Christmas isn’t over yet but we’re running out of gingerbread cookies, so we made another batch. With just me and Ingrid working, it was less chaotic and more focused than our usual cookie sessions. And we ended up with more gingerbread men and women and far fewer sharks and crocodiles than when Adrian is involved.

Usually we start piling up the gifts under the tree the day before Christmas Eve but Nysse was all over the presents as soon as they started turning up, with claws and teeth, so we had to hide them away in the bedroom behind a closed door and only brought them out last minute. Only one or two packages got slightly chewed in the corners.

I am kind of proud of how I managed to wrap a large potted plant for Ingrid without breaking anything.

Lunch was the traditional devilled eggs, served with herring and an orange-avocado-feta-pistacho sallad, and vörtbröd.

Ingrid made a cream cheese Christmas tree for a starter. I didn’t think of taking any photos of the rest of the dinner, which consisted of the bean balls I always make for Christmas, potato gratin, brussel sprouts and a lingonberry sauce. I had planned for a cranberry sauce but there were no cranberries to be had in any of the three supermarkets I tried, neither fresh nor frozen. Lingonberries with orange peel didn’t taste half bad either.

We decorated gingerbread cookies. Ingrid and I decorated hearts and trees and pigs. Adrian made bleeding sharks, stitched-up crocodiles, and Frankenstein’s monster with parts of different gingerbread men glued together.


Then he went on to even more innovative creations, like a two-headed giraffe, a tangle of teddy bears, and 3D dolphins.

In the evening we decorated the tree. Unpacking the decorations is the best part: “remember when we got this one!” and “oh, I’d forgotten about this one”.

Gingerbread cookies are an essential part of Christmas. We made this year’s batch this weekend.

We have a whole pile of cookie cutters. I’m a traditionalist and prefer the Christmas-themed shapes: the Christmas trees, stars and hearts and angels, and the traditional gingerbread man and woman. Pigs have a very decoration-friendly shape, and so do mitten-shaped cookies.

The stranger shapes include a set with tiny animals and a boat, which I believe is Noah’s Ark, kind of thematically appropriate – but it also a train engine and a car. This set gets used a lot because the small shapes fit so nicely in between the larger cookies.

Another set has more animals, which for some reason includes a crocodile and a shark. Who hasn’t heard of Christmas crocodiles? Adrian especially likes the shark and the crocodile, so we usually end up with a lot of those.

We found a bottle of last year’s glögg in the pantry. I don’t believe in best-before dates too much, so we opened and tried it.

Last year’s glögg flavour was mojito: glögg with a flavour of lime and mint. Quite a bizarre combination, since there is no overlap in ingredients between mojito and glögg. Well, apart from the sugar. And their flavours don’t match or complement each other, either. Mojito is fresh and cold and tart; glögg is warm and round and spicy.

The idea of mixing the two was not a good one. We tried it; I was the only one to want to taste it twice. Then we poured it down the drain.

Marketing people want everything to have “this season’s variety”. Clothes, shoes, Christmas gifts… and glögg. There’s rarely a point in having a favourite model of sandals, or even of socks, or of glögg, apparently, because when the old ones have run out and you want more, your favourite has already been retired in favour of something newer and shinier.

We did something wild and crazy today and bought a new kind of pasta. Eating it was such a ridiculous experience – we literally spent most of dinner laughing and joking about the pasta – that I had to memorialize it.

Bucatini is what happens when spaghetti begets children on macaroni. Long like spaghetti, but slightly thicker, although not quite as thick as macaroni, and with a hole in the middle. It turned out to have all the bad sides of both.

Like spaghetti, the bucatini are so long that they don’t fit into a normal pot. Spaghetti softens after just a minute, though, so you can push them down into the pot and they’ll soon be submerged in the boiling water. Bucatini take a much longer while to soften, by which time the bottom ends have already had time to stick to each other, while the top ends are still hard. So one half of each ends up softer than the other half.

Like spaghetti, the bucatini are so long that you can’t just fork them into your mouth. Unlike spaghetti, though, they’re too thick and stiff to be wound around a fork. We next tried cutting them in pieces but then they were too narrow to easily stab, and too long and stiff still to easily scoop up. Whatever we did, it was awkward. It’s like the bucatini are not designed to be eaten. I’m sure there is a trick, because must be a reason for their existence, but I don’t plan on ever trying them again.

Another type of pasta that looks better than it works is orecchiette. I’ve tried cooking them several times and every time they stick to each other. They’re shaped like little hats, and they stack as well as hats, too, and then they stay that way. I tried turning the heat up higher so the water would boil more vigorously; I tried using more water; I tried stirring more frequently; I even tried adding oil to the water. Nothing worked, and I always ended up with clumps of orecchiette. So I’ve given up on them.

A fresh haul of chocolates from Chokladfabriken. I’m very lucky to have an office near one of their shops.

Adrian likes anything fruity, so his favourites are the passion fruit hearts, the ones with lingonberry-flavoured filling, and the raspberry ones. Ingrid also loves the passion fruit hearts, and also the ones with orange flavour, which I totally forgot to get this time. I like the various “chocolate on chocolate” varieties – truffles with chocolate ganache, the cru sauvage truffles, and so on.

At one point I bought a pretty box of truffles and pralines. Normally I just buy a bunch of them in a bag, and transfer them to the box (which I kept) when I get home. Now it bothers me that I didn’t line up the three with the diagonal slash in the same direction.

We eat toast as part of our weekend breakfasts quite often. Nobody has time for toasting anything on weekdays, so breakfast then is either cereal or a simple sandwich.

The end slices are usually no good for toasting. They’re too thin, and the crust makes them curve when heated, so they toast unevenly. The edges are too dark while the middle is not crispy enough. I’m too thrifty to throw them away, though – one doesn’t throw away perfectly edible food just because it’s inconvenient in shape. Instead there’s a bag in the freezer where we dump all the end slices. (Or some of us just leave them in the original bread bag and shove it to one side in the bread drawer in the freezer, and then weeks later I wonder what’s with all the nearly-empty bags, and then I end up consolidating four bags of end slices into one.)

I’ve used the end slices for croutons in the past and used them for a deconstructed French onion soup, and for salads. Today I wanted to make bread pudding, which I haven’t eaten since I was a child. It was a thing in Estonia (saiavorm) but it’s virtually unknown in Sweden. I don’t think they even have a word for it.

There was no shortage of hits when I googled for recipes for saiavorm, but making use of them was harder. There was no agreement whatsoever when it came to proportions. When rescaled to about 400 g bread, one had 3 decilitres of sugar (or something like that, because the recipe was based on “half a loaf of sai” of unspecified size) while another had 2 to 3 tablespoons. One had one egg per one dl of milk; another had twice as much eggs as milk; a third had the opposite.

In the end I gave up on the recipes and just winged it. The end result both looked and tasted good, but was a bit too dry. Less bread next time, for the same amount of eggs, milk and apples. (Less bread, rather than more of the rest, because half of what we had would have been enough.)

My childhood version definitely had raisins, but I think it may have been without apples.

Quince being candied, this year again.

Slippery, hard little seeds absolutely everywhere. But the result – candied quince – is so worth it.