Trying to change

Regular readers will have noticed that the blog design has gone from shades of beige to shades of charcoal grey this week.

This isn't entirely intentional. We were wanting to change the banner photo for a while now but with the weather being so mild we didn't have any really seasonal wintry photos - unlike last year! So we settled on a photo taken earlier this month on a misty morning.

shades of gray at Chenonceau

Changing that led to also trying to change the design template. You know the idea: fresh 'face' for 2012.... What we wanted was a color palette of grey-ish blues and greens. Now Blogger let us change elements to all sorts of colors but would it let us change the background -- would it heck! We either accepted one of a set series of color combinations or selected a different design; and we didn't like the other colorways.

Trying to customise the color palette worked in theory - we tried to 'adapt' each of the offered colorways but for some reason Blogger refused to transfer our choice to the blog page -- it only changed some of the page elements. So after much frustrated messing, and some swearing we were left with changed font colors, post titles and link colors all of which clashed hideously with the ever present beige background.

As an alternative we chose this antracite gray template. It is quite sombre but we think it does set off photos nicely. What do you think? And if anyone knows how we could make Blogger do what we want please let us know!

Chenonceau in winter

approach to Chenonceau, no people...

Last week we had Sarah, my cousin's daughter to stay. Playing tourist with someone who is seeing for the first time what treasures the Loire valley has to offer is always great fun; especially when she is an art history major. 

Sarah looking down the long gallery

We picked her up at Orly airport early in the morning. We had lunch in Amboise and found time to buy some handmade chocolates at a very busy chocolatier before heading to the Clos Lucé, Leonardo da Vinci's residence where he died in 1519. The king of France, Francois I had coaxed him to come to France and he's buried in the chapel of Amboise castle. Sarah wanted to see it and the collection of models of Leonardo's inventions.  It was so quiet we literally parked at the entrance and had the place to ourselves:- an advantage of visiting on a cold grey winter's day. In the summer it is absolutely heaving with visitors.

The next day we had to pick up our pintade from Loches market and this gave us an opportunity to show Sarah the Caravaggios we've mentioned before and pay a quick visit to St Ours to see Agnes Sorel's tomb. There was quite a bit of fallen plaster in St Ours, presumably it had been knocked loose by the recent storm, Joachim.

Sarah, Niall and a christmas tree!

Having got our pintade we drove up to Chenonceau for the main visit for the day. Again it was really quiet. A place like Chenonceau will always have visitors, no matter what day of the year but there were only about 20 cars in the parking lot and not a tourist bus to be seen. In Chenonceau terms that is empty!

It meant that we were able to enjoy the full impact of the allée of plane trees leading up to the chateau.

Catherine de Medici

real log fire in the five queens' bedroom

It was a great visit as, with the christmas trees, floral displays and roaring fires it had a lovely ambiance. You weren't part of some demented rugby scrum trying to see the art treasures hung on the walls such as small Poussin landscape and the portraits of the two most well known owners: Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de Medici. Diane was the favourite mistress of King Henry II. Catherine de Medici was Henry's wife and after Henry's death 'appropriated' Chenonceau from her longtime rival Diane. 

It was interesting to re-visit the unusual black painted 'mourning room' of Louise de Lorraine wife of the assinated Henry III although we weren't quite convinced by the white christmas tree with black decorations. 

Soon after we entered a bus load of tourists did come pouring in armed to the teeth with camcorders but they were obviously on a tight schedule as they went from room to room at a rapid pace and soon disappeared over the horizon. We took our time and enjoyed the christmas decorations as much as the chateau.

Christmas Day pintade

As regular readers will know we ordered a pintade [guinea fowl] for Christmas Day dinner. We finally decided on the following menu:

main:

roasted pintade with a sauce a la Normande

pommes dauphinoise and haricots verts

dessert:

traditional christmas pudding and creme brulé ice cream.

We roasted the pintade in the oven. We put a sliced lemon and a roughly quartered shallot into the bird's cavity. The skin was rubbed with colza oil [in preference to butter] and seasoned with salt and pepper. Then we wrapped the bird in streaky bacon; set it on slices of apple and quartered shallots in the roasting tray and drizzled it with a little more oil. It went into the oven at 180C.

For the Normande sauce we sauteed some shallots, lardons fumé and an apple in butter. We then addded cider and reduced it all down. Next, we warmed and flamed off a generous amount of Calvados and added it to the sauce before letting it reduce again and finishing off with light cream. Finally, we added the apple slices the bird had sat on to the sauce. It went very well with the pintade.

The food was all very yummy so we ate a lot and drank quite a bit, including a very nice sparkling Alsace Rosé.

The photos are of two of the lovely Christmas tree arrangements at the Chateau of Chenonceau which we visited last week.

Christmas Eve

Well we're back home having dropped Sarah, the daughter of Antoinette's cousin, off at Charles de Gaulle airport for her flight back to Greece. She's been studying there this last semester and now she's flying back to Athens to meet up with her sister and father for Christmas before all three fly back to the USA. 

Unfortunately the earliest TGV train would not have given her enough time to get to the gate for her flight so we drove up last night and stayed at a cheap & cheerful airport hotel [Premiere Classe] before waving 'au revoir' this morning. Predictably after days of murk and misty rain the weather turned glorious and we were treated to a beautiful sunrise as we drove away from the airport.

It has been a hugely enjoyable but busy few days visiting Amboise, Chenonceau, Chinon, Fontevraud Abbey and the Abbey of St Savin. We'll write more about our visits soon. 

For now, on Christmas Eve we'd like to send our best wishes at Christmas to everyone and leave you with some seasonally appropriate images. We have presents to wrap and cooking to do!

Nativity, Charnizay village, perched in a lime[linden] tree

Nativity, Chenonceau chapel

Nativity, Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry

 

Breezin' through

flooded Aigronne river

Well "tempete Joachim" came storming in in the early hours of Thursday to Friday morning. In preparation we'd shut the shutters and anchored down things outside. We're on a ridge, and although to some extent sheltered by the neighbour's house from S/SW winds, it was very very blowy! That wasn't the worst of it, however. 

It was the accompanying rain. It came out of the black sky in huge bucketloads. The result this morning was over flowing ditches along the chemin, unexpected rivulets and extremely waterlogged ground everywhere; so saturated in fact that in places we have ponds!  The ground is clay on top of the calcaire and the water takes its time working through this claggy clay top layer. Ultimately it will all drain away of course, but in the meantime it makes for a very squelchy messy situation. If we're lucky we'll get a few days in which the ground can recover and all that water will drain away to fill the acquifers. The Aigronne river, normally a shallow little trout stream, has swollen out of all recognition and we have an impromtu lake in the valley below Charnizay.

collapsed gable

We had some large branches down, but the tarpaulins weren't blown off the woodpiles and no tiles came off the roof. The only casualty we found was the gable end of one of the ruined houses, which had collapsed. Happily it sits far enough back from the chemin that all the stone and rubble have strewn across the ground and it's nowhere near the roadway. The building sits on the parcel of land which belongs to a whole horde of heirs who can't decide what to do with it so it will continue to crumble into the woods.

A small hurrah! We are back on track with Christmas preparations. The last of the cards were sent off on Wednesday and parcels with small gifts for family and friends were handed in to Madame La Poste for dispatch on Monday.

Wednesdays and Saturdays are market days in Loches so the day before yesterday we went up to do some foodie shopping and get a Christmas tree. There's a good free range poulty farm at St Senoch [a village not far from us]. The farmer who runs it has a stand on the market selling all manner of fowl. We wanted to order a bird for Christmas and have been deliberating for some time as to what to go for: goose, duck or pintade [guinea fowl]. 

detail of rubble

We both are intruigued by goose but as the smallest one we could order was for 6 to 8 people we gave it a miss. We'd be eating it until kingdom come! Sadly monsieur was all out of duck, be it tame or semi-wild, so a pintade it will be. We had a detailed discussion as to how we planned to cook it and whether or not we wished for a ' pintade caponée' or 'normale'. A 'pintade caponée', at twice the price [€18.50 per kg] is a male bird which has been castrated and then milk fed to make its flesh even more delicate and soft. We went for a regular bird, not a milksop and will be picking it up at next Wednesday's market. 
Christmas Eve we'll have a seafood platter and be treating ourselves to oysters. Purists maintain one should eat them raw, and indeed we have done so; but, at the risk of being philistines we prefer having them cooked on the 1/2 shell.