Kind And Generous Bulgarian Baba

Baba is of the old Bulgarian school and a very funny person with it. However, she does get stressed out at the smallest of things. A hole in a jumper is a major problem and she's on it with repairs even before you can take the jumper off! Just missing a phone call sends here into a panic worrying that the call was the utmost importance. She will spend the next 20 minutes trying to figure out who it was and what they want question everyone until the mystery caller that was missed is solved.

Now 85 years of age, she is full of aches and pains with the colder weather during night now upon us this mid November. Even with the aches, she never attempts to put the newly installed air-conditioning system on when she is at home on her own.

There are two reason for this, the main one is, she’d rather stay cold than use up the electric, she often goes to bed at 7:00 before the system was installed to save energy. The other reason is that she just can’t understand the air conditioning controls. Even though the on/off button is the biggest and the only one coloured pink. No matter how many times we try to teach her, it goes in one ear and out the other.

The other day she had us all in stitches with a typical incident. She said that lunchtime she had lost two teeth; one fell in her bean soup she was eating and other she accidentally ate. That was it! The story was a two liner. The funny thing was that we all couldn’t understand how on earth you could lose teeth eating soup! She repeated the story time and time again and it remained as funny each time as she herself had trouble telling it from the fits of giggling.

Baba always puts other people before herself, even if she was starving, she would make sure others ate before her. She sneaks out of the house without telling anyone sometimes and brings back basic food such as bread bought on her measly pension. She knows we usually shop everyday after work, but feels that she has to contribute something to the dinner table. That’s Baba; they just don’t make people like this anymore - even in Bulgaria. Looking after here is our duty in the family house, but it really is a case of her looking after us.

So what is the point of this particular blog?

Bulgaria is changing so fast that it has left many behind, Baba is one of those people. She just doesn’t know what has hit here with the changes over the last ten years. It is now an unfamiliar world she is living in, along with many others of her generation. It becomes even more unfamiliar to her as each day goes by, I see that very clearly.

Food from a Bulgarian Baba

I live with Baba now during the day. Galia is out to work early ‘till late and I am writing with Baba Mama doing her busy woman about the house trick everyday.

She is 84 and doesn’t stop going back and forth from chores in the kitchen to sweeping the yard, watering the garden, putting the washing out. She starts at 7:00 in the morning and doesn’t stop until bedtime.

There is a rest at around 1:00 – 2:00 where she gets her head down for a little snooze but that’s where it ends. Even when she is sitting down her hands are busy sewing, knitting or repairing something.

What Baba can’t understand is why I don’t slow down and eat and sleep every couple of hours. She doesn’t understand that a Bulgarian man is very different to a Englishman. I always remember going back nearly tow years ago when she saw me vacuuming the front room…… she was in tears as she had never seen anything like it in her 80 odd years in Bulgaria.

I know now that every time the clock goes past midday she pokes her head around the corner of the kitchen area where I work and tell me I’m hungry. To be fair I start work at 8:00 after having given Galia a lift to work so she knows that a fair morning work has been done at this point.

The first week this routine came into play I Baba didn’t get any sleep, she was too shy and humble to tell me that her sleeping sofa was being occupied by my posterior working on the laptop. Little did I know that I was in the way of her routine until Galia found out and told me one evening. Now I move into another room for the rest of the day to give her a well earned forty-winks but not before she has prepared me food and drink whether I want it or not.

Now Baba is a tried and tested cook and there isn’t anything she prepares that isn’t home cooked and natural. Base ingredients all from the market or from my own Skalitsa farm. She is a superb cook and I cannot ever remember not liking anything she has prepared.

There is a little wariness about how long the food it kept as Baba always used the big pot to make lots – it is a question of economic cooking energy wise. There has been food, meat at that, which has been standing around for 4 or 5 days. This used to worry me immensely at first – is it my own British standards that have brainwashed me into thinking that everything has be eaten with two days or you die fo food poisoning? Yes I think it is, a ploy by global food producers to make you buy more putting the fear of God into you if you didn’t! I digress….

Baba totters along to prepare the food and she now has come to accept that a microwave we bought for her last year has its uses. It took her almost a year to the day to come to terms and understand what she can and can’t put in it and that was from experience not instruction! Now she can’t get enough of it but all she has learnt is how to cook pop corn in it! The little bottle gas stove is still used religiously as before and used for the original cooking using the big pot.

Today for the third day running and the fifth meal we had chicken, bean and potato stew and never in a million years would I get bored with that. The bones as after ever each meal is given to Alex the dog, our neighbour’s doorbell.

Each day Baba lays the table and never a day goes by where raw garlic, fresh bread and green salad is positioned next to the main meal. The most delicious combination and compliment to any meal. Drink accompaniment is Ayran made from yoghurt made in Skalitsa from my neighbour’s fresh cow milk. Baba loves Ayran along with all three generations of family living here.

Spoilt? Yes but in this day and age of fast food how lucky am I to get traditional food derved up the most respectful and experienced cook. Something now she is handing down to me so long may it continue to live on.

Baba has such a variety of cooking skills and recipes that now after a while of Bulgarian routine the sleeping habit after lunchtime meals is beginning to have an affect on me. A lie down after her fantastic food is something that just seems so natural to do. Unlike before where no break and no food was taken, a habit picked up from England now finally beginning to be laid to rest.