We moved to the house for the summer in Aggtelek National Park with the help of Brian Scoffield. Brian was luckily on hand to celebrate his birthday and helped us move the 2 bikes and various other supplies to the countryside. We were also lucky to be able to borrow a car for the summer from our friend Gabi, which we named the "Napsugar Szeker/Sunshine Chariot." What can I say? It was paradise. It was the first time we had been able to use and enjoy the house for an extended period, which meant that we could also begin on some of our long-term gardening projects. The Brits will understand what I mean when I say it was an experience from The Good Life. Much of the time we just took guesses without the aid of books or the Internet and hoped for the best. We had great success with our parsley, sage, oregano, gladiolus, tulips, jacinth, cilanthro, parsnips, tomatoes, and small hot peppers. The onions never grew very large, but they are overpoweringly strong. Kata had seen a video of an old woman ("The Mulch Lady") that practiced non-interventionist gardening whereby she basically planted everything in mulch. One of her sucesses was covering budding potatoes in straw and just letting them be without even watering them. While our potato plants surprisingly grew and flowered, no new potatoes took root. The bugs seemed to really like the mint and basil, and these herbs did not fare so well.

We also cooked up a storm. I made two loafs of bread every week, and we bought homemade milk, túró and cheese from local producers. Along the way we made elderberry syrup (szőrp), mint syrup,  sage syrup, cherry syrup, lavender syrup (my favorite), chili in the cauldron (bogracs) by the campfire, spinach pancakes, carrot cake, ginger cookies (based on the recipe from Planet Kids last Christmas the cook was kind enough to share with Santa), turkey burgers, Jeroen's solyanka with our own kovaszos uborka, celery-potato soup, Dad's gazpacho, horseradish cream soup (first tasted in Poland this summer), grilled corn, eggplant cream, quesadillas, hummus, ganica (a kind of potato dish), aranygaluska borsodoval...

Our neighbor Sanyi also took us mushroom hunting once. We would have gone more often, but such a dry summer prevented mushroom development. Sanyi had promised to take us once before many years ago and told us to get up at 4am. We did, but he did not show up, so we have not trusted his reliability enough to try this again for a long time. He did turn up this time though, and we had a grand time picking keserű gomba. We picked a couple kilos and then spent a couple hours processing them. The bitter undersides and top have to be completely scraped out. The mushrooms then have to be boiled for a long time in salty water. We made stew (pörkölt) out of the first batch and froze the rest for later. Hopefully the autumn will give us more opportunities. In the meantime, the price for Sanyi's expertise was a trip to Bodvalenke's Dragon Festival to see the singer Stefano. More on that in the next installment...