Adrian eating ice cream.

He still doesn’t like cow’s milk, refuses cheese on his quiches and grilled sandwiches, prefers his dairy-free “butter” to real butter and soy “yoghurt” to the real thing. But when it comes to ice cream he is perfectly happy to eat dairy ice cream. And when real yoghurt has Star Wars imagery on it, it also suddenly becomes delicious.

Going the extra mile for dinner and de-stringing sugar snap peas.

Autumn break, and Ingrid said she’d rather be at home with me than at fritids, so that’s what we’re doing.

This is my breakfast. My favourite breakfast during the cold season is porridge. We make our own porridge mix. The details vary but it’s a mixture of 1/3 rolled oats and 2/3 other “stuff” (barley, spelt, wheat, rye, flaxseed etc – pick any two or three).

Sometimes I eat my porridge with jam, but there are still fresh Swedish apples to be found in the supermarket so currently I make it with finely diced apples instead. And a generous chunk of butter. Awesomely good.

Adrian and I made kladdkaka for his birthday. It’s a kind of Swedish chocolate mud cake and it’s his favourite kind of cake.

Ingrid likes making potato gratin. It’s about the only dish she can make. And potato gratin is one of Adrian’s absolute favourite foods, so it’s a win-win situation! This time she decorated Adrian’s gratin (which differs from ours because it does not have grated cheese on top) with A-shaped potato pieces.

I found a bag of dried figs in the pantry. They had probably been there a while. Much of the sugar in them had crystallized on the surface. They were delicious.

This is one of my few splurges: spending silly amounts of money almost daily on the best fresh, seasonal fruit I can find. When we get home in the afternoon, the kids and I eat fruit until it’s almost coming out of our ears. It starts with all kinds of berries during early summer. Those were followed by peaches and nectarines, and now we’ve come to apricots and plums.

Ingrid has swim camp this week. Tomorrow is the last day and Ingrid wanted to make sweets to share with the other kids and the leaders.

These are traditional Swedish sweets commonly called dammsugare, meaning “vacuum cleaners”. Some say the name comes from the way they resemble old vacuum cleaners. Others claim it’s because these sweets function as vacuum cleaners because they use up all the leftover pieces of cake, the ends and edges and crumbs that would otherwise be thrown away in a bakery.

Dammsugare consist of an inner core made of cake crumbs, butter, some cocoa powder, and a few carefully counted drops of arrack essence.

That core is wrapped in a skin of marzipan. Traditionally, dammsugare just have to be green. Occasionally someone makes pink or white ones but they just look wrong to me! You can actually buy green marzipan in Swedish supermarkets, in convenient rolled-out sheets, because green marzipan is also essential for Sweden’s most popular cake, the princess cake. But we made our own from plain marzipan and green food colouring. Kneading the colouring into the marzipan was hard and boring work for Ingrid so she left it marbled, which looked quite decorative. The colour evened out with time so they became plainer overnight.

Finally the ends of each roll are dipped in melted chocolate.

Today was cherry picking day!

Our cherry tree is unpredictable. I think we last had a great harvest three years ago. We got almost no cherries last year, or the year before. This year’s harvest was pretty OK.

Ingrid and Adrian quickly divided up our two step ladders and got started. In fact I believe that for them, climbing on ladders is the best part of the whole cherry picking thing.

My job was to help stabilize the stepladders (especially the taller one is a bit wobbly) and to ooh and aah over all the cherries the kids got. Adrian especially loved showing off how much he had picked.

Once we started picking we noticed that the quantity may be OK this year but the quality was not so good at all. We always have to throw some out because the birds have been at them. But this year, many cherries had a different kind of damage: they had split because of the rain we’ve been having all throughout June and July. I can’t recall having seen that before.

Today I learned that commercial growers actually use helicopters to blow-dry their cherries to keep them from cracking. Luckily for us, we don’t need our cherries to look perfect or to store well, so we kept many of the cracked berries for making jam and syrup.

Here’s the cherry sorting station, where Eric sorts them into three groups: undamaged, damaged but OK, and inedible.

Cherry jam is awesome. But we still have a fair amount of jam left from three years ago, so we don’t need any more.

Cherry pie is probably the next best thing you can make out of cherries, so that’s what I did.

Adrian likes dark chocolate. We always have a stash of Lindt Excellence at home for both baking and snacking. Currently there were two open packages, one of 70% and one 85%. Adrian was unsure which to choose (his real favourite is their Madagascar variety) so we had a mini chocolate tasting. The 70% version won.