The vineyard shed

Little buildings like this one are common sights around the local vineyards. Le cabanon du vigneron (the grape grower's shed). They once served as storage sheds for tools and places to take a little bit of lunch in the days before motorized vehicles made it easy to shuttle between home and the vines. Nowadays, they mostly sit empty or crumbling from neglect.

The grower's shed sits next to the dirt road through the vineyard behind our house.

This one is not far from our house, in fact we can see it from the guest room window. It's locked up tight and there's a small pile of debris blocking the door. Vines are planted against the walls on three sides, and every year the workers prune them back.

You are seeing this post because it was written on Thursday morning, prior to the big storm. We may lose power during the night because of high winds. That will mean no internet and no central heating. We have the wood stove; I'm going out this morning to split a few logs just to be prepared for the morning. And three of the burners on our kitchen stove (cooker) are gas burners, so we can boil water and heat food.

I'm hopeful that we won't lose power, and if we do, that it's not for a week like last year.

Here comes the sun

Just as visible sunsets have been rare sights recently, so have visible sunrises. I saw this one just a few days ago during my morning walk with Callie.

The sun rises slowly in the southeast. It doesn't get very high in the sky this time of year.

So far this season has been very mild. I haven't had to build a fire every day, and that's good because it means the wood supply will last a little longer. Who knows whether we're in for a mild winter or if the temperatures will suddenly drop? Time will tell.

In the meantime, I'm getting sick of the wind. Where we live, up on the heights above the river, we don't have to worry about flooding. But the southwest wind can really blow up here. I'm hopeful that we won't have a repeat of February 2010 any time soon (although a new storm is coming in off the Atlantic today).

There won't be a sunrise like this one on Friday morning, if the weather prediction holds.

One man's trash...

...is more often than not just trash. I saw this crumpled cigarette pack by the side of the vineyard road the other day. Someone just lobbed it out of a car window, I suspect. Classy.

"Fumer nuit gravement à votre santé et à celle de votre entourage."
"Smoking is extremely harmful to your heath and to the health of those around you."

Ken and I finished our bagels in record time, they were that good. So I'm going to do another batch very soon. I want to implement my changes and see if they come out as good or better. Bagels freeze very well, so in case we get tired of them before we finish them, into the freezer they'll go.

Making bagels

I love bagels and we can't find them where we live in the French countryside. I know where to buy them in Paris, but not around here. So I've learned how to make my own. I've been making bagels now for several years, but this weekend I tried a new method that I saw while watching our DVD of Baking with Julia (Child). The guest was Lauren Groveman, and she and Julia made bagels together.

Starting to shape the bagels.

I used my standard bagel dough recipe, but decided to try Groveman's techniques. The only change I made in the dough is that I added about a tablespoon of black treacle (Groveman uses barley malt) to the yeast mixture instead of white sugar or honey. This gave the yeast the sugar that it needs to feed on, but it darkened the dough a little. Otherwise, my recipe was the same as usual.

Shaped bagels to be covered with another towel for a twenty minute rise.

Groveman makes her dough the day before, gives it a quick rise, then refrigerates it overnight for a good slow rise, so I did the same. The dough had doubled in size when I took it out of the refrigerator the next day. I punched it down and formed the bagels by cutting the dough into ten pieces and forming each piece into a perfect ball. I used my thumb to press a hole in the center of each ball and then widened the hole, making a bagel shape. At this point the hole is larger than you think it should be, but it becomes a normal size after the dough rises and cooks.

Bagels simmering in water, two minutes on a side.

After the bagels were shaped and laid out on a towel, I covered them and let them rise again for about twenty minutes. The next step is to pre-cook the bagels in boiling water, about two minutes on each side. I do this in batches because my pan only has room for about three or four bagels at a time, depending on their size. I add a tablespoon of honey to the water go give the bagels a nice sheen.

Boiled bagels on a cooling rack.

Once the bagels are cooked and cooled, the toppings go on. I used sesame and poppy seeds and some course sea salt. The next step is baking. I used to just put the bagels on a cookie sheet lined with a silicone baking mat, but Groveman recommends using a pizza stone and, since I have one, this time I tried it. A little cornmeal or semolina on the peel helps the bagels to slide off onto the stone, and the preheated stone (in a hot oven) really cooks the bagels well. Another of Groveman's techniques is to toss a few ice cubes into the bottom of the oven when the bagels go in, for steam. I did that, too.

Bagels on the peel, topped with seeds and ready for the oven.

The bagels baked for about fifteen or twenty minutes then sat with the oven turned off for about five minutes. I baked two batches of five bagels each. The process worked well and the bagels were delicious, but I'm going to make some further adjustments for the next time. Groveman recommends doing one batch at a time, but I didn't follow her advice. I made and boiled all ten bagels at once before baking. This meant that five bagels stayed on the rack for half an hour while the first five baked and I think they deflated a bit. Next time, I will not boil the second batch until the first batch is in the oven. Lesson learned.

The finished bagels. Yum!

Another thing is that Groveman's recipe uses more flour than mine, so I had less dough and my bagels were a little smaller than I want them. Next time, I will only make eight bagels instead of ten. It's much easier to work with batches of four as opposed to five, and the bagels will be a little larger.

Ken took these photos while I was in baking mode. Wasn't that nice?

Cherry jubilee

Two years ago, in 2009, we had a good cherry crop. The trees around us were bursting with cherries and they were there for the picking. There are several trees nearby that no one really picks, and if the fruit stays on the trees too long, the birds get it all. That year, Ken picked a bunch of cherries and we ate clafoutis and made preserves.

A little cherry cordial in a tiny glass.

One other thing we did with cherries was to put them in a jar with sugar and alcohol and set them in the pantry. After a few months of maceration, the cherries flavor the alcohol and you have a nice little cordial.

Well, we forgot it and left that jar in the cellar for two years. I opened it last week and drained out the cherries. The fruit was not good to eat any more; the flesh had gotten tough and had no flavor. But the alcohol has a beautiful pink color and a rich cherry flavor. Yum! I put it in a bottle for holiday sipping.

A December sunset

During the past few weeks, sunsets have been rare. Well, let me rephrase that: visible sunsets have been rare. We've been having a series of weather systems that keep the sky overcast most of the time. Before that, high pressure inversions kept us under a blanket of fog.

The view from our guest room window on December 2, 2011. Click to pinkify.

But once in a while, the fog dissipates or the clouds break and we're treated to a nice show at sunset. And these days, as we approach the winter solstice, the sun is setting earlier and earlier. Tonight, or should I say this afternoon, it will set at 17h04 (5:04 pm).

Gunk

That's what I call it. There were several inches of it in the bottom of our water heater's tank. And the heating element was caked with it. Before he got to the gunk, however, the plumber had to fix our shower stall. It was really easy (for him) to get the stall unbolted from the wall, disconnected from the drain, and pulled away from the corner where it stands.

The gunk from the bottom of the water heater, some on the ground, most in the bucket.

He disconnected the flexible cold water pipe in minutes. Then he had to drive to the hardware store to get a replacement. I don't know why a plumber doesn't have that stuff on his truck, but there's probably some very good technical reason (like: I can charge more if I have to take the time to go to the hardware store). The shower was back up and ready to go in less than two hours.

A close-up of the gunk. I knew you'd want to see.

Next up was the issue of the water heater. Before he started on the shower stall, the plumber opened the drain on the water tank. It was still draining, very slowly, when he finished upstairs. Since it was close to lunch time, he said he'd just let it finish draining over lunch and come back after.

When he got back, the tank had stopped draining. When he opened it up, however, there was still a good six inches of hot water in the bottom. The drain is about six inches above the floor of the tank. I'm not sure why. So, the plumber got in his truck and went back to the shop to get his wet/dry vac to suck all the water out. That worked pretty well. The rest of what was in the tank was the gunk you see in the pictures. This is the stuff that's been clogging the filters in our faucets, toilet tank, and washing machine intake for the last year and a half.

The new pressure regulator. The white-ish pipe on the right will be replaced Monday.

It's not really gunk and it's actually pretty clean. It feels like sand, but is actually tiny crystals. I suppose it's crystallized calcium from the hard water. The plumber said it had to have been there when we got the tank; that much gunk could not have accumulated since we've had the tank. And, he said, the plumber who installed the tank should have noticed it was full of gunk when he moved it. Oh well.

He got most of it out of the tank and cleaned off the heating element. After doing that he installed a new pressure regulator. The previous one was obviously not working. This new one is adjustable so that we can change the pressure if necessary. It's supposed to protect the water heater from too much pressure and also is supposed to keep the pressure even throughout the house so that opening a faucet or flushing the toilet won't result in a sudden drop in pressure elsewhere (like in the shower). We never had that problem until that other pressure regulator went in about a year and a half ago.

The plumber is coming back on Monday because he wants to replace two short lengths of old cast iron pipe that he says are most certainly clogged with rust and calcium. He'll put in copper pipe, like the rest of the house has.

One of the nice things about having the utility room below the living space is that all of the systems are accessible. Nothing's hidden in a cramped closet or crawlspace or under a stairwell. It makes maintenance and repairs a little easier.

So, did it work? The shower is back in commission, so that's good. And the pressure is good, back to where it was before all this started. Ken opened a faucet while I was showering and I did notice a little change in pressure, but nothing like it was last week. So I think we're in good shape. The plumber said that now that the gunk is gone, the heater should be a little more energy efficient. And he turned the temperature down a bit; it was set too high.

I can't wait to see the bill for all this. Well, maybe I can.