I had a free evening today; Eric picked up the kids and took care of dinner etc.

My afternoons and evenings are always stressful. From around 15:00 until after dinner, I’m always watching the clock, calculating and scheduling to make sure I get everything done on time. I need to get my job done, so I cannot leave too early – but I also need to pick up Adrian in time, and buy and prepare dinner, and make sure everyone gets to their activities in time. Dinner sometimes needs to be early, and sometimes it cannot be early, because the activities are at different times every day. I feel like a slave to the clock.

So it is extra nice to be able to let go of all that occasionally. To cycle fast only because I enjoy it and not because I am in a hurry. To cycle slowly when I feel like it. To go out for a leisurely restaurant dinner.

Today’s dinner was at Lao Wai, a vegan Chinese restaurant that’s been a favourite of mine for twenty years already. I used to eat there regularly when I was a student because it’s very close to the university. The one and only waiter looks just the same as he did twenty years ago, maybe a tiny bit rounder in the face. Out of curiosity I asked him how long the restaurant has been there. Twenty-five years this month, he told me. I hope they keep going for another twenty-five.

Fresh bread.

I’m a food snob, and bread is one of the foods I am snobbiest about. Most Swedish supermarket bread is barely worth eating – flavourless and with the mouth feel of a dry, loose sponge. Many upmarket “artisanal” breads are no better – expensive and with lots of very crusty crust and lots of big sourdoughy holes, but still without much flavour.

Eric’s breads on the other hand are so good that I can eat them every day and still not tire. Most of them I eat with only butter. There is no need for cheese or anything like that.

The bread in the photo, a scalded rye loaf with sunflower seeds and caraway seeds, is my absolute favourite. There are others that have more yummy things in them, but this one has the perfect balance between everything.

It was Ingrid’s turn to make dinner, and she picked one of her and Adrian’s favourites: stuffed bell peppers.

That whole dish has kind of come to belong to Ingrid. Both kids love her version, which is the same every time. If I tweaked it in any way (which I would, if I were to cook it) it could not be anything but inferior.

We were talking about plums, and that led to Eric baking a plum cake. And that led to me also baking a plum cake, because Eric’s was going to be yummy but not the kind of plum cake that I was craving.

I want my fruit cakes to have lots of big, luscious, juicy chunks of fruit in them. A cake should have enough batter to give it some structural integrity, but not much more – there should ideally be more fruit than cake. Quite often I decide that the amount of fruit in the recipe is ridiculously small and double it.

So we had two plum cakes, and it was interesting to see just how different they could be. Eric’s was like a loaf of banana bread but with plums instead of bananas: spicy, very moist, but with no clear plum flavour. Mine was dense, heavy, and with distinct pieces of plum.

Mine also had half a cup of sweet plum wine in it. (The recipe called for madeira, probably because most people don’t have plum wine at home…) Adrian tried the batter before I added the wine, and then the finished cake, and said the wine totally destroyed the cake. Eric and I thought it was the best batter ever.

Upside down plum cake (Swedish)

Redcurrants also go well with feta cheese, melon, cucumber and mint leaves.

It is mind-numbingly hot and a salad is the only thing that I could imagine actually eating for dinner.

This July was the hottest July in Sweden since records began 260 years ago, and thus far August isn’t turning out much better. My feet are swollen, my brain is working at half power, and I wish we could have normal summer weather instead.

I have more redcurrants right now than I know what to do with, so I’m trying them on everything. For dinner today, I made an aubergine, onion, coconut and cashew something that was (according to the recipe) supposed to be served with pomegranate seeds, which I replaced with redcurrants. It came out great; redcurrants are a perfect replacement for pomegranate.

I also discovered that if you photograph food – not ingredients but cooked food – up close enough, it begins to look alien and almost icky. Like insect macros. We never see food at that scale, so it doesn’t look like food any more. You’ll have to trust me when I say that it tasted way better than it looks here.

The scouts, and other hangers-around at the camp such as myself, took turns to try our hand at baking traditional Hälsingland flatbread, with the help of a local expert. I enjoyed the result.

When I was a child, the cake I always had for my birthday was a redcurrant merengue cake. We couldn’t find any redcurrants today, so this is a raspberry and blackberry merengue cake.

Back then, a birthday with just one cake was no birthday. My other cake was often an upside-down pineapple cake (without any artificial-looking canned cherries) or a kringel, which is a filled and braided bread. The internet seems to think it should be filled with cinnamon, but I remember raisins and chopped nuts and a chocolatey glaze.

For today, we chose a flat walk. From Bärenau a local bus took us to the Zillergrund dam, and from there we walked along the reservoir lake to Hohenaualm and back.


Hohenaualm has a Tibetan theme, with prayer wheels and flags. It’s a small and rustic hut, very cosy and pretty but unfortunately not at all familiar with vegetarianism. Which I guess is kind of in keeping with the whole Tibetan theme. They served sausages and cheeses of various kinds, and that was that.

We tried a cheese platter with a local “gray cheese”. It had a potent smell and didn’t taste particularly good. At least it came with some bread and pickled cucumbers.

Adrian ordered “sausages and bread” which we all expected to look vaguely like a hot dog, but it was truly sausages and bread – two wiener sausages and two slices of white bread.

We thought that perhaps the bigger huts near the start of the hike would have more choice for us, so we hiked back. They had more choice, but were no more prepared for vegetarians than the cottage at the end of the road. The two options on the menu for us were French fries, or pancakes, so that’s what we had for lunch.

The locals are very, very fond of pancakes. Their version is called Kaiserschmarrn, and it’s to pancakes like scrambled eggs is to an omelette: it’s a scrambled pancake. Quite sweet to begin with, then covered with mounds of icing sugar and served with a large bowl of jam on the side (preferably apple sauce). Tastes quite good when you first try it but when you have to eat a whole large platter of it or go hungry then it’s not quite so appealing any more…

Eggs, new potatoes and herring are givens for a Swedish midsummer. Devilled eggs are by far the most delicious, festive way to serve eggs, so we make them every year. New potatoes need no fancy preparations whatsoever to be delicious. Today we served them with a luxurious summer salad of avocados, asparagus, sugar snaps, pine nuts and strawberries.