going to market

The weekly markets are butter to Crozefond’s bread. No fewer than three weekly markets are attended during the warmer months. The markets begin at Villeneuve-sur-lot on Wednesday morning. The marathon continues Thursday morning at Bordeaux before climaxing at an evening market on the way back to the farm Thursday night. Each market has its distinct dynamics.

Thirty minutes away from the farm, at Villeneuve, Mami and Regine lend a feminine sensibility together with a couple of the granddaughters. The market (what few minutes I experienced) has an altogether laid-back feel, though it has a fair number of producers. Papi’s brother, along with several other produce stands, sell fruit and vegetables. There’s a guy who makes great chevre (goat cheese), a fishmonger (if I remember correctly), and the occasional staples-peddler (salts, vinegars, etc).

Bordeaux is a much larger town, and is three hours away (meaning  getting up at 3:45 to load up the cold goods and get the camion rolling). This market, at least when stagiares are around, has a different, more intense feel, even with fewer vendors. Bordeaux is where Vincent tends to take the stagiares, and is the market I became most familiar with. It’s full of characters. Before we’ve even arrived, groupies are gathered at our parking spot. Sweet arthritic women and flamboyant old men know the stand’s workings better than do the stagiares, and get down and dirty helping us set up. They do this for nothing tangible in return. Julie, a psychology student at Bordeaux, works weekly to earn some extra euros. She’s quick on her toes: she seems comfortable dancing around the occasional harmless chauvinistic banter.

Then there’s her occasional patient-to-be, like Chella, who announced her distaste for Americans upon meeting me. When she learned my ethnic background she tried to redeem herself, but ultimately seemed confused that I consider myself an Israeli despite Arab roots. The next week, before any greetings or pleasantries, she chastised me for improperly returning her bicycle after borrowing the previous week. It turns out I left the seat lowered (my fault, yes, though the quick-release fastener should have rendered the adjustment easy as riding a bike) and for breaking her brakes (this one an unfounded accusation). Alas, some people, one learns, are best just left alone.

At 10:30am, our halfway point, we join forces with the winemakers to our side and set up a snack table behind the scenes. Wine glasses fill up, bread sliced, cheese and ham brought out. A couple of bicycle-mounted policemen and -women are regulars, but mostly older men show up, talk trash (in French the expression literally translates to “make the mayonnaise”), and get their morning buzz on. It’s very convivial, and poles apart from anything we’ll ever see at the Union Square market. Around two o’clock, we eat again, picking at leftover pizzas and quiches, rinsing with more wine (or coffee). Then we pack up and head to the second market of the day—an evening market complete with entertainment, booze, and lots more to eat.

Having spent the last twelve hours on the road and at the market earns one the privilege of relaxing a bit—walking around and sampling the fare. Mami introduced me to her cousins and various townsfolk. I chatted a fair bit with Serge, the mayor of Savignac who, along with the Pozzers, is entertaining and entertained by the possibility of me someday settling down in the area (have I mentioned I love it here?). There’s altogether too much food to go around. Working with one of the vendors has its privileges, such as grilled skewers of foie gras-studded duck breast, and pretty much all the wine one can drink. The British invasion in the area makes for a number of people with whom to practice my native tongue. And there’s the evening show—sometimes rock, sometimes rather awful folky stuff. Turnout reaches 1000 on busy weeks, creating another amazing scene that brings out my American’s jealousy. All of this is picturesquely set on the Lot river, and brings one to dream of living on its bank (Mami’s keeping her eyes out for a suitable piece of land for me).

At midnight commences a communal drunken chair-stacking, table-dragging orgy. We finally make it to sleep, a full twenty two hours after waking for the long day.

fires and booze

Since arriving, by my count (even counting sometimes gets fuzzy) I’ve attended four outings, for lack of a better term. Two were for St Jean’s day, two were festivals local to southwest France, called Bodegas.

St Jean’s day technically falls on June 24^th, but is celebrated whenever the local towns decide to celebrate it. I’m hopefully not stepping on too many Catholic toes by calling it a pretty pagan celebration. I compare it to Sweden’s similar bonfire holiday in late June. St Jean’s has the obvious religious connotation; Sweden’s is pretty outwardly-traditional/pagan. In any case, as it goes, it involves food (whether as simple as Savignac’s sausage grillade or as elaborate as St Aubin’s more intricate plate including pâté, grilled pork, veggie sides, and dessert), followed by a bonfire at nightfall (a late 23:30 at this time of year). St Aubin’s was rather tame while Savignac’s (Vincent’s) left me with a headache the next morning. Vincent corralled us up for the walk to his house, where he broke out his own pear eau-de-vie, prunes soaked in armagnac, along with a medley of beers and cognac. A cool bit of slang I learned for the post-drinking phenomenon (it sounds cooler in French than in English) literally translates into a “hair ache,” or “my hair is growing inward.”

Bodegas are an altogether different beast. The term is Spanish, but it refers to a township’s summer block party, if you will. Like the bonfires, they range from a smallish couple-hundred people dancing to bad ‘90s remixes and eating mediocre food (as we did outside of Monflanquin, to the much larger summer spectacular we at Issigeac (Bendicte’s hometown). Here, we started off with a hearty white bean soup slowly stewed with lots of pork skin, moved on to crepes stuffed with sautéed onions, crème fraiche, and ham, followed by a grilled brochette of duck breast. There’s no shortage of beer on tap and very drinkable box wine sold for less than a coke (1 euro). Throughout, we grooved to various bands playing throughout the picturesque village, from French marching band to contemporary French fare to a good blues cover band.

In any case, small or large, elaborate or simple, I can only think of one event I’ve attended (alas, I wanted to USA-bash with an honest zero) in the States that would begin to match the experience: Danny Meyer’s Madison Square Park BBQ spectacular (the queues are ridonculous (sic), but the food is outstanding). Seems it’s time for me to hit up some real southern BBQ fairs…

a bit of the bayou

We went crayfishing the other day. Armed with traps that reminded me more of hanging fruit baskets for the kitchen, we’d strategically (read: right side up, in the water) set them down in the muddy stream, wait a few minutes, and then pull them back onto land. The  traps being little more than glorified nets, it was key to get it out of the water and onto land before the big bugs would crawl through the net and back to safety. We baited with some old sardines Claudette had in the freezer along with special crayfish (écrevisse) snacks (read: not-so-slim dry blood sausage slim jims). The little buggers preferred what probably more natural to them: the sardines (or maybe it had something to do with the snackies not being organic).

We were worried at first that it’d go the way of my flopped turkey  hunt last fall (no turkeys in sight, thanks), but after a few empty nets we caught onto their game, and ended up with something like 80 of the American guys (turns out they’re not native: they’re a pest that somehow got transplanted at some point—the better, I’m told, native crustaceans of bigger rivers are only allowed to be hunted one day each year). Cleaning them meant carefully grabbing the body with one hand (careful not to lose a finger in their pinching claws), and pulling out their middle tail-fin, vein (and digestive waste) included. Cooking them was deliciously straightforward: a hard sear, ample garlic and parsley, and a flambé of Vincent’s prune (plum) eau de vie (literally: water of life, really: fire water). They yield even less than Maryland blue crabs, so you need to be prepared with a patient appetite and to make use of the guts, not just the tails. There were lots of mosquitoes and thorns about, but a hyper- (as they say around here) fun time.

life is good when...

...you wake up to birds chirping and cows mooing

...lunch has traveled less than 50 yards to make it into your stomach

...a hot day warrants an evening dip in the salt- (not chlorine-) treated pool

...drinking an ’83 Bordeaux during lunch is nothing out of the ordinary

...(surrogate or otherwise) Grandma doesn’t quit trying to force dessert upon you

Perhaps I’m showing off a bit, and I’m surely presenting the idealistically wonderful side of working on a farm, but none of the above is embellished. How about chiming in on a few of your favorite things?

prunes

Like raisin, prune refers to the fresh fruit in French, not the dried names we use in English. Crozefond is studded with 8m tall hedges. Trees really, but all in nice, straight lines, dividing their property into 3-4 hectare (7-9 acre) plots. At least a third of these trees are wild plum trees, called mirabels. Late June and into July the trees come into their prime, yielding bucketfuls of fruit. Unlike the  homogenous fruit population we’ve become used to in big cities, each and every one of these trees are different. They ripen at different times, weeks apart. Some ripen to yield a yellow fruit, others are nearly black when sweet, and of course all the fiery shades of orange and red between. Not only do the colors differ, but each tree yields fruit with a unique flavor. It is all so beautifully variable.

I made a few tarts using the fruit a couple of weeks ago, and the idea has caught on to start using them in the farm’s pastries. So, this week, Sarah and I, along with three of the grandkids who live on the farm, went hunting, along with two five gallon buckets (and a host of smaller ones), a large sheet, and a rake (the best tool we could find to use as a hook). Blanket stretched out at four corners, the rake wielder would literally shake the fruit off the trees. About half of it landed in the sheet, the rest would fertilize the surrounding soil. The fallen fruit seems of little matter considering we snagged at least 30kg of fruit within a couple of hours.

Over Sunday lunch, with Papi, we cut open about ten of the fruit to test them using his sugar refractometer to get a gauge of the percentage of sugar in the various colors and ripeness levels (In case you’re curious, it turns out the yellows (even the ripe ones) harbor the least sugar, whereas the deep reds are the sweetest). At the end, we scooped the mangled fruit into the compost heap. Now, I’ll be the first to complain about wasting perfectly good fruit, but the stuff is literally falling off the trees. I love this place.

snails snails everywhere

This year’s June has been weird. It’s been raining on and off for a while now. We haven’t gone more than a couple of days without rain, in fact, and some nights have been cold enough that I’m glad I ended up bringing a coat along for the summer. When the rain comes, so do the snails. For slow-moving creatures, they sure come out quickly. When the lawn is wet, there’s an inevitable crunch every so often. So Claudette, Sarah (the new stagiaire), and I went foraging for the little homemakers. They seem to like climbing on walls and around certain plants. We loaded up a special escargot basket (with a locking door, and mesh too small for them to crawl through) full of them and pondered our upcoming meal.

A couple of days later, Mami finally got around to cleaning the suckers (turns out you soak them in a water-based mixture of salt and vinegar, with some stinging nettle if you feel like going to the trouble), and boiled ‘em. I whipped up a nice aioli, and we got to eating (I eat the whole best, while Claudette likes to get rid of the guts). A couple days of this, and the idea (and the snails) grew old. Claudette made a little tomato-based stew with the rest of them, which we thankfully gave up on days later. Still, it’s nice to be up to date on my snail-handling skills.

self-conscious evolutionary introspection

I’ve written about fifty posts thus far. Enough tedious verbose prose to fill a small book. I’m psyched to have so many thoughts and ramblings on record—artifacts I’ll revisit someday, to laugh and blush. The past months are far from over and have been nothing short of amazing, even on my (mostly) shoestring budget. They've changed my life, even though I haven’t outwardly changed much.

I’m still shy about meeting new people (well, women, really), and that’s helped me keep this journey calmingly introspective, though isolated at times. In addition to the lucky few that I’ve added as valued people in my life, I’ve had time to think about those I’ve increasingly missed. And then there are those that I’ve lamentably alienated and neglected, usually without even knowing it. I wouldn’t trade or imply regret about a day of it.

This time-consuming project started with wanting to keep friends and family in the loop about my hopefully debauched exploits. Pondering aloud (it’s my blog, and I’ll ruminate if I want to), it’s both succeeded and failed. The successes can be found in those of you who continue to read and stay in touch. I’m so happy about the few I haven’t heard from in ages, with whom I now correspond. I get to keep everyone (well, anyone who cares enough to read) updated. The failure, however, is rather obvious to those of you who haven't kept up from the start: information overload. There's just too much to read in fewer than twenty sittings. Who knows, maybe there'll be a book deal?

boudin noir

My first morning on the farm, I moseyed on over to the charcuterie (the same general structure that houses some storage spaces, the patisserie, the boulangerie—really a huge wood-burning oven where they bake the bread, and the cheese cave). I was delighted to stumble upon Benedicte (married to the Pozzers’ middle-generation, Nicolas) getting ready to make what Daniel already tipped me off as the best boudin noir (blood sausage) in the region.

She had cooked (boiled) the heads, feet, lungs, and hearts, of the two pigs that had been slaughtered four days prior. Everything except the bones and the snouts got passed through the grinder. She fetched the bag of blood and added it to the mix, along with some onions, garlic, and seasoning, and mixed it all up. We sorted out the salted intestines (different pigs’) and started stuffing the casings. All this went back into the original cooking liquid for a few hours, just short of simmering. What came out was magic.

I ate the stuff for the next few days, a piece here and there for lunch—it really is the best I have had—it’s all the goodies that elevate it above the usual blood and fat mix. It’s a shame, but they stop slaughtering pigs during the summer: it gets too warm to properly handle the meat. This was sadly the last for the season, and the first of many reasons to come back.

drinking and driving

I landed in France an hour late. No worries: I still had no idea what train I’d be on. Border control and baggage claim were a breeze, my 28kg (60lbs) of baggage notwithstanding. I had cheese with me from New York. French cheese—silly to import back to France, but I knew it’d be a while til I saw some decent food. Short of decent bread, I made an attempt, and bought a few dinner rolls at one of the overpriced airport cafés. I got to the airport train station and did the obvious thing of using the automated machine to buy my ticket. Except for that machines in Europe (like the Europeans themselves) tend to hate Americans: it wouldn’t accept my cards. So I got in a long, sweaty line, waiting to talk to a real person. And thirty minutes (that could have been better spent washing up in the toilette) later, I had an expensive ticket to the middle of nowhere, SW France.

I ate my cheese, slept, and did what I could on my computer before my (and my computer’s) batteries ran out (gripe: thanks to installing Vista, my battery life was about a third of what it usually was—call me old fashioned, but I’ve gone back to XP). One transfer and seven hours later, I had arrived. There was no one awaiting me, even though I had called ahead to let them know when I’d be arriving. I did the embarrassing thing of walking up to a strange car, thinking that the lady was smiling at me, thinking that my ride had arrived. It wasn’t my ride.

Vincent Pozzer, of the middle generation (actually, I think there's a great grandchild out there), pulled up fifteen minutes later, helped me with my bags, and apologized for showing up late. We went through the usual pleasantries, and he pulled a cold, organic, Bavarian beer out of the glove box. We clinked the bottles and toasted to good health; he had already started on his own bottle. Things would be different out here in the country.

It was about 10pm when we arrived to the farm, “Crozefond,” and the sun would keep the sky lit until around 1130. I dropped off my bags in the caravane, a dusty, cobwebby old RV, where I’d be staying for the month. I met Claudette, better known as Mami (grandma), and Gilbert, aka Papi, whose name I didn’t even learn til days later. We ate dinner, together with their granddaughter Matilde, who’s one of the few not to live on the farm. I said my bonnes nuits, and headed to unpack my bags. It was only thanks to Mami’s flashlight that I was able to get anything done—there wasn’t any electricity feeding into my place until we ran the extension cord two days later. It was an inexplicably excellent evening in all, and I went to bed, unpacked, and with sweet dreams.

the big apple

A few (too many, as usual) words on New York, while the memory is still fresh stale in my mind. The week passed like a summer thunderstorm. As it approached, I was a bit apprehensive of being back in the city, perhaps nervous that I’d feel out of place, maybe just worried about how the reunions would go. I love thunderstorms, especially with empty hands and pockets, getting drenched with abandon. I got to see nearly everyone I have been close to in the city, and the mood had hardly changed. Sure, there are those who have drifted away, some seemingly for good. But I was truly thrilled with the way the whole trip went.

I got to meet my new roommates and sublettors, as I found them online while in Morocco, and never got to meet anyone beyond a few emails. Despite the fact that one’s a vegan, another a vegetarian, and a third will only go as far as fish, they’re really a great group of people, and I’m glad I have cool people taking care of the place while I’m gone. The two in my room even went to the hours-long task of scrubbing down the kitchen and getting rid of the remains of myriad poisoned mouse bodies.

I love the city. Of course, I had no real responsibilities, no work, and no hardcore deadlines (the fee to change my flight date was somehow just $50), so a good time was to be expected. My friends who cook poked me, reminding me how hard it will be to come back to civilization and settle down. Another friend gave me a too-honest opinion of my blog (boring), which will hopefully keep me on my toes, and at least start categorizing posts as boring vs. exciting, etc…

I ate (this part is important) at Spicy+Tasty (Szechuan out in Flushing), Han Bat (Korean in k-town), Trestle (Swiss guy who’s doing really fun food in Chelsea), Resto (twice—Belgian beer/resto in Murray Hill), and in an unnamed Peruvian restaurant in Elmhurst (my part of queens), among others. All of the mentioned meals were awesome, and there are pictures in my album. The best meals, of course, were home cooked between Jasper, Kat, and I, dripping with sweat all the while, since both days we cooked were ridiculously hot/humid. Highlights included a pig head/foot terrine I made, Kat's strawberry tart-turned strawberries and cream, and pig skin tacos.

Moma had some awesome stuff going on, and I’m glad I made it before the exhibits closed (Comic Abstraction closed the next day). I paid full admission for 45 minutes to run through the museum before it closed, and I found it worth every penny. The Comic exhibit was a fun surprise I wasn’t expecting—I was supposedly here to just to see Richard Serra's mind-fing-blowing sculptures. Scurrying from floor to floor, the goofy smile on my face remained.

My visit was none too short or long. I made the best of it, and after an afternoon at Moma and catching up over a beer, I was back as my sweaty self, running to make it to the airport on time for my flight to France.