I made grilled cottage cheese sandwiches for lunch. I guess a sandwich in English maybe needs to have two slices of bread, but for me the Nordic, open kind of sandwich is also a sandwich.

Ingrid and Adrian both tend to wrinkle their noses at these, while I love them. They both like other types of grilled sandwiches, especially with cheese – cheese and apple, cheese and tomato, cheese and pepper, banana and curry. But not with cottage cheese. “It’s like pizza bianca,” they say, as if that was a bad thing. (They do not like pizza bianca either.)

For me these sandwiches are childhood nostalgia food. To be really right, there should be dill in the topping, instead of the basil that I used today. If you want to make these at home: mix about 500 grams of cottage cheese with 1 egg, a pinch of salt, and chopped dill. Spoon generous amounts of the mixture onto buttered slices of toast and grill them until they look good. Don’t skimp; if there’s too little of the cheesy stuff, the result will be too dry.

There are other meals I remember from my childhood that I feel no desire to recreate. Milk noodle soup, for example, which is exactly what the name says – cooked noodles in milk. I remember eating this with gusto, but I don’t think I’d enjoy it now.

I had thought this was some Soviet-era invention but apparently it’s a traditional German recipe that’s existed for far longer than the Soviet Union. I stumbled upon a digitization of an Estonian cookbook from the beginning of the last century that has not just one but two recipes for milk soup with pasta, one using macaroni and one using noodles:

Piimasupp nuudlitega
3 toopi rõõska piima, tükike värsket võid, natukene soola
ja teelusika täis suhkrut keedetakse üles. Nüüd lisatakse sinna
juurde 1 nael katki murtud jõhv-nuudlid või 1 nael stern-nuud-
leid ja keedetakse kuni pehme on.