About Sofya
Hello and welcome The Girls’ Guide to Guns and Butter. My name is Sofya and I am a 32-year-old, stay-at-home mom of three, living my American Dream in the rolling hills of the rural Driftless Wisconsin.
A recent immigrant to this country, I was born in Azerbaijan, one of the southernmost republics of the Soviet Union, wedged between Russia and Iran on the Western coast of the Caspian Sea.
My first language is Russian, but when I was 17, I decided to teach myself English. Less than a year later, I won a full scholarship to the American University in Bulgaria, or AUBG – an American-style liberal arts college with English as the sole language of instruction.
While I found it really difficult to be going to school in English and to adapt to a completely foreign educational model, I graduated with an Outstanding Achievement Award in English, although I strongly suspect that this had more to do with the fact that English majors were few and far between than with any real achievement of mine. So that’s how my English got to be so good.
Halfway through college, purely by chance, I found myself spending two weeks at an extremely isolated rural resort in the Bulgarian Rila mountains with a few of my fellow students.
Having grown up in a multimillion, metropolitan Azerbaijani capital, I had never seen countryside or forest or anything of the kind prior to that experience. It was on that trip that I fell in love hard with the peace and the natural beauty of the country and knew that this was where I belonged.
A mere year later, I would meet a 21-year old Wisconsin farm boy who transferred to AUBG after two years at Deep Springs College – an isolated, academically elite, all-male school on a cattle ranch in California’s high desert. We ran into each other at the cafeteria where I would help him buy a ham sandwich in Bulgarian. Within the first five minutes of conversation, I told him I wanted to live in a small, rural town, and he told me he came from one. Within the next five, I imagined us married and living on a farm raising kids and animals.
Ten years later…
Our ten-acre ridgetop farm is located on the edge of Viroqua, Wisconsin, a home to organic agriculture, a bustling food cooperative, and thriving Waldorf schools among other things.
Farming is more of a hobby for us, but it allows us to grow a large proportion of our food, including all meat and eggs, not to mention the fact that the country is a wonderful place for our kids to grow up.
I started this blog almost two years ago to share recipes and adventures in my then newly-found interest, deer hunting. I then expanded to include posts on homesteading, butchering, photography, and parenting.
Need help getting started? Here’s a sample of what I’m all about:
My Family
My Life in the Country
Homemade Lotion Recipe
Classic Russian Borscht
How to Make Yogurt at Home
Easiest-Ever No-Knead Bread
Best Chocolate Chip Cookies
Chicken Butchering 101
The Value of Killing Your Own Meat
How to Make Lacto-Fermented Dill Pickles
I Love Photography
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi, Sofya. LOVE your story of your life path. Very cute! Thanks for the lacto-bacillus cucumber recipe. Will try it when my cukes are ready. Found your recipe by searching for “black currant leaves” which I saw reference to as being used in Russia to cure cucumbers in the book, “Salt”. Our family way is with vinegar, fresh dill, celerey seed, and peppercorns (German-Jewish from Rhineland-Palatinate region).
Before reading the book (which is fascinating!), I hadn’t heard of the use of black currant leaves, oak leaves or cherry leaves. We have an abundance of the latter two trees on our property. I can try those. I just saw a cherry tree LADEN with ripe cherries kayaking yesterday. I was so surprised because I often see wild yellow, red and black raspberries and blackberries, that I pick with great gusto, but rarely see wild cherries growing on any of the cherry trees around.
Anyway, thanks for the post. The website I gave you is not a website, really. Just my first foray into blogging. I am on vacation and had the time to try my hand at it! What blog app do you use by the way? I like the interactiveness of it.
Tks.
Renee Cantori
Eaves for pickling
Renee recently posted..The Gunkhole Express
My blog is a self-hosted Wordpress blog – not wordpress.com. I am not sure what you mean by app because this is not the term usually applied here, but maybe you mean the “comment luv” plugin that allows people to share automatically from their own site? You need to have a self-hosted site to install these types of things.
Hi Sofya,
I love your recipes. Stumbled upon your writings in my quest towards healthy living.
Keep up the good work.
-Saravana Bharathi.
Hi Sofia, I came across your blog totally accidentally. As I was reading info about you, I realized there was a reason why I came across your blog
. I am a 35 year old stay at home mom with 4 kids. I moved from Baku in 1989. Lived in ny until moving to rural PA in 2010. In was first a shock for me to not have a store across the street from my house but now, I love living here! Thanks for the great recipes!
Oh funny. I made a deliberate choice to live in the isolation of the country because I love slow and quiet and would never live in any city again, however I am a mile away from the grocery store, and that’s CLOSE. There is no major shopping area in the nearby town of 4,000, like say a mall, which is great because those places fill me with great anger.
Hello Sofya, Thank you for your posts about maple syrup. My husband recently went to Canada and told us about a “boiled maple syrup taffy on the snow” he purchased, which sounded divine. He also fell in love with a horrid sounding dish called Poutine. My googling turns up recipes that call for gravy and cheese curds on top of fried potatoes. Even though I love him and his healthy heart, I’m thinking for a treat on his birthday I will surprise him and make him some. I’ve never seen cheese curds for sale in grocery stores here in St. Louis. Would you know how to make them?
Thank you for writing your blog. I thoroughly enjoy reading it.
Suzanne Langlois
Suzanne Langlois recently posted..Building a beehive
Hi Suzanne,
I often make maple snow taffy for my kids, and in case you haven’t stumbled upon this post, here’s the recipe: http://girlsguidetobutter.com/2010/02/maple-taffy-the-pioneer-treat/
I have never heard of that dish. Cheese curds are sold just about anywhere here in Wisconsin, but outside of Wisconsin, I couldn’t say. For this reason it had never crossed my mind to try making cheese curds at home, but a quick google search returned this link:
http://culturecheesemag.com/recipes/make_cheese/winter_2011/cheese_curds
I am a big fan of fried potatoes (french fries) and gravy – I make this dish where you top fries with a burger and then pour gravy over all. Delicious. I am big brown gravy expert, need a recipe?
Thank you for these great links, Sofya! I did indeed see your beautiful picture of maple snow taffy, and recipe. Although I’m tired of winter and happy spring is finally here, my kids are eager for next winter’s snow to try this out. I’m planning on trying it with honey, since I am a beekeeper. Will let you know if it works….
I must say, the smell of hot maple syrup, though, is beyond compare. (Honey doesn’t have a good aroma when heated.)
I will try this cheese curd recipe out. Thanks for the offer of a brown gravy receipe. I buy half a cow at a time, and the farmer gives me all the bones she has, so I make up a lot of gravy and freeze it. (My husband’s mother is English, and she always makes gravy with this horrendous bottled flavoring crud called Bisto. It’s his favorite, but I have limits, you know. I refuse to indulge that culinary part of his heritage.)
Thanks for the help, and for your great blog!
Suzanne Langlois recently posted..Building a beehive