Counter-intuitive allergy experience of the day: it is safer for me to eat butter than to eat margarine, even though butter is 100% made from milk (OK, water and salt, too). Butter is milk fat only and does not appear to have any significant amounts of milk protein left in it. Not enough to trigger allergic symptoms in Adrian, at least. Margarine on the other hand is an unpredictable mixture of stuff, often including skimmed milk powder or whey powder, both of which do contain milk protein. So when a restaurant serves margarine with their bread, I skip it; when they serve butter, I eat it.

The day before yesterday I ate a small chunk of goat’s cheese with my dinner. No complaints from Adrian. Yesterday I boldly ate a slice of cheese after breakfast, another small chunk of goat’s at lunch, and finally two slices of cheese in the afternoon. That was apparently too much; Adrian woke and cried a lot during the night. No cheese sandwiches for now.

Butter on the other hand is now tried and tested and works well. I love butter. Just plain good bread with butter on is delicious.

Today the builders finished their work, packed up their stuff and went home. Just in time for the weekend, and just in time for my vacation! (Today was my last day at work, I’m on vacation for the next four weeks.)

The very last thing they did was sand the floor in the old hall. When they started work in there, back in January, they tore up the laminate flooring, and the glued cork tiles beneath them, and uncovered the original pine planks at the bottom. The cork layer had been glued right on top of the pine and left ugly patches everywhere. For half a year the floor looked atrocious. But now after sanding it is pristine again, and looks lovely.

We now have pine plank floors in all three rooms on the ground floor, as well as that hall. In the old living room the floor is varnished; in the other rooms the new floors are untreated as yet. We have ambitious plans to leave them that way and simply care for them by scrubbing them with linseed oil soap, which both cleans and protects the floor, a bit like oiling it.

You can see this kind of floor in some old Swedish houses, and after a hundred years it both looks and feels wonderful – silvery gray and satiny smooth. This is especially nice if you walk around barefoot at home, like us. I’ve been told that it doesn’t take a hundred years to get there. Should the floors not turn out nice, we can always change our minds later and treat them with oil.

Today I gave the newly-sanded floor its first scrubbing. Now the hall smells of linseed oil soap. To me it smells like a very old but well-cared house, like an old rural schoolhouse that’s been turned into a museum, or an old Estonian farmhouse. A very cosy smell.

If you can read Swedish, you can learn about using soap for floor care from Skansen.

This summer’s favourite recipe is a rhubarb crumble with sunflower seeds and almond paste. I love its flavourful chewy crunchiness. I think I’ve made five or six of them this summer already. Here it is:

4–5 rhubarb stalks
1/2 dl sugar (the original had more but came out too sweet for my taste)
3 dl rolled oats
1 dl sunflower seeds
100 g almond paste
100 g butter

Cut the rhubarb in pieces of 1 to 2 cm. Put them in a saucepan, add water so it barely covers the rhubarb, and bring to boil. Pour off the water. Spread the rhubarb in a pie dish and sprinkle the sugar on top.

Mix oats, sunflower seeds, butter and almond paste into a crumbly mass, and crumble it over the pie. Bake in 200°C for 15 to 20 minutes.

Here’s the original recipe.

I had butter on my bread yesterday evening. Adrian has not yet reacted to it. Yippee!

A busy day: it feels like these remaining days are my last chance to get things done at home.

Some more painting of the play house while Adrian slept. Playgroup. Supermarket. Went to the hardware store to see if I could borrow their fan deck of NCS colours. (Unfortunately he answer was no, because they’ve lost too many of those expensive decks, despite taking down folks’ names and numbers.) Weeded and dug through the top layer of soil in two of our planting boxes with strawberries.

Adrian has, in the last few days, started to demand solid food. Previously I’d just put him in his highchair and give him some food when I wanted to eat, so he could get used to the concept, have some fun, and we’d keep each other company. But now he has been fussy and I’ve gone through my checklist (sleep? boredom? breast? nappy?) and then offered him food, and seen him wolf it down. His and my meal schedules are thus no longer in sync, so I’ve spent more time than usual preparing food and cleaning up him and the kitchen afterwards.

I’d planned to take Ingrid shoe shopping after preschool but she was not at all amenable to that. Too hot (it was another hot and sunny day) or too tired or hungry or thirsty, or all of that – in any case she was in a very precarious mood all the way home. Then we put a picnic blanket under the cherry tree, I made us both some smoothies with frozen raspberries and blueberries, bananas, and apple juice, and we relaxed together. She felt much better after that.

I noticed wasps on the kitchen windows on at least five separate occasions, and never in any other part of the house, or near the door. Now I’m wondering if they have a nest somewhere inside the walls there – there are gaps around and beneath the newly installed windows, and they could be coming out of those. If that’s the case we will have to plug those holes quickly.

(Actually I missed one wasps’ nest in my list yesterday – we also found an old, abandoned one above the ceiling of the old veranda. I guess wasps really like our house.)

After one of the really nice dinners at the restaurant Rustico in Maspalomas, I realized it had tasted so great because the fish was swimming in a little puddle of melted butter. Oops. I steeled myself for a bout of serious crying from Adrian – and it never came. Looks like a little bit of butter is OK. Perhaps his intolerance is improving.

When we were back home again, I took a deep breath and experimented with a bit of parmesan on my pasta one evening. Still no problem.

So now I’m thinking. If Adrian can tolerate a limited amount of milk protein, what should I eat? What gives me most bang for the buck, so to say? The most taste for the least amount of milk protein? Butter is a good bet I guess, because it’s mostly fat and should not have much protein at all. And it tastes SO much better than the milk-free spread. What else?

Unlike the average Swedish parent, I cook dinner every evening, if at all possible. And I mean a proper dinner, from proper ingredients. Fish fingers and rice and peas is not a proper dinner; cheese sauce from a powdered mix is not a proper ingredient.

I enjoy cooking, but there’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation. I’m not sure if I cook so often because I enjoy it, or if I enjoy it because I’ve done it so much that I am by now pretty good at it.

Tradition is a part of it. I grew up with home-cooked food since that’s the only thing that was available in Soviet Estonia. There was no takeaway pizza and no frozen meals. Somewhere deep down inside I feel that home-cooked meals are an essential part of what home is all about.

I took a break from this habit in London. We ate ready meals quite often while we lived there. It was convenient, we could afford it, there was a lot of choice, and the food tasted good. I still miss M&S’s vegetarian moussaka with lentils, and the Pizza Express pizzas, and Sainsbury’s pumpkin ravioli, and Waitrose’s canneloni. Here in Sweden there’s almost nothing available. Tasteless, boring frozen fish gratins and pasta with chicken. So we’re back to home cooked meals.

But it’s also because I’m a picky eater. No, that’s not quite the right term. “Food snob” is also a bit wrong. What I mean is that I find it difficult to motivate myself to eat dull, uninspiring, boring, monotonous, low-quality food.

I suspect this is physiological more than psychological. In general I get pretty clear signals from my body. Now that I’m dairy-free I find myself desiring nuts and pulses almost every day, and occasionally I’d suddenly get a craving for eggs or sushi – my body telling me it needs protein. Most of the time my body wants fresh vegetables and a decent amount of fat, and moist, juicy food. My pregnancy cravings were for yogurt and juicy fruit.

I always try to bring a lunch box to work, because the food at the lunch restaurants around the office is so boring, and the choice for a sushitarian so narrow. After a few days of restaurant lunches I tended to find myself thinking “Oh bother, do I really need to eat lunch today again?” and waiting until well past normal lunchtime until I was starving, to make the food seem more appealing.

With dull food, I tend to eat enough to not be hungry any more, but not enough to be properly full. Then I’m peckish again after a while and snack on something that has immediate appeal – something semi-sweet and reasonably fatty. It may be uninspiring but it’s satisfying on a baser level. And my metabolism is such that I can do it without any ill effects on my weight.

For this reason I also try to make sure that there are leftovers at home for lunch. If there aren’t any, I’ll end up subsisting on sandwiches and snacks that day.

I notice that frequently, now that I cannot eat dairy products. While I’m breastfeeding I need five or six meals a day. Breakfast, lunch, a light snack (such as fruit), a bigger snack, dinner, a late-night snack. Before I figured out Adrian’s milk protein intolerance, the snacks were often either a sandwich or some cereal. Cereal is off the table for now, and the choice of meat- and dairy-free sandwich materials is quite limited. So when I’m tired of my two fish-based spreads, and of hummus and avocado, I fall back on peanut butter and honey on rye bread for my 11-o’clock-at-night sandwich. It does the job.

Now I’m getting tired of sugar. I never thought I’d see the day. I’m not one to binge on ice cream or candy – I’m a snob here as well, I’d rather eat small amounts of good-quality stuff. But I’ve always liked my desserts, jam on porridge and on pancakes, orange juice for breakfast and so on. Home-made jam… mmm. Brämhults orange juice… another mmm. But a few weeks ago I started having juicy water for breakfast, because juice straight up was just too sweet. Now I’ve tired of jam on my porridge. Luckily we have berries in the freezer since the summer – redcurrants and blueberries with a small amount of sugar make a perfect porridge topping. When we run out of those, I’ll have to see what’s available in the supermarket, or see if dried fruit works (I suspect I might find it too sweet). On the other hand I’m sure that porridge with no topping will be way too dull.

Yep, it’s milk sensitivity all right.

I’ve been on a milk-free diet for the past three weeks. Adrian’s general state and disposition has improved immensely during this time. He behaves like a normal baby (as far as I can tell). He cries when he is unhappy with his current situation, but it is almost always possible to deduce what is bothering him, and fix it.

But perhaps this was just a coincidence? Perhaps he just outgrew whatever problem he had?

Now Christmas is lurking around the corner and it is time to bake gingerbread cookies and saffron buns. This weekend the question arose: do we have to bake our gingerbread cookies with margarine instead of butter, and to look for a recipe for milk-free saffron buns? We needed a decision on the milk-free diet.

So today I did a milk provocation / challenge: I ate what I would eat on a normal day when I’m not avoiding milk. Milk in the breakfast porridge, and a glass of milk on the side; butter on my sandwiches; a yoghurt for my afternoon snack. Yum.

By 5 o’clock in the afternoon there had been no signs of adverse reaction. I was already celebrating in my mind, thinking of all the nice stuff I can eat again. My mouth was watering just from thinking of it all.

Then at 6, The Screaming was back. Adrian woke, fed, and the moment he stopped eating, he started crying. Reflux, arching his back, painful burps, inconsolable crying until he finally fell asleep, and then some more reflux while he was sleeping.

I don’t know which felt worse: to see him in such pain again, or to know that I will not be eating any of the nice stuff for a long time.

And I really like milk and milk products! I am one of a very few people among my acquaintances who actually drinks milk with meals. Used to drink, that is.

After the situation stabilizes again, the next step will be cautious experiments with goat’s and sheep’s milk products. Cheeses are easy to find, but I wonder if it’s possible to buy, say, cream or yogurt made of sheep’s milk. Can you even make sheep milk yogurt?

1.
I’ve been experimenting with a milk-free diet now since last Friday, hypothesizing that perhaps Adrian’s tummy troubles are caused by a milk protein allergy / oversensitivity. Apparently reflux can sometimes be due to milk allergy. Given how much his reflux is hurting all of us, it’s definitely worth a try. Since I cook almost all our meals from scratch anyway, it’s not difficult, really, just a bit frustrating. I like yoghurt, and cheese, and creamy sauces, and milk in my porridge.

Friday afternoon I forgot my diet and took some cinnamon swirls from the freezer, and for Sunday lunch I grabbed some leftover leeks in white sauce before I realized that white sauce is mostly milk. But apart from those lapses I haven’t ingested anything with milk in it.

And I do think it may be working. He’s been mostly scream-free since Monday: four days now. There’s some crying now and again, but not the endless inconsolable screaming we used to get. Last time I thought I saw an improvement it lasted two days only. I don’t yet dare to think that this is the new normal, but it is very nice while it lasts.

2.
Meanwhile Adrian has hit a growth spurt and is eating every 2 hours during the day (and every 3 hours, occasionally 3.5) at night. I feel like a milk machine. He barely has time to get a nap before he wakes up hungry again.

He’s already outgrown his size 50 bodies and now size 56, too. Next week he’ll be getting his 2-month checkup and we’ll find out what he weighs.

Michael Pollan is the author of the best advice about food I’ve ever read or heard:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

He first expressed this in Unhappy Meals, an essay in NY Times Magazine back in 2007. I found myself agreeing so strongly with everything in the essay that I bought the book. Then I read the book, and again I found myself vigorously agreeing with every single page. This is such a sensible book that I wish it was mandatory reading for everybody. In fact just skimming through the book now while reviewing it makes me want to re-read it.

Part 1 of the book talks about “the age of nutritionism”: how food was reduced by scientists to collection of nutrients, which we’re always told to eat more or less of. Great news for the producers of processed foods – and bad news for us, since instead of just enjoying our food, most people are confused, obsessed and worried about what they eat. Unfortunately all this advice rests on a very weak foundation – the last few decades’ prevailing advice to “eat less fat” was essentially a huge experiment, and is now looking like a failure.

Part 2 talks about “the Western diet”: how our relationship to our food has changed over the last 150 years. We’ve gone from whole foods to refined, from complex food chains of wide variety to simple monocultures, from quality to quantity, from leaves to seeds, and from food culture to food science.

Part 3, “Getting over nutritionism”, goes back to those seven words of advice and expands them into more tangible pointers. What does it mean to “eat food”? How can you help yourself not eat too much?

For a contrarian viewpoint, check out In Defense of Food Isn’t About Nutrition (a review), according to which Pollan’s book is mostly “the desire to show off beating out scientific thinking”.

Amazon US, Amazon UK, Adlibris, Adlibris (Swedish translation).