It's a Northern Thing

Pease pudding that is! A favourite of many people from the North of the UK and brilliant with ham. Easy to make and tastes just the way I remember it from my childhood when my grandma used to make it. So here's the recipe, of course all the ingredients can be found in Bulgaria

• 250g split yellow peas
• 750ml bacon stock, you can use shop bought stock cubes (or OXO) but homemade bacon or pork stock improves the taste so much.
• salt and pepper to taste.

 You can soak the split yellow peas overnight but I find this isn't really necessary.

• preheat oven to 150C, 300F or gas mark 2.
• Place split peas and enough stock to cover the peas (they will swell during cooking) in an ovenproof dish, season and cook for up to 1 hour, adding more stock if necessary and checking every 15 minutes. 
• Once the peas have started to disintegrate remove from oven.
• Top up with any leftover stock and mash or blend with a liquidiser.
• Leave to cool and chill in fridge or if you prefer eat it hot!

Tip - homemade stock is easy to make, simply boil any bones or leftover meat for at least 1 hour with seasoning, then remove meat. For pease pudding you can leave small pieces of meat in the stock, or if using packaged stock simply cut up pieces of ham/bacon and add them to the pease pudding as it cools.

No Complaints Here :)

I can honestly say I've really enjoyed the last week. The weather here has been fantastic, my garden is producing and we have some wonderful friends around us that make life in Bulgaria even better. What more can we ask for?

Some people want to win the lottery, others want the latest gadgets etc but we're happy with life. It may not be everyon'e cup of tea living in rural Bulgaria, but I still say it's the best move we ever made. Yes, it's not perfect but I seriously doubt that a perfect place exists.

I'm still missing the kids and guess I always will. This week is also the 11th anniversary of my youngest sisters death and what would have been her 30th birthday so a bit of sadness and memories going on, but onwards and upwards as they say. I was very lucky to have her a sister and will never forget her. Anniversaries and birthdays of loved ones can be hard when we're so far away. Even the postal system here isn't very reliable so now I tend to keep in touch more with facebook etc.

We have people staying with us at the moment, they're house hunting so are trekking around the area with various estate agents looking for something that says "Home" to them. I really hope they find what they're looking for, but if not I may know a few properties in their budget so we'll see what happens.

Temperatures are set to rise again by the end of the wek so the garden will need more watering, but I'm happy with the way things are growing. We will hopefully have our first WWoof volunteers arriving soon and i'm looking forward to having some help with things. We might even get the paddock fence done! or at least the straw bales stacked away for winter. Either way it should be fun :)