Adrian is stepping up, now that it’s mostly just him and me in the house. (And Nysse, of course.) Getting groceries and cooking three or four meals per week.

Most days I enjoy cooking; even on tired weekdays I don’t mind it. But it is really nice to be surprised, to eat something that has been cooked based on someone else’s ideas, based on someone else’s tastes.

I bought oyster mushrooms for dinner today. Mostly the supermarkets here sell button mushrooms/common mushrooms, which for some reason are called champinjon in Swedish, but today there were locally-grown oyster mushrooms at a good price. I’ve eaten them before but usually “diluted” with the cheaper common mushrooms, and I don’t think I’ve ever cooked or prepared them myself.

The body, the core lump of it, was surprisingly dense and firm. I was reminded of the fact that mushrooms, while common in vegetarian cooking, are not actually vegetables but a kingdom of their own, perhaps even closer to animals than to plants. But they don’t have anything that I recognize as consciousness so I eat them.

Easter Sunday, with all its traditions. None of the traditions can be changed at all. Which is a bit boring, but I’m OK with that. Who knows how many more Easter celebrations I will have before Ingrid goes off and starts her own traditions.

Things that can be varied: What kinds of herring to serve. What topping to use to decorate the devilled eggs. What design to paint on the eggs. What pattern to use for piping the merengue on the pie.

My half-teaspoon measuring spoon fits perfectly inside the opening of a standard spice jar. Not theoretically perfectly, with no space between the two, but practically perfectly, with just enough room that I can put the spoon inside and scoop out some of what is inside.

As a result, I measure nearly all spices in half-teaspoons. If the recipe calls for a tablespoon, that’s six half-teaspoons. If it’s any more than that, I might start pouring from the jar into a larger measure instead.

I’m having a baking weekend. The freezer was empty, the cake tin was empty – this could not continue.

The plan was to make brownies, oat cakes, and poppy seed buns. Adrian got there first with the brownie, though, so I just had the cakes and buns left for this weekend.

These Estonian oat cakes are based on a childhood recipe. They’re mostly rolled oats and butter, with just enough egg to hold them together, and a bit of sugar. Most people who eat them say they’re less sweet than expected, and that just means you can eat more of them. And chopped candied orange peel.

The traditional recipe I’ve held on to for many years doesn’t work in its original state any more. Standard-sized eggs have become so much larger that if I follow the old recipe, the cakes spread out when baked. They’re supposed to stay in little mounds, softening only just a tiny bit around the edges. I have no memory of how large eggs used to be in Estonia thirty-five years ago, but it seems that they must have been about 2/3 of today’s Swedish eggs. Right now with the eggs I get at the supermarket, using two eggs instead of three makes the cakes turn out exactly right.

The poppy seed buns came out great as well.

I set a bread dough on Sunday morning. It took a long time to rise, as usual in our house. I was going to bake it in the evening, after dinner, but completely forgot about it. Then at 10 o’clock at night I was suddenly reminded of it – way too late to shape loaves and bake them.

I put it in the fridge (having reshuffled half the fridge to make room for the large dough bowl) and crossed my fingers that it would keep for a day. Either it works or it doesn’t – worth a try at least. Came home from the office on Monday evening, took it out, and picked up from where I’d left off.

The dough didn’t suffer at all from a twenty-hour pause. The bread came out great – possibly even better than usual.

Things I bought in Japan: realistic food magnets.

Japan has a whole industry for food samples, realistic fake food. Many restaurants have displays of their menu items outside. Instead of looking at a menu, you just look at the almost-real thing.

The craftsmanship is astounding. The food truly looks real: shiny where it needs to be, matte where that is appropriate. Colours, colour gradients, marbling, textures.

At many street food stalls, I recognized the food on display as not real not by its looks, but by its lack of smell, and then realizing how impractical a large display of the real thing would be: expensive, wasteful, unhygienic.

For retail sales, there were earrings, magnets, hair clips, etc. I bought two magnets as souvenirs. They’re life-size and thus a bit impractical as actual magnets for holding things up, so I guess they’ll just be decorating the fridge.

The sushi magnet is a piece of tuna nigiri. (Of course you could by fake nigiri with different kinds of toppings.) Having sampled a whole lot of sushi during our trip, I concluded that fatty tuna was my favourite kind of sushi.

The egg is a soy-marinated egg. I ate a lot of those – daily for breakfast, towards the end of the trip – and it’s the one Japanese food that I think I can bring home with me: I should be able to reproduce it and have it come out like the real thing.

There was a whole wall of food-shaped magnets at the shop where I bought mine.

I could have bought a bowl of soup, or perhaps a bento box, or why not a plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce.

The main benefit of the porridge book has not been the recipes in it, but how it’s made me rethink porridge.

In my mind, porridge has always been a simple meal. It consists of the porridge itself and a topping. The porridge itself is utter simplicity: grains + liquid + salt. The topping can be jam, honey, fruit, or possibly even a combination such as apple sauce + cinnamon. The most adventurous that I’ve been in the past is putting (some of) the topping in the porridge: cooking the porridge with a diced apple, instead of adding apple sauce on top, and then maybe adding nuts as well. Two toppings? Where will this craziness end?

Somehow it’s never really occurred to me that I could add more. It’s like I didn’t give myself permission to make porridge a complex, luxurious thing… because it’s not supposed to be?

You can put cinnamon AND cardamom in the porridge. You can cook the fruit – fry the banana, turn the pears into a compote, make a sauce from the cherries. You can do that AND add a sauce AND nuts as well. All at the same time

This looks ugly as all get out – beige with brown and more brown and then this really horrible greenish-brown – but it was decadently good. Cardamom-flavoured four-grain porridge, a home-made pear compote, an artisanal peppermint-flavoured honey, and chopped walnuts.

Also: one of the three spoons I bought in Japan was just perfect.

Adrian, Ingrid and I used to go for fika at Spånga Konditori on our weekends together. We lost our routine over Christmas, and then forgot to start again in January. Then of course Ingrid and I were gone for two weekends.

Now we’re back at the bakery and the cakes are as fabulous as ever. A red velvet raspberry cheesecake for Adrian, a raspberry truffle macaron (hallonbiskvi) for Ingrid, and a raspberry pistachio tartlet for me. I wonder if the raspberry theme is due to leftover pink materials from Valentine’s day.

Things I bought in Japan: wooden spoons for eating.

I have large wooden cooking spoons and forks and spatulas, and even larger wooden serving spoons. Plenty of wooden butter knives, even a wooden cake slice. For years already I’ve wished for a good wooden eating spoon, but never found one. I’ve run across crafts stalls selling spoons of roughly the right size, but they’ve all had a shape that’s more decorative than useful. A good eating spoon fits the shape of the human mouth. And is made of a suitable material! A spatula can be rough and scratchy, but an eating spoon needs to be as smooth as silk.

Why a wooden spoon? Because wood is soft and warm, where metal is hard and cold. I mostly don’t mind forks, but metal spoons sometimes truly feel like lumps in my mouth, and I wish there was something better.

One of the shops in the cookware district in Tokyo must have been run by someone like me. They had dozens of varieties of wooden spoons, in all kinds of sizes and shapes and types of wood. I bought three likely-looking variants, hoping that at least one would be good. All roughly the same size, but varying in angle, curvature and material.

What I didn’t think to do is take photos of the labels. They’re three different kinds of wood, but which ones?