Adrian and I are on a short break in London.

I went with Ingrid six years ago (to see saw Hamilton and various sights). Now it’s Adrian’s turn.

The weather forecast promises rain for all of our four days here, although the prognosis has been improving the closer we get. Just a few days ago, the forecast for Friday and Saturday was torrential downpour; now it’s down to just fairly rainy. It was raining as we got to our hotel, but the afternoon was supposed to be one of a few dry-ish periods, so we headed out to see the town. To get the proper London experience, we took a double-decker bus from East London through the City to Trafalgar Square.

Saw Big Ben and Westminster Abbey; walked past Whitehall and a guard change, then onwards through St James Park. Debated whether the large white birds we saw in the distance were really pelicans, which seemed unlikely. Adrian argued that they were swans, but the shape was all wrong. It was getting dim and the birds weren’t posing very well, but Google confirmed that there are indeed pelicans in St James Park.

Buckingham palace, then along Piccadilly to Chinatown.

Tons of tourists everywhere. It’s autumn break in more places than Stockholm, I guess, although a lot of the tourists were not of an age to be there for a school break. I wonder if there is any space for locals left at all in central London. It definitely wasn’t like this when I lived here. I am contributing to the problem myself, and this does rather confirm my general preference for holidaying in less popular spots, outside of big cities.

We stopped by Fortnum & Mason on our way, and it is now more of a tourist attraction than a department store. Hysterically garish, rather crowded. Worth it, though – I now have an authentic English Christmas pudding for this Christmas!

This trip was for Adrian’s sake maybe even more than mine (although I do love London) and one of his wishes was to eat typical British food. We had Pret sandwiches for lunch, and ate dinner at an Indian restaurant in East London. (That one was too dim for photos.)

No afternoon tea, but we did treat ourselves to very decadent donuts at Donutelier

It’s the end of October and still warm enough to sit outside, even for me.

One of my favourite Estonian foods is karask, a barley bread with sour milk.

It wasn’t a staple when I was a child, but my mum made it a few times. Now it’s come back as a commercial product – not in every supermarket, but some do sell it, as well as some artisanal bakeries and food market stalls.

For some reason I’ve never tried making my own, until very recently. I made a first batch a couple of weeks ago, and another one this weekend.

What made this one even better than a standard karask was the addition of quark to the batter. Barley is great, quark is great, the combination is even better.

These days quark is a health food: all low-fat or no-fat, marketed for its high protein content, homogenized into a smooth, creamy mass for easy consumption. Back when I was a child, Estonian quark was a solid, dense, rich product. The richer version was 12% fat, I believe, while the skinny kind was 6%. It was sold in paper-wrapped pats, kind of like you’d buy butter today.

I ran across old-school tvorog at the Baltic store. Sold in one-kilogram blocks, grainy and solid, just like it’s supposed to be. Not Estonian but Latvian, I believe (didn’t look to closely at the packaging) but still – what a find. Half of the one-kilo package immediately went into a double recipe of quark karask. The other half is in the freezer for when I bake another batch.

Served warm, with butter and – by suggestion of the recipe page – honey. I never had honey on my karask before but why not.

Brewery tour and beer tasting evening at Omnipollos kyrka with Active Solution.

Kind of fun, mostly because this brewery is fun and irreverent in their approach to everything. It was founded by two people, one “beer person” and one artist. Now the beer person brew experimental crazy beer, and the artist person makes art for each new beer. Apparently the first beer they submitted to Systembolaget caused serious head-scratching because the label they sent over was just art and didn’t even include the name of the beer.

We had dinner (with beer), then a tour of the brewery as well as of the atelier in the attic. Then a long beer-tasting session, which I abandoned halfway through. Most beer is undrinkable to me, and I don’t much enjoy drunken company either.

They had some interesting alcohol-free beer, one with mango flavour and one with blueberry. I did enjoy those with my dinner. Sadly but expectedly, those were not part of the tasting.

Ingrid’s birthday was on an away week. We had an extra mini-celebration today, since she’s here now. With Estonian cake! (From the Baltic shop in Sollentuna.)

Did I remember to take photos of the celebration, the presents, or the eating of cake? No, I did not.

The flowering quince harvest was good this year. Lots of large, even fruit.

I was going to make candied quince. Eric has been doing this in the past but now it’s up to me. I clearly don’t have his Fingerspitzengefühl for preserving – it was a failure. The first step in the recipe is to cook the fruit for “a short while” to soften it. I felt like I had barely gotten the water all the way to boiling and the fruit had already turned into mush. Next time I will try just pouring boiling syrup on the fruit straight away, no cooking them.

There was no rescuing that – it was too mushy to even strain – but I also didn’t want to throw it all away, neither the fruit nor the work. So I added more sugar, cooked it all a few more minutes, and pureed it all. Now I have some kind of quince sauce – runny, because of all the water, and not as sweet as jam. Might go well with yoghurt or oatmeal, I guess?

The local Facebook group had a post offering plums. Almost discreetly begging people to come and pick more. So I went and picked some. The plums were small, but juicy and flavourful.

When I saw the tree in question, I understood the near-begging. The tree was overloaded with plums – and of course anything that doesn’t get picked ends up falling on the lawn and then rotting there. Cherries, like we have in our garden, are small and can almost disappear into the ground, whereas squished overripe plums make the whole lawn rather slimy.

Stuff is broken at work. Stuff that impacts our work immensely but is entirely outside of my circle of control; there is nothing I can do to fix it. I can only watch the alerts go off constantly and the graphs all point in the wrong direction. And I can turn things off and back on again at regular intervals to minimise the damage. I’m like a data administrator from the previous century, pressing buttons to refresh my numbers and then manually twiddling knobs in response.

It’s simultaneously stressful and boring. There’s no way I can focus on any of my actual work while this is going on, but I can absolutely make pancakes in between clicking stuff, so that’s what I’m doing to add some cheer to my day.

It’s harvest season for Swedish fruit and many vegetables. Apples, pears, more apples. Tomatoes, spinach, leeks, string beans.

The Coop supermarket in central Spånga is pretty bad at seasonal vegetables, beyond fruit, but even they have had some Swedish stuff. The “new” Large Coop has more, so I’ve been making the trek there whenever I want to buy fruit and veg.

Tomatoes don’t get sold by variety, it’s just “Swedish vine tomatoes”. The pears are Clara Friis. I’ve already forgotten the name of the one apple variety, but the other one is Discovery, which is one of my favourites.

Making a batch of sourdough bread and discovering, again, to no surprise, that my “room temperature” is not the same as cookbooks’ “room temperature”. I ended up turning on the oven before I really needed it and then positioning the bowl with the dough right where some of the hot air leaked out at the edges of the oven door.

There are all sorts of half-forgotten odds and ends in the pantry and the fridge. Ingredients needed for a single recipe, two-thirds of the package left over afterwards. Things that sounded interesting and were tried once and turned out to be so-so but not bad enough to be thrown out. Stuff that Eric liked more than I did so they’re never my first pick.

I prefer not to throw out food that there’s nothing wrong with. I’d rather find some use for it, if I can. Sneak it into a meal together with something else, a little bit at a time.

It might be a hopeless project – it’ll take me forever. Every other week there’s just me here, and I just don’t need an awful lot of food, and I’m also not spending all my time eating the forgotten stuff. Most of the time I’d rather eat something I really want to eat. But occasionally I remind myself to look at the odds and ends and pick something and do something with it.

It’s taken me until now to finish this cereal that’s been lying around since Eric left the house. It’s the most boring cereal I’ve encountered. Doesn’t taste bad, just… really boring. But with fresh fruit and a sprinkle of nice granola over it, it’s OK.

Is it silly to not have thrown it out? Probably. I chose to eat it anyway.