We eat a lot of broccoli.

Broccoli is one of the few vegetables that Adrian truly likes. The rest of us are also favourably disposed towards it, so we eat it frequently. I believe in the benefits of eating veggies while Adrian, left to his own devices, mostly prefers pure carbs (pasta, potatoes, bread etc). So I try my best to make the vegetable part of each meal appealing to him. I can integrate broccoli into just about any meal.

When the broccoli is inside a dish such as a soup, casserole, pasta bake or muffins, I can use the entire broccoli, with stem and everything. But when it’s a side order for a quick dinner with potatoes and fish fingers for example, the stem often gets left over. So we have a permanent queue of leftover broccoli stems in the veggie drawer in the fridge, waiting to be snuck into some soup or other.

Pasta bake.

Learning point for me: give Ingrid a proper recipe to follow. An ingredient list with rough notes is not enough, and just means that she has to ask me about every single step, probably multiple times.

It’s Thursday so it was Ingrid’s turn to cook dinner again.

Today we got hajkbomb, which is a meal that probably only those with a background in Swedish scouting will recognize. It’s a meal designed to be cooked over the hot coals of a campfire, but a normal kitchen oven works equally well. A “bomb” is an aluminium foil package filled with any kind of ingredients: chopped vegetables, potatoes, meat if you prefer, etc. (Potatoes and other harder veggies need to be pre-cooked.)

As is often the case, Ingrid likes things to be the same as they normally are, so the hike bombs in our family always consist of potatoes, salmon, bell peppers and one or two other child-friendly vegetables.

It’s a quick and simple meal and would probably take me about half an hour to prepare, plus some time in the oven. Peel and dice the potatoes, chop the rest while the potatoes are cooking, wrap into foil packages, season, done.

It took absolutely forever for Ingrid. 80 minutes, to be precise. I was so bored and itching to actually do something (other than hover around and be ready to help her when needed, remind her to turn off the stove, etc). I was needed often enough that I couldn’t go off and read a book for example, but not often enough to actually keep me busy. I could perhaps have been even more hands off and let her figure more things out on her own, but everybody was so hungry that I felt I needed to direct her a bit to speed things up somewhat.

It was just like watching a junior programmer take an hour to painstakingly solve a task that in my mind should take all of 10 minutes. Excruciating. Frustrating.

But just like a junior programmer can’t get any faster unless they get to spend that hour on a 10-minute task, Ingrid can’t learn to cook unless she gets to practise, on her own, without me interrupting to tell her how to do things faster.

In fact the process of cooking this dinner reminded me of pair programming. The senior programmer takes on the navigator role – keeping an eye on the goal, making sure the pair stays on the right track, warning of upcoming obstacles. The junior programmer does all the actual coding. Just like we cooked: me making sure we are moving in the right direction, Ingrid performing all the actual cooking.

We redistributed the kids’ chores. Ingrid used to lay the table for all shared meals. Now that Adrian is old enough to help out as well, he takes over that responsibility. Ingrid cooks dinner once a week instead.

Ingrid is happier about her responsibility than Adrian is about his. He’s never had any real chores, so it will take some getting used to. Ingrid on the other hand helped me make a list of possible tasks, then analysed the list and picked one that suited her best. It happens at predictable times and can be planned in advance (unlike for example taking out the garbage), does not happen during her screen time, makes her feel grown up, and has the potential of being fun.

Today: sweetcorn fritters.

The one meal that the (a) loves and (b) can cook almost on his own.

Too busy unpacking, shopping, cooking and entertaining to have any time left for spending on photography.

Our 2nd year of making gingerbread houses. Ambitions were higher this year; no store-bought kits here any more! The kids and I designed our own houses and actually managed to assemble them all (which was not a given, considering how crooked some of the pieces were).

I don’t understand how people manage to assemble these houses with icing. We tried, and after 10 or 15 minutes it had still not set fully. So we scraped it all off and went back to last year’s method using melted sugar. Much faster and more robust.

I was so annoyed by the icing that I threw it all out, so we went back to store-bought icing for decorations. It doesn’t flow very well so it’s hard to get the lines nice and even. Next year I think it’ll be sugar for glueing but homemade icing for decoration.

We had our traditional annual Christmas baking day and made gingerbread cookies and lussebullar and mince pies. All turned out delicious, as usual: each recipe has been tweaked over the years until it is so good that we cannot think of any way to improve them. The gingerbread cookies are seriously spicy, the saffron buns plump and fluffy and flavourful.

We’ve gotten a bit bored with just making the same old same old each year, so the saffron buns get more and more fanciful in design, and the gingerbread cookies more and more decorated. This year’s bun designs included Minecraft-themed picks, axes and hoes. Adrian joined us in decorating cookies for the first time (it takes some strength and dexterity) and made non-traditional designs – such as green blobs, and using the glaze as glue to stick cookies on top of each other.

Dark chocolate brittle with chopped almonds, dried figs, cranberries and apricots, and mini-marshmallows.