I had butter on my bread yesterday evening. Adrian has not yet reacted to it. Yippee!

A busy day: it feels like these remaining days are my last chance to get things done at home.

Some more painting of the play house while Adrian slept. Playgroup. Supermarket. Went to the hardware store to see if I could borrow their fan deck of NCS colours. (Unfortunately he answer was no, because they’ve lost too many of those expensive decks, despite taking down folks’ names and numbers.) Weeded and dug through the top layer of soil in two of our planting boxes with strawberries.

Adrian has, in the last few days, started to demand solid food. Previously I’d just put him in his highchair and give him some food when I wanted to eat, so he could get used to the concept, have some fun, and we’d keep each other company. But now he has been fussy and I’ve gone through my checklist (sleep? boredom? breast? nappy?) and then offered him food, and seen him wolf it down. His and my meal schedules are thus no longer in sync, so I’ve spent more time than usual preparing food and cleaning up him and the kitchen afterwards.

I’d planned to take Ingrid shoe shopping after preschool but she was not at all amenable to that. Too hot (it was another hot and sunny day) or too tired or hungry or thirsty, or all of that – in any case she was in a very precarious mood all the way home. Then we put a picnic blanket under the cherry tree, I made us both some smoothies with frozen raspberries and blueberries, bananas, and apple juice, and we relaxed together. She felt much better after that.

I noticed wasps on the kitchen windows on at least five separate occasions, and never in any other part of the house, or near the door. Now I’m wondering if they have a nest somewhere inside the walls there – there are gaps around and beneath the newly installed windows, and they could be coming out of those. If that’s the case we will have to plug those holes quickly.

(Actually I missed one wasps’ nest in my list yesterday – we also found an old, abandoned one above the ceiling of the old veranda. I guess wasps really like our house.)

After one of the really nice dinners at the restaurant Rustico in Maspalomas, I realized it had tasted so great because the fish was swimming in a little puddle of melted butter. Oops. I steeled myself for a bout of serious crying from Adrian – and it never came. Looks like a little bit of butter is OK. Perhaps his intolerance is improving.

When we were back home again, I took a deep breath and experimented with a bit of parmesan on my pasta one evening. Still no problem.

So now I’m thinking. If Adrian can tolerate a limited amount of milk protein, what should I eat? What gives me most bang for the buck, so to say? The most taste for the least amount of milk protein? Butter is a good bet I guess, because it’s mostly fat and should not have much protein at all. And it tastes SO much better than the milk-free spread. What else?

Unlike the average Swedish parent, I cook dinner every evening, if at all possible. And I mean a proper dinner, from proper ingredients. Fish fingers and rice and peas is not a proper dinner; cheese sauce from a powdered mix is not a proper ingredient.

I enjoy cooking, but there’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation. I’m not sure if I cook so often because I enjoy it, or if I enjoy it because I’ve done it so much that I am by now pretty good at it.

Tradition is a part of it. I grew up with home-cooked food since that’s the only thing that was available in Soviet Estonia. There was no takeaway pizza and no frozen meals. Somewhere deep down inside I feel that home-cooked meals are an essential part of what home is all about.

I took a break from this habit in London. We ate ready meals quite often while we lived there. It was convenient, we could afford it, there was a lot of choice, and the food tasted good. I still miss M&S’s vegetarian moussaka with lentils, and the Pizza Express pizzas, and Sainsbury’s pumpkin ravioli, and Waitrose’s canneloni. Here in Sweden there’s almost nothing available. Tasteless, boring frozen fish gratins and pasta with chicken. So we’re back to home cooked meals.

But it’s also because I’m a picky eater. No, that’s not quite the right term. “Food snob” is also a bit wrong. What I mean is that I find it difficult to motivate myself to eat dull, uninspiring, boring, monotonous, low-quality food.

I suspect this is physiological more than psychological. In general I get pretty clear signals from my body. Now that I’m dairy-free I find myself desiring nuts and pulses almost every day, and occasionally I’d suddenly get a craving for eggs or sushi – my body telling me it needs protein. Most of the time my body wants fresh vegetables and a decent amount of fat, and moist, juicy food. My pregnancy cravings were for yogurt and juicy fruit.

I always try to bring a lunch box to work, because the food at the lunch restaurants around the office is so boring, and the choice for a sushitarian so narrow. After a few days of restaurant lunches I tended to find myself thinking “Oh bother, do I really need to eat lunch today again?” and waiting until well past normal lunchtime until I was starving, to make the food seem more appealing.

With dull food, I tend to eat enough to not be hungry any more, but not enough to be properly full. Then I’m peckish again after a while and snack on something that has immediate appeal – something semi-sweet and reasonably fatty. It may be uninspiring but it’s satisfying on a baser level. And my metabolism is such that I can do it without any ill effects on my weight.

For this reason I also try to make sure that there are leftovers at home for lunch. If there aren’t any, I’ll end up subsisting on sandwiches and snacks that day.

I notice that frequently, now that I cannot eat dairy products. While I’m breastfeeding I need five or six meals a day. Breakfast, lunch, a light snack (such as fruit), a bigger snack, dinner, a late-night snack. Before I figured out Adrian’s milk protein intolerance, the snacks were often either a sandwich or some cereal. Cereal is off the table for now, and the choice of meat- and dairy-free sandwich materials is quite limited. So when I’m tired of my two fish-based spreads, and of hummus and avocado, I fall back on peanut butter and honey on rye bread for my 11-o’clock-at-night sandwich. It does the job.

Now I’m getting tired of sugar. I never thought I’d see the day. I’m not one to binge on ice cream or candy – I’m a snob here as well, I’d rather eat small amounts of good-quality stuff. But I’ve always liked my desserts, jam on porridge and on pancakes, orange juice for breakfast and so on. Home-made jam… mmm. Brämhults orange juice… another mmm. But a few weeks ago I started having juicy water for breakfast, because juice straight up was just too sweet. Now I’ve tired of jam on my porridge. Luckily we have berries in the freezer since the summer – redcurrants and blueberries with a small amount of sugar make a perfect porridge topping. When we run out of those, I’ll have to see what’s available in the supermarket, or see if dried fruit works (I suspect I might find it too sweet). On the other hand I’m sure that porridge with no topping will be way too dull.

Yep, it’s milk sensitivity all right.

I’ve been on a milk-free diet for the past three weeks. Adrian’s general state and disposition has improved immensely during this time. He behaves like a normal baby (as far as I can tell). He cries when he is unhappy with his current situation, but it is almost always possible to deduce what is bothering him, and fix it.

But perhaps this was just a coincidence? Perhaps he just outgrew whatever problem he had?

Now Christmas is lurking around the corner and it is time to bake gingerbread cookies and saffron buns. This weekend the question arose: do we have to bake our gingerbread cookies with margarine instead of butter, and to look for a recipe for milk-free saffron buns? We needed a decision on the milk-free diet.

So today I did a milk provocation / challenge: I ate what I would eat on a normal day when I’m not avoiding milk. Milk in the breakfast porridge, and a glass of milk on the side; butter on my sandwiches; a yoghurt for my afternoon snack. Yum.

By 5 o’clock in the afternoon there had been no signs of adverse reaction. I was already celebrating in my mind, thinking of all the nice stuff I can eat again. My mouth was watering just from thinking of it all.

Then at 6, The Screaming was back. Adrian woke, fed, and the moment he stopped eating, he started crying. Reflux, arching his back, painful burps, inconsolable crying until he finally fell asleep, and then some more reflux while he was sleeping.

I don’t know which felt worse: to see him in such pain again, or to know that I will not be eating any of the nice stuff for a long time.

And I really like milk and milk products! I am one of a very few people among my acquaintances who actually drinks milk with meals. Used to drink, that is.

After the situation stabilizes again, the next step will be cautious experiments with goat’s and sheep’s milk products. Cheeses are easy to find, but I wonder if it’s possible to buy, say, cream or yogurt made of sheep’s milk. Can you even make sheep milk yogurt?

1.

I’ve been experimenting with a milk-free diet now since last Friday, hypothesizing that perhaps Adrian’s tummy troubles are caused by a milk protein allergy / oversensitivity. Apparently reflux can sometimes be due to milk allergy. Given how much his reflux is hurting all of us, it’s definitely worth a try. Since I cook almost all our meals from scratch anyway, it’s not difficult, really, just a bit frustrating. I like yoghurt, and cheese, and creamy sauces, and milk in my porridge.

Friday afternoon I forgot my diet and took some cinnamon swirls from the freezer, and for Sunday lunch I grabbed some leftover leeks in white sauce before I realized that white sauce is mostly milk. But apart from those lapses I haven’t ingested anything with milk in it.

And I do think it may be working. He’s been mostly scream-free since Monday: four days now. There’s some crying now and again, but not the endless inconsolable screaming we used to get. Last time I thought I saw an improvement it lasted two days only. I don’t yet dare to think that this is the new normal, but it is very nice while it lasts.

2.

Meanwhile Adrian has hit a growth spurt and is eating every 2 hours during the day (and every 3 hours, occasionally 3.5) at night. I feel like a milk machine. He barely has time to get a nap before he wakes up hungry again.

He’s already outgrown his size 50 bodies and now size 56, too. Next week he’ll be getting his 2-month checkup and we’ll find out what he weighs.

Michael Pollan is the author of the best advice about food I’ve ever read or heard:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

He first expressed this in Unhappy Meals, an essay in NY Times Magazine back in 2007. I found myself agreeing so strongly with everything in the essay that I bought the book. Then I read the book, and again I found myself vigorously agreeing with every single page. This is such a sensible book that I wish it was mandatory reading for everybody. In fact just skimming through the book now while reviewing it makes me want to re-read it.

Part 1 of the book talks about “the age of nutritionism”: how food was reduced by scientists to collection of nutrients, which we’re always told to eat more or less of. Great news for the producers of processed foods – and bad news for us, since instead of just enjoying our food, most people are confused, obsessed and worried about what they eat. Unfortunately all this advice rests on a very weak foundation – the last few decades’ prevailing advice to “eat less fat” was essentially a huge experiment, and is now looking like a failure.

Part 2 talks about “the Western diet”: how our relationship to our food has changed over the last 150 years. We’ve gone from whole foods to refined, from complex food chains of wide variety to simple monocultures, from quality to quantity, from leaves to seeds, and from food culture to food science.

Part 3, “Getting over nutritionism”, goes back to those seven words of advice and expands them into more tangible pointers. What does it mean to “eat food”? How can you help yourself not eat too much?

For a contrarian viewpoint, check out In Defense of Food Isn’t About Nutrition (a review), according to which Pollan’s book is mostly “the desire to show off beating out scientific thinking”.

Amazon US, Amazon UK, Adlibris, Adlibris (Swedish translation).

I am an underbuyer. When in doubt, it’s easier for me to decide that I don’t really need the whatever-I’m-considering. I’m more likely to feel bad about buying something that I then don’t use, than to feel bad about not buying something that I could have used.

Whenever I have to buy something expensive, I have to overcome a slight internal resistance – even though I know that we need it, and that we can afford it, and that it’s not worth buying a cheaper alternative, because you get what you pay for (most of the time).

Spending money is a little bit easier when it feels like a long-term investment, like a bicycle, or winter boots, or a computer. Even then, though, it takes a bit of an effort. The hardest for me is to buy things that seem frivolous, that I like but don’t really need. One winter scarf is perfectly enough, so even if I see another really pretty one, it’s unlikely that I will buy it.

Or fruit. There is a part of my brain that insists on telling me that apples for 19.90 SEK/kg are perfectly good fruit, though slightly boring, and there is no need to splurge on grapes for 49.90.

Lately, though, I have begun to train myself to ignore that part of the brain. If there’s one thing in my everyday life that I really enjoy, it is simple, fresh, good-quality food. Often when I look back at my day and think about the highlights, it’s the freshly baked bread, or the cereal with fresh strawberries, that comes to mind.

And it’s not like we cannot afford it. For various reasons, we do not spend money on a car, or eating out, or alcohol and cigarettes, or movies and such. We run a not insignificant surplus every month.

So now, when I feel like eating the season’s first Swedish strawberries, 60% more expensive than the Belgian ones, I just do it. (I’ve nothing against Belgians, but their strawberries are a poor substitute for the real thing.) When the veggie stand down at Spånga Square has in-season Pakistani mangoes at exorbitant prices, I barely hesitate. (They keep a few of them in a small box right next to the cashier, with a hand-written sign describing them as “the best fruit in the world”.)

During this pregnancy (thus far at least) I haven’t experienced anything like the absurd all-consuming hunger I felt last time around. I eat a little bit more, and need an extra snack now and again to keep my blood sugar level.

But just like last time, I want cool, light, juicy food above all. Yoghurt and fruit are especially good. Some days I notice a lovely cake or cookie somewhere, and really wish that I wanted to eat it – but when given a choice I’d much rather have some grapes. The best meal is unsweetened yoghurt mixed with some berries from the freezer, and Havre Fras (puffy oat cereal). I’d been wondering what we would use all those berries for (cause we have lots). Now I know: to build a baby!

My body never quite regained its original shape after my previous pregnancy (even though I quickly tumbled back to my original weight). And now my waist is getting rounder again. Most of my “smart casual” skirts are already unusable; the dresses still fit, and some trousers too. Time to unpack the pregnancy clothes again. How lucky that we’ve managed to time this pregnancy to match the seasonality of the previous one almost exactly!

Seen on town today, #1: the first sellers of semlor. For years they’ve started as soon as Christmas was past (just after Epiphany). This is the first time I’ve seen them advertised before the new year. What is the world coming to? I guess being first gets you at least a handful of extra customers…

Seen on town today, #2: “Mayonnaise without additives! New!” I feel simultaneously cheered and disgusted. On the one hand I am glad that real food is making a comeback. On the other hand, isn’t it pathetic that something as basic as this is worth advertising?