Discoveries, old and new

I made another trip this morning into the countryside around the village to take a few more photos for the geology lecture next week.  The features we were concentrating on were olistoliths – rocks which stand up from the flatter ground around them, the result of movement of a block of limestone over another layer of rock and its collision (underwater as it was 300 million years ago) with a coral reef, which broke up the limestone into these distinctive features.  The same formations occur in the Guilin area of China and around Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

There are three of them in this first photo, a large one on the left, a smaller one on the right and a very small one in the centre.  The view also shows how dry it is here now – in the season when we should have had most of the year’s rain over the past couple of months, we have had no proper rain since November.  The garrigue on the hills looks as it always does, because it’s evergreen and adapted to drought, but I hope we’ll have enough rain for the spring wild flowers.

We followed this tiny road through some very dry vineyards towards Vailhan and past the gap between an olistolith and its original limestone block.

At Vailhan, the church and presbytery (the latter is now a very good restaurant) stand on another olistolith.

It will be an interesting talk next week, just as it was fascinating to travel through familiar landscape with someone who knows so much about the geology of the area.  The vinegrowers are very lucky in this small area around our village because there is an unusual variety of different kinds of rock, due to forces on the different formations 300 million years ago, and resulting in a terroir (an untranslatable word meaning the geological and meteorological elements that make up the character of a wine) where different varieties can be grown very close to each other in suitable conditions for each one.

The Cercle Occitan is a group in the village which I belong to and which promotes Occitan language and culture, Occitan being the indigenous language of much of southern France from the Alps to the Pyrenees (and including some small areas in both Italy and Catalunya).  It is still spoken by many, in spite of the discouragement of the French state and its centralised educational policies.  As well as language classes, our group organises  a programme of cultural events, not all directly related to Occitan issues, like this lecture on geology.  After each lecture or meeting about 40 or 50 of us eat together and continue the discussion.  Next week’s lecture will take place the day after St David’s Day, the Welsh national day, when we usually make a Welsh meal in our house for 15 or 16 friends.  This time Lo Jardinièr and I have offered to make cawl (Welsh lamb stew/soup) for 40 people.  Others will make the first and last courses.  I’ll post the recipe, as promised!

The village shop has recently been taken over by a very enthusiastic young couple who are willing to carry on as before, but still to try out new things.  This morning I found that they were offering chicken livers confit (cooked in duck fat), so I couldn’t resist trying them.  I made a salad with sliced endive, grated carrot and a few slices of fennel and added a dressing made with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  I cooked the livers in the duck fat (if I’d had fresh ones I would have fried them quickly in olive oil), added them to the salad and deglazed the pan with a bit more balsamic vinegar to pour over them.  Served with bruschetta and a glass of local red wine, it made a nice lunch for this in-between season when spring is clearly on its way at last.

Going back 300 million years

This morning I had an interesting trip to the viewpoint near the ancient church above Roquessels, the village where we buy wine, with a geologist who is going to give a lecture to our Cercle Occitan about the interesting and unusual variety of rocks and soils that make up the terroir for vine-growing in this area.  I’ve been asked to take photos to illustrate his talk and I’ll be able to tell you more about what he has to say next week when I’ve heard it all, but it was fascinating listening to him describe what we saw today, pointing out small details that I might not have noticed as well as the broad sweep of landscape.  It wasn’t a good time to photograph the view down towards the sea, so I shall have to go back later in the day when the light is better, but I think you can see what an impressive vista it is and see the sea sparkling in the distance.

I’m always interested in human impact on landscape, so I couldn’t resist taking a photo of the roofs of the village houses below us, built this way and that – i gam o gam as we say in Welsh – to protect from the heat and, in earlier days, from attack.

 And beside the road leading to Mas Rolland we found these fossils, relatively recent according to the geologist – a mere 25 to 30 million years old.

Route barrée

Going up the hill to the garden for the first time since we’ve been home, we found this.  Work has stopped for the weekend, but the project is to lay a water pipe all the way down the hill, closing the narrow road to traffic and forcing us to postpone plans to collect some more goat manure as it will be impossible to take the car and trailer near enough to the garden.  There were some good surprises, though.  The broad beans have survived very well, with help from the covering we gave them, during nights when the temperature reportedly sank as low as minus 10 C, and the parsley is also still green and growing.

We consoled ourselves with the thought that a lot of the work of gardening over the next couple of months will be in the house and on the balconies, sowing tomato and pepper seeds and keeping them warm in the mini-greenhouses until they are big enough and the danger of frost has passed so that we can plant them out.   We also consoled ourselves with a very good lunch.

Rosé wine from the Domaine de Cadablès on one side of the village and bread dipped in olive oil from the mill at the other side of the village, Moulin de Casso.

Some of the foie gras we conserved last March after our trip to the Gers, served simply with large-grain sea salt and pink peppercorns.

Guinea fowl legs pot-roasted in a glass of local white wine with onion, garlic and smoked bacon, then put in the oven for the last 10 minutes to brown the skin, served with potatoes roasted in duck fat.

Flavours in Cardiff

While I was in Cardiff I enjoyed two very different and both excellent versions of the traditional Welsh dish, cawl, one in a café, posted the other day, and one made by my daughter and Lo Jardinièr as an introduction to Wales for a Catalan visitor on his first trip there.  As promised, I will post a recipe for cawl – maybe for St David’s Day on 1 March – but for now I just wanted to record some of the many delicious flavours and dishes that delighted us during our stay.  Mostly cooked by our daughter, there was her Scandinavian potato and anchovy dish:

a beautifully arranged ‘flower’ of endive leaves with blue cheese, red pepper and walnuts:

prawn and chorizo gumbo – a collaboration between our daughter and her partner – with hom-emade corn bread

followed by lemon Bakewell tart:

Out to Sunday lunch in Cardiff Bay, we ate in Bosphorus, a restaurant built out over the water that reminded me of similar occasions many years ago in Istanbul over the real Bosphorus, with very authentic Turkish food, including sucuk, slices of beef sausage,

spicy fried lamb’s liver, the flavour of which always conjures up my teenage years in Turkey for me

and an amazing dish of kofte, lamb meatballs, wrapped in unleavened bread:

And then there was the evening when our daughter with the help of her cousin, my nephew, prepared homemade salmon and ricotta ravioli:

There was a lovely lunch of vegetable soup (not shown) followed by cheese and an artichoke and olive salad:

And daughter and Lo Jardinièr collaborated again to make a special Valentine’s Day apple pie:

A quick glance up and down the main road near our daughter’s house showed that we hadn’t nearly exhausted the culinary possibilities of this wonderfully multicultural city:  within a few metres of each other there were a Polish grocery, a Balti restaurant, a bakery that has been there for a hundred years and is probably the oldest of these business with the possible exception of the Italian café (a common sight in much of south Wales), and, finally in the row in my photo below, a Sicilian pizzeria.

On the other side of the city there’s a wonderful street where I’ve been to middle eastern, Turkish, Iranian and Japanese restaurants.  With its history as an important port over the past 200 years, many different groups from all over the world have been attracted to Cardiff and have contributed to the mix of flavours, languages and cultures that makes it such an exciting place to visit, even if it weren’t for the delicious food and warm welcome we always get at the home of our daughter and her partner.

Return home

After a wonderful week staying with our daughter in Cardiff, and a lot of fantastic food cooked by her and her partner (I’ll post some photos of the dishes soon), we sped southwards by TGV train at 300 kilometres per hour on our way home. 

Now we have to start cooking for ourselves again and the first dish I made was a fairly simple one: braised carbonade of pork.  This is a tender cut of slices made across the grain of the meat.  The same method could be used for pork chops or tenderloin, but this carbonade, bought in our local shop, was tender and very tasty. 

In an oven-proof dish I sautéed a couple of sliced onions and carrots in olive oil until they were soft but not browned.  I added some green olives, chopped garlic and a sprig of rosemary, then laid the pieces of meat on them.  I poured over a glass of white wine mixed with a tablespoon of tomato purée and some salt, covered the dish and put it in the oven at 180 C for 45 minutes.  We ate it with rice, but it would be just as good with potatoes or bread.

Capital lunches

Steak frites in Paris

and cawl – Welsh lamb stew/soup – served with Caerffili cheese in a Cardiff arcade

I’ll try to remember to post a cawl recipe when I get home.

Frozen

It doesn’t happen very often, in fact I’ve never seen it before, having missed it two years ago when it thawed before I got there.  The river Thongue/Tonga has frozen.  In the bright sunshine it’s the only visible sign of the cold weather, but the wind-chill in the north wind is bitingly cold and the temperature didn’t rise above zero while I was out this morning.