February fun

We've forgotten to mention that somewhere in the last couple of months we replaced the lights over the kitchen sink. There were two "open basket" looking things that looked a bit clunky because they were hung too high and too close to the wall. There are now three lamps, mounted further from the wall and hanging further down. The windows can still be opened. Carefully.

In other kitchen news this month, we got a new refrigerator. (We'll spare you the photo.) The one we got just before moving hasn't been working well, and we decided even though it's less than seven years old, it had done its service. The new one we choose is slightly bigger and that necessitated removing the bottom of the two short cabinets over the fridge. 

We've been to a couple of concerts this month (violon sonatas and a string quartet), but our fun outing was a visit to three mills along the river Bandiat on Open Mill (Moulins Vivants) day. We visited one old mill in Chazelles that is used as a microbrewery and had little tour of the brewery process. Neither of us being big beer drinkers, we didn't wait for a sample (it was crowded), but we might visit in the summer, when we can sit outside to sip. This was in a pretty location along the river, just across from the 13C church. We walked around to see the church and found the façade and interior rather plain, but the view of the church from the mill across the river was quite nice.

The next two mills we visited, another in Chazelles and one in St Germain de Montbron, are active mills, making flours and nut oils. The one in St Germain had its bread oven fired up and we bought some of the freshly made bread, a walnut bread and a pain ordinaire. The most interesting part of these visits was seeing many parts of the process of making walnut oil. The ground nuts are first toasted, constantly stirred, on a large cast iron griddle.

The toasted "mash" is then put into a cast iron form, topped with weights, and then pressed, first by manually turning the wheel, then by inserting a long pole and using that to turn, finally by inserting an even longer pole attached to a winch across the room. (Unfortunately, the video of that part didn't "take".) Notice the oil pouring from the form into the bucket.

February hasn't been terribly cold, but gray and damp. Spring is starting to spring, though, and we look forward to some sunny days in the next weeks.