A new attempt at sourdough bread. Using the same recipe as last time, and applying all the learnings from that first try, I got even better results. Totally presentable, nice and even in shape and texture, delicious crust, not at all doughy, great flavour. This is very doable.

I think my main challenge will be remembering to feed the sourdough starter so that it can survive from one baking to the next. It’s taken me six weeks to eat the two loaves I made last time. Most days I don’t eat breakfast, and even when I do, I don’t want to eat the same bread every single time, no matter how good it is.

The grocery store’s new international food section has been filled up with more stuff. The Middle Eastern goods are now flanked by others from Poland and Finland.

Middle Eastern bulgur and halva, Polish jams, Finnish mustard and candy.

Somewhat bizarrely, each of the three sections allocates a fair bit of shelf yardage to their own kind of pickled cucumbers. And of course there are also Swedish-style pickled cucumbers further away in the usual canned goods section. Clearly each nation wants their pickled cucumbers just so and no other kind is good enough.

Our local grocery store – we have several, actually, but I mean the one I usually go to – has been moving things around recently. Bread is now where there used to be napkins and candles, there’s Tex Mex food where bread used to be, and now, in the latest move, a vaguely Middle Eastern/Balkan-inspired section has appeared where the Tex Mex stuff was before. Dry beans, four different grades of bulgur (cracked wheat), tahini, stuffed vine leaves, fig jam, roasted aubergine puree, etc.

The Tex Mex and Asian food here is all large European brands – Santa Maria, Blue Dragon. In this new section, the dominant brand is Midyat, which I’d never heard of. I thought at first that Coop have actually gone to a Middle Eastern supplier, but Google told me that Midyat is a small company based in Södertälje, a small town just south of Stockholm. So technically Swedish, although I’d guess the sourcing of the food isn’t.

I might have just walked past the new section without paying much attention to the details, but Ingrid sent me a picture. They sell halva!

Halva is one of my childhood nostalgia foods that I sometimes still miss. It’s not a traditional Estonian food at all, but that was one of the few benefits of being in the Soviet Union: exposure to the “brother nations'” food and drink. We had Caucasian šašlõkk/shashlik and Russian seljanka, Ukrainian borš/borsht. We had sõrnik/syrnik and pelmeenid/pelmeni. And halva.

Sesame halva is the most common sort on the internet, but my favourite childhood halva was peanut-based. Dense, crumbly and chewy. Like a dry, grainy, sweet version of peanut butter. I’ve never found anything quite like it in Sweden. Occasionally I’ve tried other kinds, even one that I bought in a Baltic speciality grocery shop in Stockholm, but always been disappointed. (The one from the Baltic shop tasted so wrong that I ended up throwing out.)

Mostly to make Ingrid happy, I gave this one a try. To my great surprise, I actually liked it. A lot! It’s almost half sugar but somehow the nuttiness of sesame makes it easy to just take one more bite. I couldn’t eat Nutella with a spoon, and milk chocolate is disgustingly sweet, but not this.

I’m now entertaining vague thoughts of making my own peanut halva. It’s such a traditional food that surely it can’t be difficult – if they’ve made it since medieval times, the process can’t be too finicky about exact temperature and such. Or… I just hold out until the summer.

When I started handling my shiny new pot I immediately noticed that it was all sticky. Little specks of newspaper from the unpacking were sticking to the surface, and it left a waxy residue on my hands. And it had a kind of weird, unpleasant smell. Seems like the previous owner didn’t know how to properly season it. Could be the reason why they sold it. I know I wouldn’t enjoy using a pot that felt like that. In fact I didn’t want it anywhere near my food in the state it was in.

A quick, vigorous scrubbing will fix it, right? So I scrubbed. First with soapy steel wool. Then I upgraded to a coarser stainless steel scrubber. The stickiness just would not come off. When I’d been at it for nearly an hour and was running out of steel wool, I gave up and switched to 60-grit sandpaper and that finally did the trick. It no longer feels icky to the touch. But the cast iron lost much of the seasoning along the way – some spots look like we’re almost down to raw iron.

I’ve never tried seasoning a pot from such a raw state; I’ve only re-seasoned a well cared-for pot that just needed a touch-up. I hope I don’t end up with a similar sticky mess as before. My attempts will have to wait a few days, though, for the temperature outside to go up and the electricity price to go down.

I scored a Skeppshult pot!

Our old cast iron pot was a gift from Eric’s sister, so it went with him when he moved out. We had it for so many years that I’ve actually forgotten what the occasion was for the gift. Was it for our wedding? Or even earlier, when we moved in together?

Anyway, I’ve been on the lookout for a new one for a while, because I miss it all the time. Or rather, not a new one – they’re so expensive that I decided I’d rather wait for a used pot to turn up than just order one.

I was just getting to the point where I was considering other, cheaper brands, or maybe buying an enamelled one, or maybe actually buying a brand new one after all… and then two 4-litre Skeppshult pots turned up independently on Tradera within days of each other, and I got one of them at a total steal. And it even had the lid in perfect condition, which isn’t always the case. The pot itself can be restored if it hasn’t been properly cared for, but there’s nothing you can do for a chipped glass lid.

Happy forty-seven and a half to me!

For my birthday this summer I wanted to go out to have a nice restaurant brunch. I was going to wait until September so the brunch places in the city would open again after the summer. But then it was the kids’ birthdays, and the divorce, and Christmas, and more divorce, and it never happened.

Today Ingrid, Adrian and I finally went for my birthday brunch at Kelp, a very local restaurant, just five minutes’ walk from home. We all ended up ordering the same things: scrambled eggs, sourdough bread, single-variety Swedish apple juice, and French toast with a home-made berry compote. And then, while Ingrid and I were bemoaning how full we were, another serving of French toast for Adrian, who is in that teenage bottomless phase. Very nice.

I am almost but not quite coming down with a cold. The symptoms never went further than a scratchy throat, chills, and tiredness. Feeling better today than yesterday so I’m pretty sure that was that.

I’m still cold, though. I don’t like drinking tea or coffee, and hot chocolate is too sweet, so I warmed myself with a hot glass of low-alcohol glögg. It’s traditionally a Christmas drink in Sweden, but I’m not Swedish enough to care about that and can happily drink glögg all the way to February.

Not being used to hot drinks, I need to be careful about the temperature of my drink. Coffee drinkers are sometimes like fire swallowers – how they don’t damage their mouths, I have no idea. There’s a narrow range of temperature where it’s hot enough to warm me, but not hot enough to burn me. Hence my improvised glass cosy, to keep it in that range.

Immediately I thought – I should knit a proper one! No, I should not. I would use it literally once or twice a year at most. A sock is a much better solution.

Ingrid works extra at Spånga konditori, a local café-patisserie-bakery. When she works the closing shift, she brings home all sorts of leftovers. Sourdough bread that’s too old to sell; buns that are too misshapen or have been baked slightly too dark; cakes that to my eye have nothing wrong with them at all but for some reason are unsellable. Tons more stuff gets simply thrown out.

I take a sourdough loaf to work on most Mondays and drop it off in the lunch room. Sometimes Ingrid drives round to a bunch of her friends to deliver day-old pastries. Sometimes the friends are narrow-minded philistines and say no to delicious chocolate and almond pastries, because they’ve never eaten those particular ones before, and I get take a whole box of them to serve for fika at Sortera.

Sometimes I get fancy pastries all to myself. This weekend I got a mini lime pie, a vegan brownie, and a mango/passion fruit pastry. They were all absolutely delicious.

I got chocolate for Christmas from Active Solution. Or rather, I along with everyone else got to choose from a range of delicious, mysterious options under the tree: chocolate, coffee, cheese, oil, or sausages. Among those options I naturally chose chocolate – and when I opened my mystery box on Christmas eve, it turned out to contain the most luxurious, decorative set of pralines I’ve ever seen. Sparkly golden pralines, pralines rolled in freeze-dried raspberries, or in flower petals. Some perhaps don’t quite qualify as chocolate (white chocolate isn’t!) but they’ve all been not just pretty but also delicious and interesting. The one rolled in green herbs tastes like a forest. I’m looking forward to finding out what the cornflower blue tastes like.

In addition to the obvious foodstuffs that Nysse will eat when given half a chance – butter, cream, eggs, tuna – he has some other, more surprising favourites.

The liquid from canned beans.

Various tomato-based sauces.

Rye sourdough.

The main part of the kitchen counter, to the right of the sink, is off limits to him, because that’s where we cook and serve our food. Everything in the sink and to the left of it – where the dirty dishes go – is fair game.