Homegrown and hot!

How lucky we feel, not only did we enjoy a wonderful holiday again in Bulgaria with plenty of sunshine, we were also able to embark on a slice of Bulgarian village life by harvesting our gardens treasures.

Trees are made to be climbed by all little boys and our trees in Bulgaria just seem to be the best for this and even better when plums can be picked at the same time! Molly and I then chopped and stoned these tasty items and made jam with them, we finally could return something to our neighbour to thank him for all his work, even if it was just a jar of jam. What else do you give a man who is totally self sufficient and has absolutely no need for anything. Though the girls did suggest we give him a leather tankard for his rakia, but even for him I think a pint of this very strong plum brandy might be a little too much. The plums that littered the ground were then collected on his instruction and placed in a bucket where we were taken to his cellar to empty the contents into a huge drum in which the lethal brew of his next batch of homemade rakia was fermenting!




Unfortunately the very same trees we delighted in by day, the local wildlife played in by night. Our first experience of this, left my mum terrified that all night, all she could here was a bear walking around on our roof! We reasoned with her that it was very probably a cat that had jumped onto the roof from the over hanging pear tree.
Whatever it is visits us every year and each year keeps us awake with its scampering around, but hey presto! this year we found out it is called a belka and is larger than a squirrel and is harmless, they just get into the roof space in order to find bird eggs in the nests. It is all very well knowing what it is but it still keeps you awake half the night! so following a particularly disturbed night, the evening we started to hear them again we took the matter into our own hands and started to bash the ceiling with a broom very loudly. The noise stopped and the children shouted "mum we've seen them" and sure enough in the trees were three sets of eyes looking at us, the children went out to chase them out of the trees and they turned out to be something similar to a polecat.
So our belkas had harvested their eggs from our roof space and thankfully moved onto another house in the village using the trees as their exit route as well as the path between the tomato vines, what a relief.

That left us to complete our harvest with the tomatoes and peppers our neighbour had kindly planted for us. The only problem was what to do with the huge and abundant amount of tomato's we had now picked. Molly's answer was to make bruschetta for breakfast every morning for whom ever fancied it. The beautifully tactile wooden chopping boards that we sell at THB would do a fantastic job with this delicious snack. In honour of Molly's taciturn efforts to eat as many tomatoes as she possibly can during the holiday I will write out her very own bruschetta recipe.










One loaf of uncut bread
tomatoes
garlic
olive oil
salt

Slice the bread and toast.
Chop the tomatoes into small pieces
Rub a clove of garlic over each slice.
Drizzle some oil over the top.
Place the tomatoes on top with another small drizzle of oil.
Eat straight away or place under the grill briefly.

A truly delicious holiday breakfast experience!

Molly's dad came up with another idea," how about some tomato soup"?,It was the best tomato soup we had ever tasted. The village children who joined us for lunch that day, thought we had gone completely crazy drinking hot soup for lunch when it was 35degrees outside, nonetheless all bowls were empty.

I just stoically made tons of the local 'shopska' salad and we ate it with every meal. This involves mixing chopped tomatoes, cucumber,onion and peppers in a bowl topped with grated serena cheese, which is a white cheese similar to feta that can only be found in Bulgaria. Pasta sauce was another meal we made up with our produce though this was not quite as exotic as the gourmet sauces that we now stock. If you haven't been lucky enough to go away this year these sauces would certainly help to take you to some exotic place during your mealtime.

It wasn't until I started to write this post that I realised how important the trees in our garden have become to us during our holiday. The pear tree holds the hammock, the swing and the rope ladder every year and all the local children come around to play. Nature and natural products play such an important part in our children's lives and it is experience with these that makes the biggest impressions on our memories. How many young people reminisce about a particular play station game they played when they were young, I am sure their most strong memory would be one of climbing trees or baking cakes even if these were done far less often than playing on the wii!

Happy Campers

My two wonderful daughters successfully (despite alot of heartache beforehand) carried out a 30 mile hike over 3 days with their school this week. The trouble with this was that this then obviously led to the camping bug for no.1 daughter! I said they could have a treat as my way of saying well done, Ellen chose to hit the shops and bought herself a dress, Molly on the other hand decided she wanted the whole family to camp out in the garden!!! ( why did I offer such an open ended treat- lesson learnt!)

Toby having also just returned from a camping trip with his dad and the beavers thought this was a fantastic idea, a chance to reconstruct the full English breakfast that was the highlight of his trip as well as the abseiling of course! We actually don't own a tent but this was no problem because their Uncle had loaned them a 4 man tent which according to him would easily fit 6 in. Why do little things like my brother being prone to exaggeration not dawn on me until the deed is done. The tent was in fact a 3 man and would have been hard pushed to fit much more than that in, but a promise is a promise so we proceed to squeeze into the tent. The girls thought the tent looked very cosy I thought a night light would have been good but the battery on Molly's sun jar was not charged, how lovely it might have looked if we had the new pink sun jar!! I haven't let on to the girls yet that we now have pink ones!! They both have the Bill Brown cotton sleeping bags in pink stripe which was met with a look of disbelief from the boys at their school whilst camping, even their teacher (whom is male!) was unsure they would be warm enough, but we proved them wrong, maybe next year girls we will add the sun jar and see what the boys think about that!!

I myself have definitely got my eye on the new Bill Brown sleeping bags that have just come in , they look like vintage eiderdowns but zip up into sleeping bags very, very stylish.

We had a yummy BBQ for dinner and then settled down to a board game in our new home. The problem arose when it came to bed time, what do we do with Shadow the dog?, If we left him out he would bark at anything that went past all night and he certainly was not going to fit in with us, so I attempted to put him in the house. After a loud barking session I conceded to go inside to settle him, after a few minutes I attempted to fool shadow into thinking I was going to bed and sneaked out to regain my place in the tent!! Oh dear everyone was fast asleep, spread eagle across the tent with not the tiniest of space for me to attempt to lie in, so there was nothing for it , I went back inside and had a lovely nights sleep in my bed!!!

As we sat outside our tent in the morning eating our full English breakfast cooked by Molly and Andy on the BBQ, it occurred to me we were not the only ones doing this because Glastonbury was about to start in full swing. Apparently we had a customer buy a shewee for that very event! Another vital piece of festival kit has to be the Eco friendly disposable picnic sets, they are fully biodegradable but can be washed up a few times before the need to dispose of them, the cup is even large enough to hold half a lager or a large coffee depending on how you are feeling at the time.

On Sunday we were invited to a village BBQ, in which we were asked to bring a pudding, so I whizzed over to the next village to pick up some strawberries and cream to make a pavlova, whilst in the shop we bumped into 6 other people from the village all of whom had popped in to pick up ingredients for their pudding, it was quite comical. Whilst there the strawberries were on offer so I decided now was as good a time as any to make some jam. Consequently I chose the hottest day of the year so far to commence my jam making. A friend had made some beautiful strawberry and rose petal jam last year and I really wanted to give it a try this year. The recipe comes from a Country Living magazine from a couple of years ago.

Strawberry and Rose petal Jam

Ingredients

6 unsprayed scented red or pink roses

1.25kg strawberries

800g jam sugar

juice of 1 lemon

2tbsp rose water

Place a saucer in the freezer. Wash and dry jam jars and place on a baking tray in a low oven to sterilise.

Remove the petals from the roses and cut off the bitter white base( I did this with scissors quite easily) rinse in cold water.

Hull and halve the strawberries and place in a preserving pan with the sugar to dissolve slowly, stirring frequently so the sugar does not burn.

Once dissolved, increase heat and bring the jam to the boil. Remove any froth that forms with a large spoon. Boil quite fast over medium heat for about 20 minutes, stirring from time to time.

Place a tsp of jam onto your chilled saucer and leave for 30 seconds. If it wrinkles when pushed with your finger, the jam is ready.If not,continue to cook ad test every 3-4 minutes.

Once jam has reached setting point add the lemon juice,rose water and petals and cook for a further 2-3 minutes.

Pour the jam into jars that have been sterilised and then set them aside to cool before labelling

I had a lovely morning making this recipe, I had saved some jars already but otherwise I could have used the storage jars that we sell at the shop, the lids come in two colours duck egg blue or cream . I have a large one at the moment that I keep my vanilla sugar in. I put the empty vanilla pod that I had used at the weekend to make a vanilla creme for my pavlova into the jar with some caster sugar and already I only have to lift off the lid and the aroma of vanilla is amazing.

As you can see from this photo I will now have plenty of jam to have with my toast and mug of tea drunk from my new ladybird party mug, which of course is pink and makes me smile every time I drink from it!!