Food & recipes
How we make cider
I say ‘we’ but this is mostly an annual Rob endeavour. I help out with the picking and chopping of apples, then I entirely check out of the process until it’s time to drink the stuff. Writing this post therefore meant shaking the details out of Rob’s head via a...
Mushroom season
It’s been a dry month, with hardly any of the afternoon storms that usually punctuate June. Which is great. The garden has enjoyed the abundant heat and sunshine. But it’s not so great for picking mushrooms. Every time we’ve been mushroom hunting this season the...
What to sling on the barbecue this summer
Whiplash-inducing turnaround, as per usual, on this blog. Last time moaning about the unseasonably cold April, and this time telling you to fire up the barbecue. Because SUMMER IS HERE, folks. We’ve had a couple of weekends where it’s been warm enough to cook and...
Sexy Paul. Also, more bread
Right, so I caught a bit of that Beatles documentary Get Back and I have FEELINGS on the matter. Confusing, sometimes sexual feelings. Mostly about Paul McCartney. Which is very weird because, for me, Paul McCartney has always fallen into the same category as Bono...
Supermarket excitement, what to eat this winter
Very exciting news from our corner of Bulgaria: we’ve now got a Fantastico supermarket near us. I say ‘near’, it’s a 50-mile round trip. But that’s as close as any big supermarkets get for us. (There’s a small T-Market in our nearest town, about 10 miles away,...
Misadventures in sourdough
I have a habit of adopting trends several years after everyone else. It’s like an in-built aversion to doing anything popular at the time that it’s popular. For some reason, I wait until the popular thing has eventually tipped over into cliché and everyone’s...
‘But cheese’ … a cosy chat about being vegan
A LOT of people asked me about veganism when I was back home. And the prevailing sentiment was, ‘I could never give up cheese’. Believe me, I get it. I was the same. We’d watch all those documentaries about the horrors of factory farming and I’d say ‘We should go...
Cluster sowing, beetroot recipes
Always one for trying something new (*cough* bullshit *cough*) I did something a bit different with my beetroot this year. I tried the ‘multi-sowing’ (cluster-sowing) method espoused by Charles Dowding, the guy who made no dig gardening famous. If any form of...
13 squash recipes everyone should have up their sleeve
I realise this post would have been more timely back in the autumn, when squash and pumpkin were everywhere in the shops. But if you grow your own squash, as we do, you’ll still have loads left from the autumn (cured properly in a sunny, warm spot squash will keep...
A lovely, sticky ginger cake for you (vegan, but you’d never know it)
As someone who’s constantly obsessed with my next meal, I’m still surprised how much I’ve focused in on food during this whole pandemic thing. Which is partly why I’m enjoying Instagram so much. (If you aren’t yet following me, I’m @auntie_bulgaria. I share lots of...
Homemade liqueurs. Birthday snow
The snow has finally returned to Bulgaria. Which is handy because I was getting really cheesed off with all that brownness. Brown trees. Brown muddy lanes. Brown garden. Brown paw prints all over the kitchen floor. Brown village river (it’s been raining a lot,...
How to make mekitsi
The first time we ate mekitsi, we were in the Rodopi mountains, staying in a small family hotel. Every morning the cook would bring out a plate piled with three or four large mekitsi at a time. There would be a brief but dignified scrum among the few guests...