\nUnlike 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nI 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nTradition 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nI 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nBut 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nI 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nI 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nWith 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nFor 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nI 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nNow 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. Br\u00e4mhults 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[745,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food_and_cooking","category-observing_the_self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2441"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2906,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441\/revisions\/2906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}