It’s Monday, which means it’s me and Adrian cooking dinner together, and him setting the direction.

One thing that Adrian likes in his food, and that I’m gradually also coming to like, is not peeling the root vegetables. I think part of it might be convenience, but he says he prefers the taste of potatoes cooked in their skins, and of unpeeled carrots. Even when he isn’t the one doing the peeling, he asks me if I could not peel the potatoes. He also says that broccoli stems taste better than the florets.

I can’t feel much of a difference in flavour, to be honest, but it definitely saves time, so I rarely peel carrots or potatoes nowadays. Roast potatoes are great with skins on. I even tried making rårakor – they’re sort of like flat, thin hash browns or rösti – without peeling the potatoes before grating them and it worked surprisingly well.

Something that felt so natural and obvious for so many years, even decades – of course one peels one’s potatoes! – was just an arbitrary habit, that I did just because I was taught to do it.