Team lunch at Kagges Sillcafé in Gamla stan. So much herring and other good food! Half the team are newly relocated to Sweden and I think some of them found the herring and the gravlax rather weird, but were too polite to say anything about it.

Of the two supermarkets in central Spånga, Coop is far more spacious and has a much better organic selection, while ICA has a much veggie selection (both better quality, and more to choose from). The vegetable stand in the square can be hit and miss: they’ve got things that you’ll never find at Coop or ICA, but the quality can be so-so. Case in point: peas in the pod (which aren’t commonly sold in Sweden, believe it or not) but so dry and wrinkled that I couldn’t find even a handful that I was willing to pay for. That’s what you get for lack of refrigeration.

I found a forgotten bag of potatoes in the cupboard. The potatoes were clearly determined to make the best of the situation.

(Also it’s Sweden’s national day today but none of us were interested in doing anything about it.)

We supplement Nysse’s dry food with tuna, and occasionally with fancy wet food from little plastic sachets. He eats all of it with gusto – I’m not even sure if he has any preferences.

The best thing about the dry food is how easy it is to handle. We have a plastic container in the pantry which we occasionally top up from a 10 kg bag in the basement. When it’s time to feed Nysse, we just scoop up a reasonable-seeming amount into his bowl. No fuss, no mess. The least good thing about the dry food is its smell.

The best thing about the tuna is that it feels, psychologically, like real cat food. Cats did not evolve to eat dry pellets. It’s a bit messier because of all the cans, and because Nysse doesn’t eat an entire can in a single meal so the rest has to be refrigerated.

The best thing about the fancy wet food is that it looks and smells like actual food. The worst thing about it is the sachets. It’s really hard to get the food out, and despite all my squeezing, I can always feel lumps of food still in there. The lumps are the meatiest parts, so throwing those away feels like such a waste. I’ve ended up cutting the sachets open all the way around and “serving” them to Nysse on his little place mat. Once we run out of these, I might look for something more user-friendly.

Every year we eat pasha for Easter (and a few days after) and mildly grumble that we don’t get to eat it during the rest of the year. My recipe isn’t super sweet, so it almost feels like a snack more than a dessert, and I could eat it if not every day then at least every week.

Devilled eggs, herring of various kinds, fake vegetarian herring, and assorted side dishes.

Pasha with raspberry coulis.

Painted Easter eggs. My mum and I manage stylized but recognizable objects, and pretty patterns. Adrian does his own thing. Ingrid is the only one who actually practices painting and therefore makes more and more impressive designs each year, with just 8 crappy colours.

Adrian and I are making pasha. He chops and measures and mixes; I get the technical tasks of creaming butter with sugar, pressing quark through a sieve, and whipping cream.

I was today years old when I learned the best way to warm butter to room temperature. Well, not technically today but a few weeks ago, but still, almost.

I’ve always used the microwave, because I never plan far enough ahead to take the butter out a few hours ahead and let it just warm on its own. The microwave method isn’t too bad, but it’s a bit tricky, because if you go even 10 seconds too far then the butter starts melting.

My brother taught me to instead put the butter in a bowl with lukewarm water. 10 minutes later, pour off the water, and you’re done. No tricky timing whatsoever! So much easier.

Today (actually today, for real) I discovered that there’s a bonus effect: if you then start e.g. creaming the butter with sugar in the same bowl, the thin layer of water helps keep the butter from sticking to the bowl, which makes for less butter on the sides of the bowl and more of it where you actually want it.

Eating waffles at the bottom of Mattesdalen in Branäs.

Branäs is a smallish ski resort that we honestly mostly chose because all the other places were fully booked by the time we decided that, yes, we do dare go on a ski trip this year. But it seemed to suit us well: relatively close to Stockholm, with pet-friendly accommodation available, and with plenty of relatively gentle slopes.

(Yes, we brought Nysse with us. He didn’t enjoy the long drive much, but we’re also pretty sure that he wouldn’t have enjoyed being alone for five days either, with some stranger stopping by only to feed and water him and empty the litter box. Now that we’re here, he’s all happy again.)

Mostly Branäs is as expected. Plenty of blue slopes. Small-scale, with lots of button lifts and just two chairlifts.

The restaurants have been truly disappointing, though. They all use app-based ordering, which is practical I guess, but whenever I use these things I feel like I’m doing the staff’s work for them. And our lunches today were just barely on the right side of edible. The pizzas were thick and doughy and barely had any sauce. The “creamy mushroom pasta” I ordered barely had enough sauce to almost coat all of the overcooked pasta, and contained a total of 2 smallish mushrooms (each chopped into quarters). Even school cafeteria lunches are better than that.

We took a waffle break in the afternoon to rest our legs and top up our blood sugar. Here as well the overall impression was cheap and impersonal. Order in the app, get your cardboard plate with a waffle from an overworked staff member, eat it in a room with the blandest possible interior, clean it up yourself.

(Only Ingrid and Adrian are in the picture because Eric took a bad fall and had to cut his snowboarding short for the day.)

We bought a new kitchen table. Here it is, set for an inaugural dinner, with a bonus (malus) cat photobombing it.

The old one Eric and I bought at Habitat in London just after moving there, so that would have been in 2001. Getting twenty years of use from a table isn’t bad.

But it really was on its last legs now. The veneer strips on the edges were falling off, the varnish on the top was completely worn through in places. Most importantly, it was wobbly and squeaky as hell because all the joins were loose, no matter how much we tightened the screws. We’ve had way too many incidents with drinks sloshing over from glasses when someone accidentally pushes against the table. And using it for kneading dough or energetic whisking or even cutting crusty bread has been quite frustrating.

We chose the new table with those learnings fresh in mind. No veneer, and no varnished finish. Solid oak throughout, with an oiled finish that we can just sand down again and reapply oil to when needed. And the thickest, most solid construction we could find! I hope this one will last us more than two decades.