L'École d'été de Probabilités de Saint-Flour III

Every lunch and dinner in Saint-Flour lasted about an hour and a half. Every single one included a first course, main course, vegetable dish, cheese course, dessert, and wine. The cheeses were always the same four. Nobody was ever completely sure what they were, but the most knowledgeable people told me they were Cantal, Saint-Nectaire, Fourme d'Ambert, and tomme de montagne. All of them were excellent. The soft cheeses had an amazing, gooey texture that I've never seen in American cheese. I attribute it to raw milk aged fewer than 60 days, or to non-refrigeration. We always had the same pretty good red table wine, even when we had white fish.

I tried to keep track of all of our meals and will record them for posterity here. I probably made a mistake or two, especially at the end.

Monday:

Lunchham and egg in aspic; braised beef, mashed potatoes; crème caramel
Dinnermelon; stewed Romano beans and other vegetables; breaded chicken cutlets; packaged coffee ice cream sundae

Tuesday

Lunchquiche with Cantal cheese; stewed chicken with mushrooms, onions, and cauliflower; cooked peaches
Dinnerbeets and tomatoes in vinaigrette; salad, cod cakes (from yesterday's mashed potatoes); chocolate mousse

Wednesday

Lunchprosciutto with bread and butter; pork chops with buttered pasta, roasted tomatoes; plum, apricot, and raspberry tart
Dinnersalad; chicken kebabs, string beans; fruit

Thursday

Lunchtuna with mayonnaise; veal stew, scalloped potatoes; ice cream
Dinnergrapefruit; baked crepes with ham and béchamel sauce, endives, hash browns; baked apple with caramel

Friday

Lunchsalad; a white fish called colin, which might be hake, in a very buttery sauce, rice with vegetables; meringue in vanilla sauce with caramel
Dinnercelery root remoulade; tomatoes stuffed with sausage; chopped vegetables; fruit

Saturday

Lunchham/corned beef in aspic; steak, aligot (cheesy mashed potatoes); pastry with pears
Dinnersurimi (i.e., fake crab--seriously!); salad, lasagna; flan

Sunday

Lunchassorted seafood (fish, mussels) baked in scallop shells with cheese on top; brussels sprouts with fried potato balls, chicken legs; tiramisu cake
Dinnermelon; croque monsieurs, salad; cooked peaches, lady fingers

Monday

Lunchcarrots with vinaigrette; roast pork with prunes, french fries; packaged sundae with weird pear flavor
Dinnercured sausage with bread and butter; buckwheat crepes with cheese and mushrooms, stewed zucchini; banana, nuts, and chocolate with vanilla sauce

Tuesday

Lunchmushrooms in sweet tomato sauce; rabbit stew with a cream sauce, egg noodles; tarte tatin
Dinnertomatoes with corn, crumbled boiled egg, and vinaigrette; spinach, potato croquettes, omelets with herbs; fruit

Wednesday

Lunchbaloney-like meat; sausages, lentils; creme caramel
Dinnerbeans and vegetables in mayonnaise; quiche, salad; cake

Thursday

Lunchbeets and cucumbers in vinaigrette; paella; strawberry cake
Dinnermelon; cold chicken, herbed potatoes; apricot Chantilly

Friday

Lunchmixed vegetables; cheese and ham in pastry
Dinnerpaté de campagne; peas and carrots, breaded balls of ham and veal; chocolate pots de creme with ladyfingers

Me in front of the Viaduc de Garabit, bilt by Gustave Eiffel

L'École d'été de Probabilités de Saint-Flour II

The next day in Saint-Flour, the summer school started. The routine for the next two weeks was to get up, eat breakfast, go to a one and a half hour lecture, take a break, go to another lecture, and then eat lunch. After lunch, there were usually two shorter talks by students about their research. Nothing was scheduled until dinner, after which was another student talk. This was usually the worst-attended talk.

After the lectures were over on my first day, I took a walk to look around and buy some postcards.

The upper town, from outside the train station.

Saint-Flour has an upper and a lower town. The upper town is the older part, and it's where I was walking. It has narrow streets that cars drive through at ridiculous speeds.

A street in the upper town.

Walking around that first day, I managed to get lost. The upper town is so small that this is a real feat. I blame it on the jetlag--I woke up at 5am that morning and was really confused about what time it was. I ended up wandering through the main square:

The main square.

Eventually, I found my way back to the abbey, establishing that a random walk in Saint-Flour is recurrent (parents and grandparents: this is an extremely bad math joke).

L'École d'été de Probabilités de Saint-Flour I

I spent the last two weeks in Saint-Flour, France. We're not talking about Paris: I was in the Massif Central of France, the massive middle.

Sunflowers from a train window.

I left my apartment at 6am for a flight to Dallas-Fort Worth. From there I flew to Paris. I arrived at 9am and took the commuter rail to the Gare de Lyon, where I got on a train to Clermont-Ferrand. Four hours later, I discovered that my next train was actually a bus, and after a lot of miming and attempts at communication (my one year of high school French was not that helpful), I got on one of the six buses that was waiting. When the bus sat around and didn't leave when it was scheduled, I started to worry. When about twenty young children got on the bus, I really didn't know what was going on. We left, and we did seem to be going towards Saint-Flour, according to the highway signs. The person sitting behind me spoke some English to me, and then two people sitting nearby told me that I must be a probabilist, and that I was going in the right direction. This was not to last: our bus kept going down the highway right past the exit for Saint-Flour, and we all watched the town at the top of a hill, receding into the distance. This was because the bus route involved going 40 kilometers south of Saint-Flour, stopping for fifteen minutes, and then turning around and going back to Saint-Flour. And so I arrived around 7pm, after 26 hours of constant travel. The director of the summer school, Jean Picard, picked up the three of us who were on the bus and drove us to the hotel where the summer school is held. It's an old abbey. The doors are all shorter than I am.

Then was dinner: potato salad with olives, pickles, ham, and lots of mayonnaise, cucumber and tomato salad, couscous, cold meat with pickles and mustard, baguettes and four kinds of cheese with which I would soon become very familiar, and pastries with layers of cake and cream. This was all washed down with carafes of very drinkable red wine. I ate, climbed up to my room, and fell asleep.

My room.

Haircuts

This is how we used to look:

And this is how we look as of a few weeks ago:

Garden

Lindsay and I have been trying to grow things. Let's start with the tomatoes:

From left to right, the varieties are Green Grape, Silvery Fir Tree, and Peacevine. The first and third are cherry tomatoes; the first and the second are heirloom. Here are some burgeoning tomatoes:

Tomatoes on our Peacevine plant.

Green grape tomatoes: how do we know when they're ripe?

We have really pampered these tomatoes. The first month we had them, we took them inside every night. When Seattle was more reliably warm, we put them in bigger containers, along with some compost from our friend Stephen. For a while, we covered them at night to keep them warm. Now we're forcing them to fend for themselves, but on nice days I do move them to a new spot in the late afternoon to catch some evening sun.

Here are the rest of our plants:

We bought a mystery bulb last fall, and it grew into this gigantic lily.

Arugula and thyme, with a few nasturtiums amongst them.

Our tarragon has been less prolific than our thyme, but it's doing okay.

Nasturtiums.

We also have some more nasturtiums and some sorrel growing in the same pots as the tomatoes, but they've only just started to sprout. There are some older pictures from our garden on Lindsay's blog, so you can see how much everything has grown.

I saw this when I was walking the other day. It was one block away from my apartment, sitting in somebody's front yard:

A rabbit.

Dick's Brewing Company, Bavarian Style Hefeweizen
Centralia, WA
4% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5

This beer is notable for being American and tasting like a German wheat beer. It's not as good as the best of those, but it's not bad.

Sourdough II: The loaf lives

So, you've cultivated some yeast and now you want to make some sourdough? Well, be careful. Lots of people seem to hate bread called sourdough, so call it naturally leavened bread or something like that. Your bread will be very sour if you let it rise very slowly at a low temperature, but barely sour otherwise, and your deceit will surely go unnoticed. (For example, I have no idea which of my local bakery's breads are sourdough and which aren't. You have to look on the ingredient list and check if yeast is listed to know.)

I've cobbled this bread recipe together from a few sources, including Sandor Ellix Katz, Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking, and a bread seminar I took one weekend in college. (Yes, I took a bread seminar. It was during passover, too.) I use about 75% white bread flour, 20% whole wheat bread flour, and 5% rye. In the recipe, I've just written flour.

This recipe is for two large loaves. After step 2, I take half the dough and put it in the refrigerator. Then I take it out a few days later, let it come to room temperature for a few hours, and bake it.

There are three basic steps. Here's quick summary:

1. Mix up a preferment of starter, flour, and water, and let it sit overnight. This is supposed to give the yeast a chance to multiply and to give a deeper, fermented taste.
2. The next day, combine the preferment with more flour and water and some salt. Knead and let rise.
3. Form a loaf and bake.

Step 1

• 1 cup starter
• 240g (1 1/2 cups) flour
• 40g (scant 3 tbs) water

Mix up the starter, flour, and water. Cover and leave overnight, or however long is convenient. This is your preferment.

Step 2

• 840g (5 1/4 cups) flour
• 445g (scant 2 cups) water
• 1 tbs salt

Mix up the flour and water in a separate bowl. It might be a bit too dry to quite come together. Let this sit for thirty minutes. This supposedly helps break down some of the gluten, which makes it easier for it to reform itself in a grid.

Mix in the preferment and the salt. With your hands, combine everything and start kneading. It will be really sticky at first, but don't give up and don't add any flour. After a few minutes of kneading it should start to feel a lot less wet. Knead it for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, after which the dough should be pretty and smooth. (I might even try to make the dough a little bit wetter next time.) Form a ball, put it down, and cover.

Now you want to let the dough rise. Instead of punching down the dough at any point, which the experts seem to frown upon, do something called turning: pick up the dough, gently stretch it out a little bit, then make a ball by folding the four sides up towards the center. Then flip the dough over and put it back down. After you've done this, the dough will magically seem smoother and more dough-like, more capable of stretching without tearing. I think it's ideal to do this a three or four times as the dough rises, but I'm always away when this is happening, so instead I usually just do it once at the beginning, 15-30 minutes after I stopped kneading and started to let the dough rise. You could also try doing it at the end, thirty minutes before you want to shape the dough.

Dough that has risen.

Step 3

How long you let the dough rise probably depends on the temperature. My best loaf happened when I kneaded in the morning, let the dough rise during the day, and baked it in the evening. So, try something like eight hours of rising, maybe more if your apartment is colder than 68 degrees and less if it's warmer. But you should probably just do whatever is convenient for you, since that's what I did, and it seems to work okay.

When you're done with the rise, cut the ball of dough in half. Put half in the fridge, unless you want to bake a huge amount of bread, and form the other half into a ball. Let this sit for an hour, and while your dough is resting, turn your oven to 450 degrees and put a dutch oven in to heat up for 20 or 30 minutes. When you're ready to bake the bread, take the dutch oven out and sprinkle it with coarse corn meal. Form the loaf into a ball and put it in. Sprinkle flour on top, and slash very shallowly with a knife in whatever pattern you'd like. Bake with the lid on for 35 minutes, and then off for 15-20 minutes. Remove the bread and let cool.