vive le vent d'hiver/qui s'en va sifflant, soufflant dans les grands sapins verts.

I'm not even going to attempt a translation of that, except the first line salutes the winter wind, which I don't think many people are doing, especially with a warning at the moment that we may get winds of up to 12o kilometers per hour, which is almost 75 mph. In Berlin I'd have been much more depressed by this, though; I know that by March it'll be warming up nicely, and I'm looking forward to that.

* * *

Just because I haven't for a while, here's a picture of this Saturday's market haul:

Not, I'll grant you, as impressive as the summer ones, but for two days away from the Winter Solstice, not bad: some great broccoli, a saucisson sec covered with herbes de Provence (in the lower left corner; not my best photo, either), some chiles advertised as poivrons forts which didn't turn out to be too terribly fort, but made decent salsa, anyway, two kinds of pears, and some onions.

Fans of poivrons forts will be interested in how my jalapeño garden turned out, and here's the answer:

The euro-cent is added for scale, although you can also figure out how tiny they are by the grain on the cutting board. There were actually four, but two got eaten by a beast of some sort. Are they hot? I'm not sure: I was going to add them to the salsa, but figured I'd pop them in my mouth at some point just to see, so I saved them out. This, I submit, is pathetic, although I suspect that maybe one plant per pot instead of three might produce larger chiles. I'll try again next year, but I suspect the lack of direct sun for most of the day played a part here, too; these are the same size as my friends in Berlin got, with far less sun and far less heat.

* * *

I do think Les Lunkheads downstairs have just signed their eviction notice. The landlord can't evict anyone until March 15, by law, but this is clearly grounds. The other day, I was headed to the store when, on the stairs, I came upon two dogs tethered to the raililng. One of them fixed me with his eyes and started growling. Now, I speak fluent dog and I knew just what he was saying: no further. I knocked on the Lunkhead door and it opened a tiny crack. A Lunkheadette's head appeared and I asked whose dogs these were. "My friend," she said, and went to close the door. The friend, however appeared and said "Ils ne sont pas méchants." Then he closed the door. I took another step and the growling, which had subsided while he was there, rose again. I yelled and the guy came out again, saying again that the dogs weren't bad. But his presence got me out the door. When I came back, they were gone, except for the remnants of a turd which hadn't been as well picked up as it might have been.

Okay, I figured that was that. But Saturday night, it was getting along to my bedtime when I heard someone in the hall talking on a cell phone, quite loudly. "35o euros," he kept saying. Finally he hung up. I went back to my book, and after a while I heard snoring. Then the hall lights went on, and someone started up the stairs. A woman's voice said "M'sieu? M'sieu? M'sieu!" and eventually there was a stirring. Conversation ensued, and I caught the word "dogs" and the man saying something about hot chocolate. Eventually the woman went upstairs and I looked out while the hall light (which is burned out on my floor) was still on. It was the guy from the day before, stretched out on the stairs between my floor and the one above. This didn't make me particularly happy; I've seen this guy out on the Comédie drinking beer with his similarly bedogged friends. Now, it was cold outside, and no doubt it was warmer inside, but I still wasn't comfortable knowing this character and his crazy dogs were only a thin wooden door away from me.

I'm not sure of what happened next, because I didn't catch much of the conversation, but the downstairs door opened and up trooped a huge number of people, ready for a party upstairs at the flat of the French-American girl who lives there. It was 2am by now, and I sure wasn't happy about this. There was a lot of discussion with the bum, and he repeated his thing about hot chocolate, said "I want respect" a number of times, and said that his name was Joán. Apparently an accommodation was reached, because the last thing I saw before heading off to bed at 2:30 was one of the students coming down from the party and giving Joán just what he needed: a beer. After the students went to crank up their stereo, there was a lot of pounding on the downstairs door, which I suspect was Joán's friends trying to get in. The door has a huge panel in it, which, I just discovered, had fallen out. There are guys down there putting it back as I type.

I'm all for the Christmas spirit, but I also know that the likes of Joán are sneaky psychopaths, charming naive kids into thinking of them as victims of something other than their own desires and addictions. Not that I think the Lunkheadette was that naive. I suspect they were bonding over something else from their eagerness to get back to it. The landlord's been missing lately, and he's probably taking a Christmas vacation like everyone else around here. But if he hasn't heard about this incident, he will.

Ho ho ho. Wake me when it's January, okay?

I Say Tomato...

...but all these folks were saying "tomate." Ah, well, it's their country, after all.

And their festival, as well: the third annual Festival de la Tomate in Clapiers, a town just outside of Montpellier (and still part of its Agglomeration) which turned its municipal park over to a bunch of folks celebrating the fruit. There didn't seem to be any tomato farms in the vicinity, but no matter; the French enjoy celebrating food, and so a number of farmers loaded up their wares and set up, as well as a number of fancy-food suppliers and a bunch of folks with goods and services aimed at home gardeners.

I'd found out about this through Eric Pedebas, the "tomatologist" I mentioned recently, when I saw him at the Tuesday market. He wasn't there on Saturday, no doubt because he was getting ready to be, literally, the center of attention at the festival. He set up a table with examples of at least 100 varieties of tomatoes, and worked the crowd, explaining this and that, as he walked up and down what a friend of his who was helping called the "Boulevard of Tomatoes."

That's Eric himself in the khaki pants, knife in his right hand ready to cut a tomato open to show its mysteries. I have never seen so many different kinds of tomatoes in one place, and I suspect that if some method of preserving varieties which ripen earlier or later than this very moment could be devised, he could easily have had a table twice as long. The fruit comes in every imaginable shape.

Not to mention color and size and fanciful name:

Although the real monster tomatoes were mostly over at the farmers' for-sale stands.

And even these in the foreground of this shot aren't as big as some I've seen, which require two hands to pick up. I have the feeling these behemoths are still in the field and will show up in the next couple of weeks.

Elsewhere, there was a guy selling peppers, who seemed not to know a lot about the varieties he had. Although, to be fair, there's nothing like the chile culture of the U.S. in these parts, and he was pointing out his cayennes as being particularly hot -- which no chile-head in the States would buy. He did, however, have a colorful mixture.

I have to say I'm jealous: the jalapeño on my balcony has only just developed little nubs which I think will turn into flowers and the serrano shows no signs of doing anything of the sort.

There was a guy selling fig-infused balsamic vinegar and basil-infused olive oil from Italy at €20 for about 250ml, which was ridiculous, and another guy from the gorgeous village of Saint-Martin-de-Londres with varietal olive oils from Lucques, Verdale, and Picholine olives at €15 a liter. A great excuse to go back out there some day, and I plan to.

The big event, though, was the tomato tasting, sponsored by Slow Food's local chapter (or convivium, as they call them). Since my taste buds are still alive in the afternoon, I joined this free activity, with four slices of Eric Pedebas' tomatoes to taste. We were given a form to fill out, in which we noted color, odor, texture, taste (with several sub-heads), and persistence of taste in the mouth. In order, we got Carotina, which (unlike the photo in the link) was bright orange, with a strong odor, quite an acid taste, but a fast finish; Cornue des Andes, which I've been using on pizzas, thinking it was a San Marzano, which had the distinctive "horn" shape, very light odor, and a sweet, very light taste with almost no finish; the Green Zebra, one of those remarkable unripe-looking tomatoes with a good odor, crunchy texture and a well-balanced acid-and-herb taste; and a Noire de Crimée, which he was selling in large quantity (sorry, no pic on his website), and was green at the stem, going to a dark red that was almost black, bloody red inside, and an intense, fruity sweetness that lingered in the mouth.

Besides the tasting itself, what really surprised me were the participants: about half of them were over 45 -- no surprise there -- but the other half were under 14, and as deadly serious about what they were doing as the three Slow Food representatives. One fat Maghrebi girl, who was there with her mother, finally had to be told by her to go away and play, because her enthusiasm was distracting everyone. (She's going to grow up to open a restaurant where the food won't be all that good, but there'll be a lot of it, is my guess). But there were a number of boys and girls who talked among themselves, poring over the evaluation forms, and this really impressed me, although my initial surprise, I told myself, wasn't all that warranted because developing this degree of connoisseurship is very likely perceived as being as patriotic as being a good baseball player would be in the States.

Afterwards, I talked to the Slow Food folks, who were very friendly and happy to see a foreigner with so much interest in what they were doing. I'll have to see what the coming weeks bring in terms of finances (it costs to join, and, of course, to attend meals) and, just as important, the return of my sense of smell and taste, which is reliably fading out around 8:30 every night, although not quite as completely as before.

Afterwards, Marie, who had driven (and much thanks) and her friend Genviève and I explored downtown Clapiers, which has a church with a 14th century bit (which bit I couldn't tell) and, somewhere, a Roman house, but not much else, unless you count the confection, which I forgot to note the name of, which translates as "rabbit shit." Genviève noted that it's covered in chocolate, which, of course makes anything taste good.

Clapiers is only about 15 minutes' drive from the pickup place by the American Library where Marie got me, but it's not easily gotten to without a car. This is one of the maddening things about living here: you really do need a car if you're going to leave Montpellier, or else you need to go far enough away that you can get there by train. In the distant future, I hope to have figured out a way to get a French drivers license without having to pay €3000 for a training course so that I can use the city's rent-a-car program, but in the meanwhile, I'm just going to have to scour the web to find auto-rental companies with decent day-rates if I want to go out into the deep countryside. Which, based on events like this, I most certainly do.

Plantation And Restaurant

It's been a while since I've posted a picture of the plantation out on the balcony, but that's because, at the moment, I think we're preparing for a funeral.

Here's the overall picture. As you can see, the jalapeno on the left is doing okay, as is the serrano in the lower right, but what's up with the tomatillo? Granted, this is a very badly-lit photo, but here's the tomatillo closer up:

The leaves look like they've had all the chlorophyl sucked out of them, and are greasy and droopy. Further investigation showed tiny webs between the leaves, with tinier dots in them. Some kind of spiders or mites? Whatever, they're killing the plants, and I suspect it's too late to save them.

This morning, I noted the same webs on the jalapeno, but the leaves there seem healthier. The problem with both of the chile plants, though, is that leaves -- bright, shiny, deep green leaves -- is all they have. Are we ever going to see flowers there? I hope so. There should be nice enough weather through October, though, so there's still hope there. But too bad about the tomatillos: they sprung up so nicely and quickly that I was really hoping I'd be able to cook with some of their fruits.

If anyone out there has any suggestions, of course, I'm all ears.

UPDATE: As you can see by the comments, and if you're on Facebook you can see even more, dish soap in a weak solution sprayed on these beasts (spider mites) is supposed to control them. I've also been advised to replant the plants, which I'll do when/if they're a bit stronger, but it happened I was out of dish soap anyway and just picked up a sprayer for three bucks along with it. Then I went out onto the balcony and, I hope, committed some genocide. Or mitocide, anyway.

* * *

Meanwhile, after returning from the market on Saturday, I hit a wall. I cooked a pasta sauce with some fresh tomatoes I got there, but my creativity was waning. (So was my sense of taste: since I've gotten off the regime of many pills I started with and now just do a spray twice a day and one pill, I've been having episodes of loss of taste, and that happened Saturday and, as we'll see, Sunday nights).

Since my financial situation has improved somewhat I took a close look at the numbers and decided on a luxury: instead of cooking something Sunday night, I'd go eat out at an inexpensive restaurant. At the top of my list was Moroccan food. I've never had any, and there are a number of places around here which look promising. One I've had my eye on was Les Jardins de Marrakech, on the other side of the hill from me. I went to check that it's open on Sundays and, seeing that it was, and that it was cheap enough, I went back about 9pm.

Interestingly, it occupies a building where there's a shrine to St. Roch, and those plaques mentioning that the bench where he rested after returning to town was there. It's a heaving neighborhood, filled with students and gay guys out on the town, and most of what was around me was bars and restaurants and kebab stands. Like everyone else at all the other restaurants, I sat outside. It was a warm evening, and the street scene was going full tilt, so it seemed to be a good idea. I say "seemed to be": despite the narrow streets, there are people who drive them, so that if you're sitting curbside, you'll get the occasional car. The first one got as far as where I was sitting and had a change of heart and backed up. The second one cruised by very slowly and got through. The third one's driver stopped a Vietnamese woman and asked her to ask me to get out of the way. Since there was almost a foot between me and the car, I declined and waved the woman through. In fact, the only one that didn't seem to have much of an idea was a garbage truck, which managed to nudge my chair as it came through.

Service at Les Jardines was incredibly slow. They may have only one burner in the kitchen, given how slowly things came out to my fellow diners. I had a plate with some tiny potato cubes with parsley, a few chick peas, and three black olives on it deposited in front of me, and the somnolent waitress took my order. When the little pichet of rosé wine appeared, it was clear that my smell/taste was way diminished. (Although at least I didn't order the Moroccan rosé, which another diner did; I was astonished at its grey-pink color and hoped it didn't taste like it looked).

Eventually, my appetizer showed up. Briwate poulet was described as being filled with chicken, parsley, coriander and spices, but what I got was two deep-fried triangles a little over an inch on each side with some chicken inside. There may hae been parsley, coriander and spices, but I couldn't see anything other than chicken, and it also occurred to me that the triangles could have been taken out of the oil a few seconds earlier; they were pretty brown. There was a sort of desultory salad with it, and this meant that I got bread. And the bread, dense, white, and with a salty, crunchy crust slightly burned on the bottom, was darn good.

That course was cleared, and 40 minutes later out came my tagine. I'd ordered lamb tagine with olives and lemons, since I've been wanting to try Moroccan preserved lemons for some time. Now, if you're not familiar with the tagine, it's not just the dish, it's the thing it's cooked in, as the picture here shows. You assemble the ingredients in the bottom half, put the funnel-shaped top on and throw it in the oven, so it's kind of a baked stew. The dish put in front of me was bubbling so violently I had to wait several minutes before I dared taste it. Of course, I couldn't taste it, so it was all sort of a waste. On the other hand, there were notes I could detect -- my taste wasn't 100% gone -- and among them were sour (which I was getting from the wine) and salt (which I was getting from the bread), and I was getting nothing but grease from the tagine, which was a huge number of turnips, potatoes, and some carrots covering up two pieces of lamb, bone in. There were two tiny slivers of lemon, and not an olive to be seen.

The whole thing came to €25.50, which was what I wanted to spend, and yet I felt I'd just been served some watered-down version of Moroccan food for French people. There are certainly enough Moroccans around here that there must be a good Moroccan restaurant or two, and maybe my having selected one in the student ghetto meant I didn't get anything near what I would have gotten if I'd wanted to walk over to the Figuerolles district, where the Moroccans actually live.

On the other hand, if I wasn't going to be able to taste it anyway, at least the liberation of being able to go out for a meal for the first time in over three months felt good. The street scene was better than television, and getting out of the house, sitting there in the night air, and letting someone else do the cooking meant that I don't regret a minute of it. With any luck at all, I'll be able to do this more frequently in the near future, and with more luck, I should be able to taste what I'm eating.