[size=75:2xu4wj88]Sofia echo 16 April 2010

Spring in your step

With the main spring events behind us including an early Easter, I never get tired of the new season’s fresh leaves, fruit and vegetables. Bulgaria is famous for its produce of all kinds grown in the open air, not under glass or indoors. I include in that young lambs from April to June, the dairy herds that supply our world-renowned yoghurt industry, the wild mushrooms that are a specialty all of their own.

For me a special day in early May is the arrival of the first cherries, at 20 leva a kilo for a week, falling rapidly to a readily affordable price.

Hot on their heels come strawberries, then raspberries, and then at accelerating intervals local melons, delicious home grown salads and vegetables, and later mountains of watermelons. Fresh figs and other more exotic fruits follow soon after, with the first signs of autumn being flagged up by copious supplies of pumpkins. Tikvenik is my idea of seventh heaven!

I enjoy the big traditional fruit and vegetable markets, but it’s sad that the more pushy traders feel they have to spray much of the fruit and vegetables with gleaming wax polish that can hardly improve the taste.

I used to live close to Graf Ignatiev Street, and the stalls there combine great quality with excellent value. From 10 years ago when selecting your own items from the stand was verboten, it’s much more of a buyer’s market today. Most of all I like to buy from the small farmers’ (and gardeners’) stands on the pavement, whose produce tastes good and who really need the money: sadly, the municipality is trying to chase them away while failing to tackle much more serious issues all around us.

We’re also lucky in Bulgaria to have lovely fresh fish: trout from the clear mountain streams, best of all from around Devin;
many species from the Aegean Sea to the south;
and delicious all-year-round catches from our own Black Sea. Ample supplies are available either from the shops and markets in Sofia, or from the early morning fishermen’s markets at the seaside ports and resorts.

Reverting to yoghurt, it is great that the Japanese pay such respect to the spiritual home and birthplace of this originally Bulgarian invention of ours, which these days is enjoyed by billions of people around the globe. Regrettably, our southern friends and neighbours pay little regard to intellectual property, so that 75 per cent of the yoghurt sold in some western countries including the UK goes under the questionable banner of "
Greek Style"
.

I wish I could say with a hand on the heart that my diet is principally confined to these healthy options. Yes, I am tending more to a fruit, vegetable and salad regime, but such is the variety and irresistibility of Bulgarian cuisine that I do sometimes transgress into the territory of banitsa or banitchki (each one smaller, but total consumption greater), prime cuts of meat (when the family you’re with have baked a whole lamb for Easter, you can’t not eat it), rakiya (without which salads feel lonely), and the astonishing range and quality of Bulgarian wines.

That, of course, leads me to the well-developed "
eating out"
culture in Bulgaria. Great tradition of cuisine, excellent value most of the time, and a marvellous practice of no time limits on when you start or have to finish a meal, whether it’s breakfast, lunch or dinner: a southern European style of living of which I thoroughly approve, in contrast to the situation in France, the UK, the US and Switzerland to name but a few. I also welcome and use regularly the widespread home delivery system operated in Sofia, either by individual restaurants or through BG Menu.

In conclusion, if you can enjoy all these things in moderation, but especially more of the healthy ones and less of the naughty ones, and if you can also take lots of regular fresh air and exercise, and if you will even consider trying the many herbal and bio-organic based food supplements that are so widely available in our country, you can seriously improve your health and fitness and may even live longer.