I wanted cake but have no oven, so I made rhubarb cake in a pan. It worked surprisingly well; I even managed to flip it so it baked evenly on both sides.

Not a pancake, but perhaps a pan cake?

This hob is hopeless. The left-hand burner is slow but more or less works; the right-hand one can barely keep water boiling. I tried to make pancakes today and they just never got done on the right-hand burner. The batter turned solid after a while but didn’t get any colour so it was more like drying than frying the batter.

I am so looking forward to being able to use the big stove again.

And another thing. I’ve always known that the floor in the living room has a bit of give to it. The floorboards sag somewhat when someone walk on them. It’s never bothered me, in fact I used to barely notice it. But now that we store all sorts of kitchenware and glassware here, the whole room jangles loudly and irritatingly whenever I move around. It is becoming really annoying.

Now that I know how easy it is to make temaki, we made some for dinner at home today. Making sushi rice wasn’t too complicated either, although it came out a bit too sweet for my taste.

A new colleague at work is a serious foodie and worked as a chef in a previous life, so he is bringing all kinds of new food ideas to the office. He’s brought us home baked sourdough bread for breakfast, just because. And for today he arranged a potluck temaki lunch. Everyone brought an ingredient, and then we made temaki together.

The chef ninja explained temaki to us as “sushi tacos”. Take a piece of seaweed, spread some rice on it, then pile on whatever you like on top of the rice. Roll it up and you’re done. Restaurant temaki are elegantly cone-shaped, but apparently just sloppily rolling it up before biting into it is perfectly acceptable as well.

I’ve always thought that making sushi at home seems like a lot of bother, so I’ve never tried. All this rolling and shaping… and then someone wants this on their sushi and someone else definitely does NOT want this… But with this approach, sushi becomes quite doable: very flexible, and almost no prep work apart.

Pasha is an Estonian Easter dessert of Russian origin. When I was a child, we always had pasha for Easter – it was as much a tradition as eggs. Somehow we lost that tradition for many years, but now we’ve picked it up again. We usually go to Uppsala to my mum’s for Easter so she makes the pasha, but recently we’ve concluded that one or two days of pasha just isn’t enough, so we made another batch when we got back home.

The bulk of it is sweetened quark, fluffed up by adding whipped cream, but much of the flavour and texture comes from all the other ingredients: lemon peel, chopped nuts, finely chopped chocolate, raisins, candied orange peel etc. You mix it all up, spoon it into a mould, and then let it stand for a day to drain out some of the liquid. After a day you turn the finished pasha out of the mould.

I have a lovely hand-made wooden pasha mould with decorative designs cut into it. Did I take a photo of the beautiful pasha with relief patterns that came out of that mould? No… because we attacked it like a horde of hungry locusts, and before I could think of bringing the camera, there was nothing left to photograph. This photo is of the other pasha, made of the mixture that didn’t fit in the nice mould and that I put in a sieve instead. The photo doesn’t do it justice, although to be honest, pasha does taste better than it looks in real life as well.

Workday breakfast.

I have no appetite early in the morning. The ideal time for breakfast is just short of 2 hours after waking up. So I normally have breakfast at my desk at work. Usually it’s a few slices of Eric’s home-baked bread, and a glass of nice juice.

Ingrid cooking dinner while dancing to Hamilton.

Hamilton is going round and round on the Sonos when Ingrid is at home, sometimes straight and sometimes shuffled. She knows all the songs by heart by now and mixes them up to get some variety – it’s more about the music than the story.

Adrian making “juicy water”. This is a mealtime drink that we came up with years ago, that’s now become a staple that we always have available. One part apple juice, 6 parts (ish) water – just enough juice to give the water some flavour, but not so much that the drink becomes sweet.

The best apple juice by far for this drink is Coop’s own label juice. Tropicana sort of works as well. Coop’s apple juice is on par with milk, eggs, butter and cheese – there should always be some in our fridge.

Somehow this drink got named josavatten, which is a total grammatical abomination, but the name stuck, so that’s what it is called.

For years, we all drank “juicy water” with dinner, daily. Then Eric got a Sodastream machine as a gift and switched to carbonated water. Ingrid then discovered the sugar-free flavourings that can be added to carbonated water and switched as well. Neither Adrian nor I like bubbles in our drinks, so we still drink our juicy water.

Eric and Adrian are making chewy chocolate cookies.

On Mondays, Adrian makes dinner together with me and gets to set the menu. Today he wanted to serve a three-course dinner. We made crostini with cream cheese, jacket potatoes with a sweetcorn and kidney bean filling, and oven baked apples.

Adrian cooks on Mondays. Ingrid cooks on Thursdays, but has the option to do it more often when she wants to top up her allowance, and has recently used that option once or twice a week. Wednesdays I’m often away in the evening for board games or work functions. I may have to reconsider the meal kits from Linas matkasse soon, or else there won’t be any room for me to choose what to cook!