Rouge vif d'Etampes

I harvested the two surviving pumpkins called rouge vif d'Etampes (bright red Etampes pumpkins). Etampes is a city just south of Paris where the variety originated. I kept one and gave the other to a nearby friend who often shares her garden's bounty with us. We're planning to use part of the flesh in couscous this week and preserve the rest by roasting and freezing it.

These are pretty good-sized pumpkins.

That leaves two more pumpkins in the garden, both of the muscade variety. I want to get those in and processed this week. Meanwhile, the apples keep dropping. I've made two batches of applesauce (in the freezer), but I want to make a tart this week. I haven't made une tarte aux pommes (apple tart) in a while.

It's not falafel

In the ongoing effort to use up garden zucchini, we decided to make veggie burgers. I have about six zukes that got away, growing much larger than I intended them to. They're not quite baseball bats, but close. So I grated one last week as the base for veggie burgers.

Grilled veggie burgers, ready for the buns.

I used a "recipe" that Ken blogged about when we made a batch many years ago. It's less of a recipe and more of a description, which is what you'll get here. I grated a carrot, a small onion, and a couple of medium-sized potatoes and added them to the squash which I had previously squeezed to remove as much water as I could. Next, I mashed about two cups (one large can) of pinto beans and mixed them in.

Into that went some unmeasured quantities of salt, pepper, cayenne, fennel, paprika, ancho chili powder and just a soupçon of ground cloves. Then, to bind it all, I added chick pea flour. Once that was mixed in, I let it all sit to absorb the flour and blend the flavors. After a while, we tasted it and thought that it needed more salt but, more importantly, the mixture was a little too wet. Ken had some breadcrumbs in the freezer from a batch of sweet potato bread he made a while back, so we dried those out in the oven and added them. That did the trick.

We formed the mix into burgers, two for the grill on Friday and the rest (about eight more) for the freezer. The burgers held together well on the grill and we ate them on buns with sliced pickles and ketchup, served along side some fries. Tasty!

No frost on this pumpkin

This is the season's first pumpkin from our garden. I've been checking them daily and they all seem pretty much ready. But this one had a soft spot on one side, so I picked it on Friday. I cut a wedge out where the soft spot was and roasted the rest. I scooped the roasted flesh out and will get it into freezer containers today.

I see pumpkin pie in our near future.

The pumpkin is a muscade variety whose skin turns tan (not unlike a butternut squash) when ripe. Like this one, they won't necessarily get tan all over. There are two more of these out there, and two rouge vif (bright red) pumpkins still to harvest. I'll be doing that over the weekend. Photos to come!

Deadheads

The daisies have done their thing. Now they're sad looking. At some point I'll cut them down to ground level and this bed will look a little neater.

The daisies are a mess as usual this time of year.

It's the last official weekend of summer vacation in France. If this were a normal year, kids would be going back to school on Tuesday. As it is, I don't know what the schools are doing. I guess I should pay more attention to the news.

Sauvignon

Most of the white wine grapes grown in the vineyards around us are sauvignon. Some chardonnay and chenin are also grown here, mostly to blend into sparkling wine. Closer to the city of Tours, the Vouvray and Montlouis appellations produce wines exclusively with chenin. Other smaller areas in our region, including the Touraine Amboise, Mesland, and Azay-le-Rideau appellations, also use chenin for their white wines. Lesser-known and mostly local white grapes are grown here and there around the region and are used mainly for blending.

Is this sauvignon or chardonnay? I can't tell.

The sauvignon made here is good but it can be a little acidic, a quality that some people don't appreciate.

Puddles

Last week we had some rain and I saw something that I hadn't seen in a while: puddles in the vineyard road. This view of our hamlet from out in the vineyard will be familiar to regular readers of the blog. I wasn't very far out yet when I stopped to wait for Tasha to catch up after she spent some time smelling things.

Tasha likes the puddles. She won't step in them, but she'll stop and take a drink.

The puddles have dried up now and, while the days are more or less cloudy, there's no rain in the forecast. I did get all of the grass cut over the last few days, finishing up yesterday. And I shampooed a rug. Hey, that's two things in one day!

Ça commence

I noticed a couple of trucks parked out in the vineyard yesterday. Through binoculars I saw people carrying big bins on their shoulders through the vine rows. That can only mean one thing: the 2020 grape harvest has begun.

Grapes nearing maturity.

In these first days, at least in the vineyard out back, the harvest begins with hand-picking in selected parcels. I don't know which varietal is being picked, or why certain grapes are hand-picked and others are not. I'm sure there's a rhyme and reason to it all. But I do know from news reports that the harvest is beginning early all over the country, in some places a whole month early. The culprit is the hot, but mostly dry, dry, dry, summer we've had.