Wednesday,
one of my favorite days of the week. It's market day in Uzès, but
better than just a regular market. In order to participate in the
Wednesday market you have to be a grower/producer. That means no
re-sellers who simply go to the local wholesale vegetable market, buy
produce from all over Europe and then sell it at the local market. For
me, you might as well go to the grocery store if you are going to buy
at stalls like this. So usually Wednesday morning is a morning off, no
concrete, no digging, just French bliss.
This time of year is such a great time to be in the south of France,
the abundance of summer produce is staggering. Today I bought lots of
tomatoes. I am a person that
only
eats tomatoes in the summer when they are ripe, juicy and oh so
delicious. I have never understood eating those pale pink, grainy,
tasteless tomatoes that you find at other times of the year. Right now
there are tomatoes at every stand. The Noire de Crimée are my
favorites, dark skinned, almost purple, I overheard someone in the
market asking what they were and if they were any good. Well, of course
I had to jump in and tell them that they were the best tomatoes they
will ever taste!
Maybe that
was an exaggeration, but it still surprises me when people look at
these plump, juicy, imperfect spheres of delight and question their
quality only because they've been conditioned by the "perfect" color,
shape and size of the average tasteless grocery store tomato. The
farmer smiled at me and thanked me for my free advertising. The next
week, I went back to the market just before noon, as I had a bunch of
things I had to do that morning, and sadly all of his delicious
Noire de Crimée
were gone! Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut!
Anyway I continued through the market and found more apricots than you
can imagine. This year they've had a bumper crop of apricots, the
prices are low and there are many varieties to choose from. The ones I
bought today (I forgot the name) are tiny and have a red tinge around
the top. I am going to make Alice Waters' apricot bread pudding, a
recipe I found in the Chez Panisse Cafe cookbook. Another of my
favorite things to buy at this time of year is
Brousse or the Corsican version of ricotta. No, my
brousse is
not coming from Corsica, but from a local cheese maker that is at the
market every Wednesday and Saturday. He's famous all over the region,
at a different market every day, he'll ask your name and then rhyme it
with the name of one his delicious sheeps milk cheeses.
On my way out of the market I stopped to have a coffee at my favorite
cafe, and savored the best
chausson aux pommes I've
had in many years. The pastry was flaky and melt in your mouth good,
and believe it or not, in the middle was an apple! Not the usual
pre-made tasteless apple sauce you normally find these days, but half
an apple. Mmm what a treat. Enough to inspire me to head home, make
dinner and then get back to work!
So dinner tonight will be a zucchini frittata with ricotta (recipe from
Deborah Madison), Gazpacho recipe from Señora Crende (the mother of my
Spanish boyfriend from college who taught me how to make it during the
summer I spent with her in Madrid) and apricot bread pudding. Yum! Some
Swedish friends are coming over for dinner, why don't you join us?!
After a very long weekend of cement mixing and drain setting, the
novelty of this project tends to wear off a bit! Saturday we made three
trips to the building supply store for 3 truck loads of sand and gravel
mixture and made lots and lots of cement. The first stage of the floor
pouring entailed filling trenches that we dug where the weight of the
vats will put the most pressure on the winery floor. Ten metric tons
per vat is a lot of weight to put on a floor! So we have to reinforce
the areas that will be under the most pressure. This is done by digging
a trench that is 2 meters by .50m by .50 meters deep. Lots of fun to
dig out when you consider that the ground is made of sandstone! Once
they were dug out, we put rebar in the holes and then filled them with
cement. No, we have no experience with cement, yes, we are crazy! But
we have at least consulted with an architect, and engineer and a
contractor, so let's hope we get it right!
After filling the holes, which currently look like freshly dug graves,
we started working on setting the drain in place. We have purchased
linear drains that are 1 meter each and will run the length of the
winery floor. Next weekend we will pour the floor up to the edge of
these drains, but we wanted to make sure that they were already fixed
into place before we started pouring the actual floor. Boy, I sure hope
there are no professionals out there reading this and chuckling at all
of the mistakes we are making along the way!
