Bulgaria with Noodles

Yes, you should be very careful when you pick wild mushrooms, whether in Bulgaria or anywhere else. You should be even more careful when you cook and eat them. They were very tasty, with a lot more flavour than the standard (and rather dull) ones you buy in the shops.  About an hour or so after lunch, I started to have a bit of a tummy ache and then Irena came downstairs and she said that she had been sick. As you can imagine, this was not good news and I started to feel a bit worse. By about five o'clock, I had also started vomiting and Irena was in a very bad way, shaking and hardly able to stand up. The ambulance was pretty quick, considering that it came all of the way from Veliko Tarnovo. The medic who came with the ambulance driver seemed to know his stuff and straight away he gave us both an injection and some horrible black liquid to drink. It mostly seemed to be a mixture of charcoal and water. Irena went to the hospital in the ambulance, while I drove our car, at breaknec...

The woodburner in our sitting room is a ravenous beast, gobbling two huge buckets of logs every twenty-four hours. The good news, I suppose, is that the ash is meant to be very good fertilizer for the garden. We have heavy clay soil, so lots of ash should make things a bit easier next Spring. Was it really a sign that Winter is on its way? Or was it really a last hurrah for Autumn? Well, a few days ago, Irena roped me into another mushroom-hunting expedition, so we set off with our bags and little knives. We collected about 4 kilos of mushrooms and I was delighted with one huge specimen, about the size of a loaf of bread. When I first saw it growing in the field, I thought that it must be a big stone. Most of the mushrooms we collected will be marinated, but some were boiled and then fried for lunch. The secret is to be very careful when collecting your wild mushrooms. Irena always tells me that each year, whole families in Russia are poisoned after eating the wrong species of mushroo...