It’s plum season.

I’m picky when it comes to fruit – only local plums (and apples and strawberries etc) are worth buying. “Local” here means Swedish ones. I’d totally buy Estonian plums if I was in Estonia now, or Finnish or Norwegian ones if anyone offered them to me. (I assume they grow plums in Finland.) Italian-grown plums and Spanish ones, on the other hand, the kinds you get in a standard supermarket, are flavourless crunchy sugar water. They just don’t taste like plums at all. Like, if you told me to close my eyes and then gave me a bite of one, I don’t know if I would even recognise what fruit it was.

I want my fruit to be really ripe. I want it to burst in my mouth when I bite into it, and the juices to be near dripping. When Ingrid and Adrian eat fruit, they want them firm and crunchy, almost regardless of fruit – plums, peaches, apricots, kiwis… Well, no crunchy bananas, but they definitely prefer their bananas so green that I find them nearly inedible. When buying for myself, I look for the ripest fruit. I choose the plums that are so juicy and tender that I have to handle them carefully, and gently place them topmost in my shopping bag. I’m pretty sure that I rescue fruit that everybody else skips over, and that the staff would pick out and throw away if they could be bothered to look over the fruit they have.

I came down with a horrible stomach ache after lunch. I couldn’t figure out what happened and just suffered through the afternoon, until I got home and collapsed on the sofa. Afterwards I figured out that it was the pasta dish we had for dinner yesterday, from our meal kit service, that had milk in it. I’m so used to buying lactose-free milk and not even having any ordinary milk in the house that I just opened the package and poured the contents into the sauce without thinking twice. That was very much a mistake. I guess I should have just dumped it out as soon as I unpacked the ingredients.

When the kids are here, we cook a proper dinner every day and eat together. On the weeks when they are away, I usually start the week with a bunch of leftovers. When those start to run out, I often have leftover ingredients that guide my meals. A forgotten vegetable, half a bottle of juice… Things that would be gone in a day if it was three people eating, but that last me a while when it’s just me. I don’t need to do much grocery shopping at all on my “off” weeks.

Today I was faced with two carrots that were starting to look sad and wrinkly. Two forgotten potatoes. Half a package of quark. All on their last legs, really needing to be eaten.

I’ve made plenty of carrot pancakes before, and potato pancakes, and quark pancakes. If each of those can be put in a pancake batter, what do I get if I put all three together (and throw in some eggs and flour)? Franken-pancakes? Frankcakes?

After a stretch of cool days, whenever we get a warmer one, I think “this is probably the last one for the season”. Is this the last ice cream of this summer? (Grapefruit and mango/passion from Spånga Konditori. Delicious.)

The everyday lens on my big camera stopped working again, just like it did last summer. It’s not worth another repair, so I’ve ordered a new one. In the meantime I’m stuck with my phone camera. Which takes great photos sometimes, but at other times frustrates me to no end. I have never been as dissatisfied with any vacation photos as I was with the pictures I took during my and Ingrid’s archipelago hike.

It is really, really bad at handling strong contrast, as you can see here. This is a normal ice cream in normal early-evening light, and yet the ice cream is almost blown out while the bench, normally dark green, looks midnight black.

The preview in the camera app is often completely misleading when it comes to exposure. Everything looks OK in the camera app, I click the button, and the resulting photo is badly underexposed when I view it in the photo gallery. The histogram is useless, because if there is one bright spot in the photo (like the sun!) then that spike dwarfs everything else and the histogram tells me nothing about the rest of the photo.

I hate hate hate that it has no manual exposure mode. I adjust the exposure for the scene as best I can, and then Ingrid walks into the photo, wearing dark clothes and a dark backpack. The camera app panics – oh no, darkness has fallen! – and overexposes everything.

We’re barely in the middle of August and it feels like summer is over. Cloudy days and cool evenings. This is probably the last meal we’re going to have outside this season. Shouldn’t August be a summer month still?

Happy early birthday to me! Adrian will be away at scout camp on my actual birthday, so we celebrated today. A summery salad, the traditional redcurrant cake, and board games.

I’m not an expert baker but the cake came out exactly as it should. Even with the additional challenge of trying to bake it in 28-degree heat. The dough went from “so chilled it’s hard to roll out” to “so warm that it melts” before I managed to fully roll it out. I ended up pressing it in place with my fingers, and then putting it in the fridge again to keep it from melting before it could be baked.

The cake rose like a souffle in the oven, above the edges of the cake tin, but sank down within its walls again as it cooled.

Ingrid and her job at the bakery have been supplying us with bread, buns, cakes and other assorted goodies for almost a year now. We get leftovers that would otherwise have been thrown out, because they’re either too old or too ugly to be sold. And we can buy the good stuff at a 50% employee discount, which makes all the difference, because it’s a pricey establishment.

Not that the goods they make aren’t worth the price! They make everything from scratch, bake with real butter, and unlike so many cafes, they don’t just serve the standard Swedish fika cakes. Their bakers and pastry chefs win awards in national competitions for their amazing creations.

Just look at this cake. I can’t even guess how you make something like this. The coating is cocoa powder; underneath it there’s something creamy that reminds me of tiramisu. There’s blackcurrant jelly in the middle, and the base is a thin brownie. The little drops on top are a mystery.

Took the train to town for shopping. Mohair yarn for the white wool dress; magnetic poster hangers for two photography posters I bought months ago; crimp beads so I can make my own stitch markers; charity shops where I didn’t find any of the things I was looking for.

The trains are on a half-hourly schedule due to summertime engineering works. It’s not as bad as it has been some past summers; at least we get trains. But the trains turn around in Spånga, and if you live further out, it’s replacement buses for you.

It was lunchtime by the time I got back. I stopped at Spånga Konditori for lunch. Ingrid won’t be working there any more after the summer, so we’re going to lose our access to her staff discount. I need to get the most out of it now.

I had a lovely hummus and avocado toast and strawberry lemonade. It was quiet at the café, and Ingrid could come sit with me when there were no customers to serve.

I didn’t get a photo today, so here’s one from this weekend. Gelato from Gelato Scarfo. Their ice cream is worth a trip of its own.

Organic Swedish strawberries on the left, hazelnut on the right. The strawberry gelato is somehow even more strawberry-y than eating fresh strawberries.

Decanted and strained the elderflower cordial. It came out very pink and pretty.

I’m less happy about the taste. Too little elderflower flavour for my taste, and too sweet. A bit too much “pink sugar water”. I’m going to give it another try on a hotter, sunnier day and see how it works then.

Next time I’ll let it sit for longer and use less sugar.