And life Moves On

Well finally the grip has diminished to just feeling under the norm. A bit tired, a bit listless & a bit headachy on occasion. Not bad. I reckon its all this sun we are having. Yes the sun has come back home, & ohhh what a wonderful relief it is to have it back in play. I know its proven to lift mental health & in turn our spirits & boy its soooo obvious! I put feeling better down to the turn in the weather. It was so cold & depressing before, no sign of sun for over a week. The frost didn't go & was there all day, every day for a week. When the sun came out it was like it was raining, you could hear the frost falling to the ground & feel it. I stood hanging washing on the line & was befuddled by the experience, doesn't take a lot really :-D
The sound of chainsaws have taken the place of the woodpecker, the trundle of the wood delivery has replaced the sound of bird song & the smell of the village is now of wood burners, which is nice actually.
Nigel is spending every day cutting up the beams & wood pile & storing it all in the barn. Its lovely & dry, mainly, but a bit damp on the outside, so it will dry out nicely in the barn.

This is about half of the wood chopped, plenty more where this came from!

The pile is growing day by day & its great to see it all as it gives a good indication to how long we will be nice & warm. No really I love to see it all stacked up Its a bit like my mum & her store cupboard I would guess, it's our winter store & we can tell as we go along if we need to buy any more. We have so much kindling (we use tree branches) wood, its amazing how until you live here you just cant understand the storage space needed for the winter heating alone. We have some stone built pig houses & use one of them to store the kindling in to keep it nice & dry & seasoned.

Look at that sky, no that is not now, these are the stone houses that now two dog bedrooms & kindling store.

There is nothing worse than a fire that won't light on a winter morning & the kindling is a big part of that. We have over the spring/summer been saving every scrap of paper & cardboard, also for lighting the fire. These we store in wicker baskets, in the cellar during the summer. It sounds like a right palava but it really isn't. Do you remember when you were young, did you have an open  fire? Thankfully we did so we had some memory of what to do!
We have really needed the fire lately. The weather was quite nasty. It looked like the sky had fallen in & the hard frost we awoke to did not diminish as the day wore on. We had a week of this It was like a not so wonderful, winter wonderland.

Everything stayed white for a week

 I wonder at the storage space needed for people with livestock! It's easy to see why there are so many buildings & barn space. We have no livestock, as its an expensive & very time consuming past time, but I know many expats who do & wow good for them but its not for me.  I am just too naturally lazy to be getting up at some God awful time in winter snow to feed them & clean out animal houses. Lugging about hay, straw feeds etc is not my forte so I think it's brilliant that people do but I am far too old to start now! I do many times wish we had discovered this 15 yrs ago, then maybe we would have been pig, lamb, duck & turkey farmers but the timing is well off for us. We will continue to grow what we can & learn what we can, but we will never be as our Bulgarian friends!
 The surrounding countryside is really beautiful again. All the crop areas have been ploughed & flattened (I don't know the correct way of saying this) & all around the rich brown earth is a rich green, flanked by trees that are now barren of leaves giving us free views of the hills, rocks & mountains along with the trees that are in differing stages of loss, giving us red, gold, yellows & browns. When the sun is shining through the trees the gold's shine & the reds glow its truly gorgeous. There are still many green trees too, we have lots of pine trees here, all sorts too, they keep the greenery in Bulgaria in the depths of winter when all else looks dead. I love them & class ourselves as very fortunate to have a huge one in the front of our property. We also have a completely different one at another of our properties round the corner so I get to collect lots of pine cones. Walking round the village there are many & driving through the country lanes we pass forests of them in many different stages of growth. I really want to go get a real tree for Christmas but two things stop me. Firstly, I am not sure if it is illegal to do this, I hear mixed messages about it. Some say its ok others say prison! Second I love them growing in their natural environment, if we did cut one down & adorn it for a couple of weeks it will then just be fire wood!

So I guess we will drag out our fake tree for however long it takes us to be able to afford the adornments for our own very large & majestic pine which one day will light up our home, I can't wait but I wonder what the neighbours will say ?
The weather has warmed up a lot with long sunny days again, well as long as a November day can be. The dogs are out most of the day sunbathing & playing chase, instead of in front of the fire. They all pile in at tea time.
I have been cooking up the pears this last week, upside down cake & still practicing with the pastry :-)
Sausage rolls for Christmas are a must as far as I am concerned so I need to find the perfect wrapping for them. I have managed to find sausage meat & a mix that I liked now I am onto the next experiment to get the right roll. I realise this is very English of me, but some things are difficult to let go off :-) These may be a thing I don't eat all year but are a must for a Christmas fuzzy memory.

Overheating, Jam making in the garden & Booze, Booze, Booze

My goodness the weather has taken a turn for the better, or worse depending on an individuals tolerance to heat! Personally I love it but it makes doing anything at all very difficult! Oh it's such a hard life;D Nigel spends a couple of hours every day naked, cooling off in the pool or relaxing by it hahaha, mind you most of the day is spent working very hard as everything he does is physical & in this heat he is entitled ;D;D;D

Plums, plums, plums, plums, plums, plums, plums! Its plum season here, the small damson type. three types at the moment but not the victoria plummy purple plum just yet. We have small red/blush plums, small white plums & even smaller red plums in our garden & all around the village. Nigel has been picking the plums from our property every day 2.5 - 5 kilo a day, with still more to harvest :)

We have also been scrumping from the village, got 14 kilo's yesterday, as I am making lots of plum brandy, schnapps & liqueur, yummy :) We make our own wine every year from our small vinyard & off course after the wine we develop mush into Rakia.

Slivovitsa ( Slee-vo-vee-tsah) fermenting process.

 I have also been making the jam every day which has been difficult in this heat with temps in the evening of 30c, forget making anything in the day! Nige has fixed me up an outside cooking area with our camping gas cooker,, as the kitchen is unbearable while cooking now even with the door open & the extractor hood & room fan on! I have managed to cook dinner & quite a few batches of said jam out there.
I have turned to making the booze now though as we have so many gallons of home made Rakia (Bulgarian brandy) which has matured beautifully :) We get great compliments from Bulgarians, Russians & English. We even sent some to England to a Rakia loving friend & he loved it saying it was the best he had tasted & he has only had bought over the counter Rakia's, So a real compliment. As we will be brewing the next batch in September/October, I decided to make some flavoured brandies & liqueurs from it & also have kirsch maturing away :)  Nigel thinks I am mad as we very rarely drink, never just on our own & very little when entertaining (mind you we don't need much Rakia) but I love the making of it. Same with the wine we have gallons coming out of our ears but its gorgeous now as it has matured & people really enjoy it, I also use some in cooking :)

Next on my list is plum muffins & I have an idea for a new batch so if they are successful I will be blogging it in my food blog, http://www.bulgarianvillagerecipes/ the link is down the side of this blog page :D
We are visiting friends on Friday & I will be making some for them, I hope they turn out ok but I do have a standby trusted recipe to make too, just in case but I am sure they won't mind being my guinepig's :D
We popped in to meet Karen who owns the cave book store, in Veliko Tarnovo, last week. Its a great shop where we English speakers can buy books we can read. Obviously we are starved of reading matter here as the shops are not going to sell English speaking books, Although saying that I did actually find a Martina Cole book a couple of years ago along with a small handful of other books in a book  shop in VT, but this is a real rarity. Having a place we can go & find a new book is great, they also sell some at a car boot that is held once a month, near Veliko Tarnovo. I am blessed with a full book load at the moment though as I bought a sack full of them off Ebay & Nigel drove them back when he came home after spending 6 months working in UK last year :)
Karen was telling Nigel about talking books & Nigel, who has only read three books in his life, has now gone on the rampage looking for books to download! First his MP3 player broke, then his Clio has a faulty memory card or something, not a happy man.......Until he remembered my Clie. So now he has some 6 books downloaded & is currently listening to A Christmas Carol :D Bless him, he is such a techie It appeals to his nature, whereas I love books & need to own something I can hold & read myself.
So village life here now is all about the Fruit & veg tending it, harvesting it & quickly preserving it. For me that is about it but for villagers its a different matter as they grow enough food to see them through the winter. Our friend Yovo has a thousand Tomato plants to our 100!!!!!!! His day starts at 5am tending his crops & animals & finishes at 9pm after a 2 hour  siesta at lunch time. He has goats chickens & turkeys. He used to have sheep & Pigs but he had someone break in & steal them so he sticks to breeding & eating his goats now! A lot of ex pats also have animals usually Pigs, donkeys & almost everyone has chickens. A lot have horses, if you are a horse lover its the perfect fit here as your property would have room & the horses need love & people to care for them. We are sticking to domestic animals :) well we say domestic they are free'er than that, 5 cats & 4 dogs all dogs are rescued. We moved here with just 1 cat, then was adopted before we walked through the gate on arrival from th UK :) Saskia, as we named her, then proceeded to get pregnant & produced 3 kittens who are now 2 yrs old. Enough is enough I say hahaha No chickens for me as there is no way I want to traipse down to the chicken houses in 3' snow to clean & feed them, Nope!!!!