This weekend, due to my own carelessness, I bought one of the most pointless food items ever: soup with an energy content of 26 kcal per 100g.

Now you may not be too aware of calories and such. For your information, orange juice and milk contain ca 50 kcal per 100g. One slice of wholegrain bread is around 70–100 kcal. A banana is ca 130 kcal.

So someone has actually created a soup with less energy than orange juice. The whole 600g pot is a meal that provides less energy than two slices of bread. I believe it probably took me more energy to carry the soup home than I would get from eating it!

Stomach volume is at a premium right now, since Blump is taking up a lot of space. It would be entirely too easy to not eat enough because I feel stuffed after relatively small meals, which is why I try to pay some attention my calorie intake. And therefore I don’t think I can afford to waste the equivalent space of 3 glasses of juice on something that would give me marginally more energy than one large banana. Besides, unlike juice, the soup won’t even be fresh or thirst-quenching. Much though I dislike to throw away food, I think this pot of soup is simply not worth eating.

The hunger that first alerted me to my pregnancy continues and and has grown to absurd proportions.

When it comes on at full strength, it is deafening, driving out all other thought other than itself. It is so insistent that I cannot think about anything except that I MUST. HAVE. FOOD. RIGHT. NOW. On the days when I have gone out to buy a sandwich for my second lunch, I have found myself wondering, on the way back, whether it is really necessary to wait until I’m all the way back in the office… perhaps I could tear into the sandwich right there and then, in the street. It feels like I have been starving for many days, whereas in fact about two, possibly two and a half hours have passed since I last ate.

I eat four full meals a day – breakfast, lunch, another lunch, dinner. In fact if you count all the snacks as well, I probably eat about eight times a day. Or actually, to be more precise, I eat pretty much all the time. Not only am I hungry, but my blood sugar level seems to be doing funny things. I need injections of sugar quite frequently, so I eat lots of fruit.

Pre-breakfast snack (a yoghurt or some dry cereal)
Breakfast (double sandwich, orange juice)
Fruit
Mid-morning snack (banana / yoghurt / müllerice / cereal bar)
Lunch
Fruit
Afternoon snack
Another lunch
Fruit
Dinner
Late evening snack

No cravings, thus far. A strong preference for dairy, fruit and vegetables, even more marked than usual – if that’s possible after 15 years of vegetarian living. I used to eat seafood occasionally, maybe once every one or two weeks, and fish maybe once a month. I haven’t wanted any fish at all in the past few weeks. Yoghurt in particular feels very good. When I am hungry but have a feeling that I don’t really want to eat, if you see what I mean, a yoghurt awakens the appetite very nicely. Raw fruit and veg likewise. Carrots… fruit juice… mmm.

On the other hand I have lost all taste for high-calorie snacks: sweets, chocolate, chips, cakes. I had been trying to gain weight for a while through regular consumption of chocolate croissants and cakes. The weight gain effort was rather unsuccessful in the end, but it gave me a habit of afternoon cakes. That is now completely gone. I tried potato chips the other day, didn’t like the taste at all, and gave up after two of them.

I haven’t felt any real nausea either, for which I am very grateful. I do feel an almost constant low-level queasiness, but that’s probably due to this constant eating and the fluctuations in blood sugar. Sharp juicy fruits, such as mandarins, seem to help.

For the first time in years, I am actually enjoying grocery shopping.

We have two supermarkets in the neighbourhood, both less than 10 minutes away by bike. One is a Sainsbury’s, and always has been, while the other one has had a more colourful history.

It started out as Safeway (red and green), and was initially a really good shop: wide range of goods, good quality vegetables, nice little inspiring ingredients.

Safeway then got bought by Morrison’s (black & yellow). Morrison’s aim is low prices, and that was very visible. Things got cheaper, but the choice narrowed. After a while there was 2 shelf metres of their own-label orange juice, and the top and bottom shelves were completely empty. I don’t know if that was intentional – they may have just been running the store while looking for a buyer – but I can’t imagine it went very well for them. We saw fewer and fewer people in the shop, and stopped going ourselves, too.

They finally sold the store to Waitrose (green) a couple of months ago. The change has been remarkable. There’s more choice, which is good, but even better is that their range is more focused on things I like! Instead of cheap fluffy white bread, they’ve got several kinds of whole grain bread; instead of many boxes of pale tomatoes they have organic vegetables. There’s a far wider choice of organic foods in general, and of vegetarian ready meals. The food in general is of better quality, and the deli department positively makes me drool. And the juice aisle has dozens of nice juices!

More generally, I now walk around in the store and feel good about the things I find. Rather than thinking, “Don’t they have anything GOOD here?” I can pick and choose. I find interesting things that weren’t on the list but would fit nicely into my dinner plan. Grocery shopping isn’t a painful chore any more.

It turns out that Waitrose is owned by the same group who run John Lewis department stores, which happens to be my favourite department store, by far. Those people either think just like me and have the same preferences – or maybe they just know very well what sort of customers they have and what those customers like. Either way, I really like this shop.

1. Invite friends to the kitchen.
2. Provide tools, ingredients and instructions.
3. Add glögg as needed, and stir vigourously.

We had our traditional (if 4 years can be called a tradition) Swedish “julstök” (Christmas bake) yesterday: cooking and baking in the company of friends. We now have enough gingerbread cookies, lussebullar (saffron buns), knäck (toffee), chocolate sweets and fudge to last us for a month at least.

All of it’s rather experimental, really. For the knäck, for example, we tried using treacle instead of golden syrup this year, and it didn’t work as well as expected… but the same treacle was good for gingerbread dough. This year’s gingerbread cookies came out better than ever, pleasantly spicy and dark.

Gingerbread cookies are my favourites, really, both to make and to eat. It’s fun to try and fit as many as possible onto the rolled-out dough, to waste as little as possible. And they taste good!

Fewer people came to join us than last year, and one large family had to decline at the last moment, so we’ve got a whole lot of glögg left over… well, that’ll save us the bother of carrying it home next year!

This year’s Christmas preparations in our household have now been kicked off through the purchase of 9 bottles of glögg and 6 bottles of julmust, both absolutely essential for a true Swedish Christmas experience. What would Swedish expats do without IKEA? (Invite lots of visitors from Sweden in December, I guess… although nowadays you can probably buy your julmust online.)

Christmas has three essential components: the tree, the sweets and the drinks (which also happen to be sweet, coincidentally). Presents are pleasant but not essential. Christmas food, other than the sweets, is also optional.

The drinks part is now sorted for this year. The sweets will be fixed this weekend (Saturday). This only leaves the tree.

I love julmust. If the glögg bottles weren’t so infernally heavy, I’d have bought three times as much julmust. I think a follow-up / refill trip might be needed in a few weeks’ time.

Superficially, julmust might look like Coke, but it’s really a very different thing. I am not particularly fond of Coke – I may drink one maybe once or twice a year – mostly because Coke is disgustingly, cloyingly sweet. I don’t understand how they can dissolve that much sugar in water. It somehow manages to taste sweeter than sugar water. Julmust is sweet, too, but it has a spicy rich flavour. It reminds of dark beer (think Guinness) which is not surprising given that it contains malt and hops. It tastes very nice mixed with beer, about half and half.

According to reliable sources Swedes drink 60,000,000 litres of must each year, of which 45,000,000 in December. That’s about 5 litres for every Swede regardless of age. (Add about 4 or 5 million litres of glögg, too.) Apparently Sweden is one of the few countries where sales of Coke actually decline in December, as julmust displaces Coke from the top spot. The rest is drunk at Easter, for some reason, and during the rest of the year you can hardly find must in stores. Definitely not outside Sweden. That’s part of its charm – it wouldn’t be as special if I drank it every week.