I found one last, forgotten gingerbread cookie in a jar in the kitchen. Christmas is not over yet!

I only found odds and ends in the leftover section of the fridge today. None of them was enough on their own to make a proper lunch. I didn’t feel like eating a two-course meal – and doesn’t one large course feel more satisfying than two too-small ones, anyway? – so I ended up eating cream of cauliflower soup with a rice/tofu/banana/peanut casserole. One of my odder lunch combinations, but not bad.

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.

Nysse used to live together with two other cats. When food was served, he was fast and pushy, and always got more than his fair share. Since he was living in the countryside, he probably supplemented the cat food with mice and voles and such as well. Now he’s visibly overweight.

We serve him food according to his weight, and there’s nowhere to get any extras, since he’s staying indoors for now. And he is not happy with this new situation. Add the usual cat curiosity to the mix, and you get a cat that is very, very interested in our food. He jumps up on the kitchen table and the counters while we’re cooking or eating, and tries to steal bites of whatever he can find. We keep shooing him down, but I expect it’s going to take a long while for him to learn that those places are off-limits.

And of course he seizes the opportunity when we’re not in the kitchen keeping an eye on things. No dinner ingredient or half-eaten sandwich or butter lid can be left unguarded. We’ve never been so disciplined about putting any kitchen clutter away immediately.

When he can’t get hold of anything else, he licks the edges of unwashed dishes in the sink.

My brother came by for a pre-Christmas visit. We made gingerbread cookies. We all take optimal dough usage very seriously. It matters! Every time you gather up the scraps and roll out the dough again, you work more flour in it. This year the dough was perfect to begin with, easy to work with. By the fourth or fifth rolling, it was all dry and barely workable.

Later we also made mince pies which I love even more than gingerbread cookies. Both taste great, especially when made from scratch after years of tweaking the recipes, but mince pies are moister.

We promised Adrian a visit to his favourite restaurant, Ri Cora, for his birthday. Which was nearly 3 months ago.

First we were going to do it when we were in town anyway for Forever Piaf, but left it until too late with the booking so we didn’t get a table. Then we had a similar booking problem a few weeks later: just when we had agreed a day and time that worked for all of us, and I was about to press the button, the last few available tables got booked right as I was looking at it. And then there were weekends with other things in the way.

Now finally we made a new attempt and I was surprised to find tables for the same evening. Which works great, because Adrian’s school has a study day for staff tomorrow, so he doesn’t need to get up on time, so it’s OK if he’s a bit tired afterwards.

Ri Cora is Adrian’s absolute favourite restaurant because of the limitless egg rolls and dumplings he can eat. Ingrid also loves it, although she samples the buffet more widely, and prefers sushi to most dumplings.

The buffet has been completely unchanged for the last three or four years. Nothing changes, not even which fresh fruit they serve (melon, watermelon, pineapple, grapes, strawberries), or the ice cream flavours (blueberry, melon, Oreo, plus one I’ve forgotten), or the “season’s roast vegetables” which are always potatoes, sweet potatoes, sweetcorn and broccoli, completely regardless of the actual season. But predictable also means reliable, and the staff are always attentive and friendly, and make sure the buffet is fresh and clean and filled up. While I wouldn’t want to eat there very often, it’s a pretty decent place, as buffets go.

The quince is done. Now we’ll line them up on oven racks and dry them, and then we’ll have enough sweet candied quince to last us a year.

I wish I had weighed them before. Eric could probably tell me how many kilograms of sugar we’ve pumped into them, but without knowing the original weight, it’s hard to relate it to anything. I know we’re talking kilograms in any case, because “sugar 1 kg” has been on the grocery shopping list several times recently.

I also wish I had taken before and after photos. I kind of did, but not in comparable lighting. I know that the quince and the syrup around them have a much deeper colour now, a dark amber instead of the original bright gold, but want to really see it.

We’re making another batch of candied (flowering) quince this year. Such mouthwatering goodness.

The cake is delicious and moist and flavourful but also very filling. The first time, we all served ourselves too large slices. We’ve learned now to cut what seem like slivers only. The recipe says the cake will serve 6 to 8, but in reality it’s more like double that. A sixth of that cake is like a whole dinner.