Canning Bonanza

I thought I'd devote a bit of blog space to canning, which is currently a major activity in rural Bulgaria. Many fresh vegetables are just not available period here in the winter time (unlike the U.S. where you can always get tomatoes, even if they are overpriced, mealy and flavorless in January). In fact, I've heard that in some remote villages they simply run out of things as basic as potatoes in late winter. Of course there are commercially canned items available for purchase (which I will likely become all to familiar with when I move out to my permanent site in October), but my host family seems to be very proud of THEIR homemade items (with good reason).

My host family has a very productive garden and some fruit trees as well. They keep any glass jar that they buy at the store, for use in canning. They have a large canning "cauldron" in the back yard that they light a fire under to boil the jars. The canning cauldron is located next to the rakia still which deserves its own entry. Canned items so far include: tomatoes with parsley, "compote" which is large chunks of fruit with simple syrup and "lutenitsa" a BG version of ketchup that included peppers and carrots as well as tomato (I'm a huge fan). All the adults helped out, turning their outdoor kitchen into a small scale factory.

In general household chores here are much more time consuming. It also seems to be a point of pride among Bulgarian (particularly rural BG) homemakers. For example, the wash cannot simply be hung; in our region of Bulgaria, the wash is hung sorted by size AND color. Or furthermore, my host mother baked a cake today. It had two layers (one vanilla, one chocolate) which she then cut and switched into bulls eye patterns to create and alternating checker pattern when the cake was cut. She poured simple syrup over the cake to soak in, topped it with homemade butter cream frosting, sprinkles and thinly sliced peach wedges. I assumed the cake might be for a party, but no, it was dessert for lunch, cut into literally minutes after it was finished!