Technically there’s no cheese in this dish. None. I do however like it better than the regular from scratch version I tried, I guess because I’m so much better at vegan cooking than I’ll ever be at any other kind of foodage. This is, of course, not vegan unless you use soy/oat/ricemilk instead of regular, but that goes without saying. This one’s for about four people.

Ingredients:
6 dl or 600 ml worth of pasta (we don’t measure pasta in weight here)
vegetables of your choice (for me, bell peppers, corn and broccoli)
half a chopped onion
2.5 dl or 250 ml milk of your choice
4 tbsps nutritional yeast
2 tbsps cornstarch mixed with equal amount of water
salt, pepper, chilipowder, turmeric

Directions
Put the oven on 200°C. While it heats up, cook the pasta and vegetables (I only steamed the broccoli, the rest I used as is), and mix it all together.

Sautee the onion in some olive oil. When it looks like it’s mostly done, add the nutritional yeast, stir it all together and pour the milk in. Spice it up quite a bit. The salt is the most important, and the turmeric follow no function except to make the food Kraft-dinner-yellow.

Mix cornstarch and water and pour this in too. Stir as it simmers, and let it cook until it thickens. If you want you can make a roux instead, it’s actually my preferred method, but apparently it doesn’t work with glutenfree flour.

Put it all in a casserole dish, sauce on top, and put in the oven for… uh. 10-15 minutes, I think. I forgot to check.

Today was our national day, which, generally we (as in my family) don’t celebrate, but it was also a Sunday and the weather was nice, so we did a barbecue thing. Just because. It was nice, and I got to wear my birthday dress, which I love, although it’s slightly too big in the chest area, and slightly too small over the arse, which makes it ride up in the back. Such is the life of the dis-proportionate, I suppose.

Anyway. Took some pictures, most which I will not post, because it’s only so much fun to look at a hundred pictures of various flowers. I think because it’s the first summer in I don’t know how many years that I feel well enough to pay attention to anything but my own anxiety (depression makes you not only selfish, but boring as well), it feels like I’m seeing it for the first time. It’s quite something.

So, here you go. Picture time!

When the sky is nearly as blue as the flag it’s a good day.

I love their house so much. It’s amazing and makes me so happy, every time I go there.

They have three kinds of lilac, white, pale purple and this freaky colour that looks like it’s been seriously photoshopped. It hasn’t. Promise.

My parents apparently have some kind of aversion to looking into the camera.

The cat is unimpressed with the camera, but the honeysuckle always makes me happy. It smells like home.

I suppose I could’ve picked a more flattering pose. Or possibly a smile.

Mum FORGOT to add tamari to my marinade (they used icky wheaty soy sauce), as you can see, so I spent a lot of time obsessively brushing it over the tofu as E. superglued little Simpsons people to their chairs and dad poked the meat with a fork. Despite the picture the tofu came out yummy and afterwards we had fresh (store bought) strawberries.

Mostly I’m waiting for the weather to get warm enough for the strawberries and raspberries in the garden to get ready. It’ll take another month or one and a half, but once they’re here it’s delicious and awesome.

And with that said it’s nearly bedtime. Tomorrow is weaving day and the day after that I am going to my pretendy-work thing for the first time. Am nervous, but I should be able to manage once a week. I hope.

I’m home again! Stockholm was exhausting, but so worth it. I’ll probably be stuck inside for a week or a month or God knows how long, but it was nice. Exhausting, but nice.

It’s so hard to describe to people how much energy it takes to act “normal”. Not flinch when people come too close or – even worse – touch me. Not back myself up against a wall to have at least SOME sense of stability. Smile. Chat. Be at least somewhat interesting, which, I’m telling you, isn’t easy when you get out as little as I do. Not stare at people who manage all of the above without any effort whatsoever.

It takes so much energy, and after three days around other people non-stop – even if one of those days basically was laying in a heap with my siblings, hung over and eating junk food – I was just about to break down. This happened on the train back home. There were too many people, on all sides of me. Behind me, to my right and to my left, and when the person in the chair in front of me leaned his back rest down towards me about two inches I flew out of my chair and found myself another seat. This of course meant that I could get kicked out of it at any time, seeing as it might’ve belonged to somebody else, but I’m glad to report that they did not.

It wasn’t a fun ride home, but after a couple of hours the crowd eased up and I could pull out my computer and get some editing done.

I suppose I should talk about the trip for a bit, because it was pretty awesome. I’ll start with saying that all pics in this post save the last one is from the inside of my sister’s new shiny apartment. It has an awesome vintage theme to it. So sad I’m too lazy for that sort of thing.

Anyway, on Friday she and her roommate had a party to celebrate their new flat, which is ALLTHEIRS. It’s a rental, but their names are on the lease, which is not anything to take for granted in Stockholm. Most apartments there are to-buy, and when they’re not you have to save up queue time for decades to get a decent one, so of course people hold on to them forever, subletting them and a lot of the time you have to move several times a year because of this AWESOME situation. So they’re excited about this place, and it’s very cute, although out in the suburbs. Then again, suburbs are seriously underrated.

I was nervous that it would be a big party, but it wasn’t huge or anything. Twenty or so people, most boys, for some reason, and all very nice. I talked about knitting with this gay boy for some time, and I can say that it was when he started talking about what shades of pink that was acceptable on a bloke that I decided that he was in fact not straight. Stereotypical, yes, but I was totally right.

This was, I think, the first party since I was 19 that I wasn’t tempted to bum a smoke from someone, which is all kinds of awesome, actually.

The two youngest attendants, my brother and the brother of A’s roommate, babies at the young age of 23 and 24, passed out in a corner, and I kept having to go poke one of them to see that he was still alive. Because, yes, my dear brother didn’t move or make a noise for like four hours, and I got all mum-like worried about him. The other one was snoring, so I didn’t worry so much about him.

The night ended at about 4 am, when A. and I fell into her bed and promptly fell asleep, but not until she, who has extreme phobia of vomit bent over the edge of the bed and threw up. She wasn’t even upset about it, which I guess proves just how drunk she was.

I’m so too old for this stuff.

Saturday we went and bought chips, crisps, bacon, hot dogs, chocolate and litre upon litre of Pepsi and consumed it all laying down. I was the least hung over, I believe, and actually got some writing done while the rest of them moaned and complained and watched bad movies.

There’s an awesome film clip from the party, which starts with one of the guys talking into the camera, all serious, before skipping off to the next room over, the camera pans out and shows the whole party dancing madly. It looks like it’s arranged and from a music video or something, but it so wasn’t. Am sad that the guy refused to let us upload it, after having watched it the next day.

On Sunday we had lunch with A. at a small thai place. The staff looked kind of panicked when I asked for something with “no flour, no soy sauce, no coconut milk”, because they didn’t even know what gluten WAS despite their advertising saying that they had gluten free options, but actually scrounged something up. It was glass noodles with vegetables and chicken (because glass noodles with just vegetables and salt sounded too damn depressing), and I put some sweet chili sauce on it and it was delicious, despite sounding boring as hell.

I was worried about cross contamination, but I didn’t get sick, so I think they managed it, which made me very, very happy. I didn’t have such luck on Friday, when I ate all of three chips that had been fried in oil that “may or may not” have been used to fry chicken nuggets in as well. THREE.

Which I guess goes to show that I am really sensitive, and maybe that will shut my Mum up when she thinks I’m overreacting…

After A. went to work I dragged E. with me to various yarn and book shops. The haul was this. I have no idea what the blue yarn is, but it feels exclusive and was kind of expensive. Kind of in the same vein as Manos or Malabrigo. It was in a bargain bin without tags and I forgot to ask, because I was a little stressed out.

Then we went to the sci-fi-book shop in Gamla Stan, which is very cute and old, all cobble stone streets and old houses, some dating back to the 14th century. It’s a massive tourist attraction, but fortunately it’s not summer yet, so it wasn’t too bad. The bookshop was really big and awesome. It had huge amounts of books in English, so many that I didn’t even bother going to The English Bookshop, as I had planned. I wandered back and forth for probably an hour, looking for names I recognised. I ended up buying the Modern Faerie Tale books by Holly Black, Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (because people won’t shut up about it) and on a whim, an anthology called Love Is Hell, which sounds cheesy but is actually pretty awesome. So far I’ve only read two of the stories, but I really love the one by Scott Westerfeld. He builds up this whole world where humans have done away with all inconvenient things, like sleep, illnesses, hormones, and so on, and then, the kids in it get as a school project to try to live with these things again, and find that it is pretty awesome.

The best part about this was probably that I asked this girl who worked there (who by the way was awesome, chatting to me about how great it is with anthologies and finding new authors that way, and understanding the importance of matching sets of books) if they’d gotten in White Cat by Holly Black yet. I knew it was a recent release, but not exactly how recent. As in, the release date is May 4th and I was asking for it on May 3rd.

The awesome part, however, was that they’d gotten a few copies in, and already sold it out. The day before it was supposed to his the stores! And when I tweeted this Holly Black replied to it, which made me squee because I’m such a fan girl for YA authors.

PS. Tansy, if you look really close you can see Siren Beat in A’s bookcase! I let her borrow it, convinced that it will be the perfect introduction to urban fantasy. She hasn’t read it yet, though, the wench.

Birthday shenanigans with the family. It was a lot of fun, and all chocolate. We made two kinds of chocolate chip cookies with this flour I found that had xanthan gum added, which was fortunate as I can’t find xanthan gum itself to save my life. We also made chocolate mousse, which was raw and vegan, with avocados instead of fat. Sounds crazy, but it was so good nobody even asked what was in it. The recipe is here, but we used baking syrup instead of agave as I had no idea where to find it, and actually more than halved the amount of cacao.

The final measurements were something like:

8 tiny avocados (so small that you could fit two of them in the palm of your hand)
1 dl or 100 ml cacao
2-2.5 or 200-250 ml baking syrup
1-2 tablespoons vanilla (which comes in powder here, not sure of amount if liquid)

You put it all in a food processor and puree it until smooth, refrigerate it over night and that’s it. Ridiculously easy.

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Making Pavlova instead of cupcakes after Tansy told me there is such a thing as chocolate meringue. Recipe here, from Nigella’s website. Man, I love her cooking.

This is the cake, and why is it that 75% of my pics are of food? The raspberries were actually frozen, which is why we threw insane amounts of powdered sugar on top to make them look pretty and fresh picked. They’re also from our garden, picked last summer. We bought some too, but they weren’t very nice, so Mum dug these out of our bottomless pit of a freezer.

Most of the attending realised there was a game on, and threw themselves into my parents bed and turned on the TV. There were about four more people in the room. And that is both my siblings, three of my cousins and my Mum. All handball enthusiasts.

I was however unimpressed by the exchange:

A: “Wow, she has one hell of a shot.”
B: *scoffs* “It’s women’s handball.”

Shut your mouth, mmkay?

Why do we always look like this? And why didn’t I realise how low-cut that dress is? I love polkadots, so I had to buy it. Let’s just hope I’ll use it at least once more this summer… I’m usually pretty bad with dresses, but over the last year I’ve started using more girly clothes, and it’s actually kind of fun even though I’m self conscious wearing them still.

My Brother Is Tall, birthday edition. And Jenn, my Mum is about 2-3 inches taller than you. For reference!

Found this one! It’s me, age twelve, and all about soccer. I was a right winger, by then, which was a relief as it turned out that I was crap at all other positions. Too slow for striker, not tough enough for defence, to afraid of being hurt to for goalie and not multi-tasking enough for holding midfielder. So, winger it was, and that was the point where football went from being a chore to being fun. This pic reminds me of that.

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And now I think I’m going back to bed. Two more days of sister-back-home, but I’m so beat after the last few days. I actually only managed two and a half hours of socialising before I walked upstairs and passed out on my brother’s couch. I didn’t even make it downstairs to say goodbye to everyone.

Presents were awesome, family was better and I so wish that we could spend more time together. We’re spread out across the country, though, but at least at the same train line. Now if it only cost less than half a fortune to visit each other…

Also, yesterday at the gym I ran for all of six minutes on the threadmill. It’s the most I’ve run since I was seventeen and quit football. I’ve been building up slowly, from all walking to a quarter of running and three quarters of walking, and now I’m at one third running and two thirds walking. Maybe one day I’ll be able to run the whole twenty minutes, and then I plan on upping the amount of time on there…

I also got to put more weight onto my machines when I did my weight lifting! Very exciting to see progress, I have to say.

And now back to bed. Napping. So glorious.

After two days of baking me and my sister has produced two kinds of cookies, a gigantic pavlova (meringue cake!) and ridiculously rich chocolate mousse. It took most of two days, yet I’m worried people won’t think it’s enough. I must be insane. And I would include some pics, but I left my camera at my parents house, so you’ll have to wait until after the party.

I meant to go to Stockholm next week, to attend A’s move-in-party and visit the sci-fi bookshop (yes, I’m equally excited about both, shut up), but I didn’t buy tickets in time and now they cost like… 500 SEK each way. I might put my hopes to a last-minute-ticket, even though I’m technically too old for them. But only just, and two weeks ago I was asked if I was over eighteen (or possibly twenty) when I was buying a bus pass… So maybe it would work, although it would probably mean staying away from Thursday to Monday, two days more than I meant to, because there’s no such thing on a Friday or Sunday.

Speaking of which, A. told one of her friends that I read fantasy, and got the answer “so, she reads TWILIGHT?”. A. defended me beautifully I’m told, and people may have different opinions about those books, and I may not be a fan, but in the end it doesn’t matter what I think, because there is so much more to fantasy than that, and I think that’s the important point.

(And yes, in the past I’ve been a bit harsh towards certain books in this blog. The more I work on my current project the worse I feel about it, because I’m realising just how much work that goes into a book. So, I’ll try to be nicer, even if I don’t like a certain author. I really will.)

I also had a conversation with my mum, with a slight disagreement. I learned that this syrup we have in sweets and icecream, may or may not have gluten in it. The Swedish word for it is “glukos-fruktossirap”, and apparently “glukossirap” and “fruktossirap” are separately okay, but when put together they may contain gluten and the manufacturer doesn’t have to specify whether it does or not (and sometimes have no idea). I suppose it’s the equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, except, you know, wheat based. Sometimes.

(Also? I hate the book Ingredienslexikon, because it tells me stuff is okay when it’s not, like, for example soy sauce. It’s not okay. Not even close.)

But yes, this means that almost all sweets are out, and so I read on a bag of sweets while home and the following conversation happened…

Me: “That damn glukos-fruktossirap, it’s in everything!”
Mum: “Oh, but it can’t be that bad, can it?”
Me: “YES IT CAN. I know somebody whose son got sick all the time until they figured out that it was the sweets he was eating, so I’m not going to risk it.
Mum: “Well, anyone who stops eating sweets will feel better.”

Head, desk, desk, head, have you two met? Oh, you have? Well, here’s a reintroduction!

So yes. I need to translate this article for her, because she’s driving me crazy. It’s not like it’s fun to avoid most sweets, almost all chocolate (though I found a kind I can have, expensive dark chocolate with a hint of lemon, OMG SO GOOD), icecream and so on. It’s not. It sucks. But when I get sick I get sick for days, and it’s not just that specific things that causes me to set up camp in the bathroom. It’s that everything I eat for several days afterwards also makes me sick, as if it takes that long for the gluten to clear out of my system. And really, one scoop of icecream isn’t worth three days of bathroom trips, stomach aches, lethargy and other fun stuff. It really isn’t.

And this specific conversation came only two days after she offered me a tub of butter that had visible bread crumbs from a gluten-ed bread in it and thought that I was ridiculous when I refused to use it.

She’s a nurse. Isn’t she supposed to know these things?

Argh.

So, yes. Translating that article, only not today because I desperately need to get back to my project. I haven’t written on it in what feels like forever, although in reality it’s more like two days. I’m almost at the “run downhill really fast” portion of the book, and it’s very exciting. Sadly my male main character turned out to be a total creep, but I’m told that makes for a more interesting book.

I also asked my sister if she wanted to visit a graveyard with me, because I usually take inspiration from a location and build from there and my NEXT project is about a graveyard. Well, not really, it’s not like it’s The Graveyard Book all over again, but that’s where it starts…

She gave me an odd look and said “um… sure?”

Ha. Yes. So. Writing.

THIRTY. I’m thirty years old. Big day, people! I spent it doing big things too, let me tell you. I went to the psychiatrist, ran errands, became irritated-by-way-of-anxiety, had coffee with my grandparents and… drumroll please… took a nap.

Ah, good times.

I have however gotten about twenty birthday messages on Facebook, because it tells people when your birthday is. I love living in the future, and I’ll never take seeing my family for my birthday for granted after so many years abroad, and it was in all a lovely day.

This weekend my sister comes home and we’re going to bake up a storm. Sadly (or maybe awesomely) my plans of British high tea was kind of set aside because of plans of utter and ridiculously yummy chocolate party idea!

We shall have chocolate cupcakes, chocolate mousse and chocolate chip cookies. Possibly two kinds, if I can be bothered. Possibly some fruit to for the crazy people in my family that is doing the low-carb thing. I so don’t understand that, but to each their own.

(Carbs is yummy. Carbs is amazing. Carbscarbscarbscarbs.)

It will be grand. And with that said, and done, I have to share with you a new bunch of health care related WTFs. I’m sure you’ve missed them.

Here we go:

1) My doctor is about to go off to other adventures. He’s apparently what we referred to as a “relay race doctor”. That is, the mental health care is so shitty that no doctors want to work there for more than a couple of months, so they kind of come in, do what they can for three or six months and then duck out as somebody else picks up that stick the relay runners use in the Olympics… and keep on running. So, he’ll call me in four weeks, check up on my meds, and that’s it.

2) Summer holidays is upcoming. That means that after he calls me in late May I won’t be able to get an appointment until SEPTEMBER. And then, of course, it will be a different doctor, but I have no idea who or when. Just… autumn-ish.

3) I was supposed to be called to an appointment with a therapist in January. I, um, wasn’t. Why? Because apparently two therapists were retired, one went on maternity leave and nobody thought it would be a good idea to hire a couple of new people. And the kicker is probably that the doctor I mentioned above made this my fault, for not calling and bugging them until they realised that none of the remaining therapists had actually contacted me… Which, let me tell you, I would’ve done, albeit grudgingly, if I had KNOWN that I was supposed to get a call in January. Which I didn’t. Because when I asked (in March) how long it would take, I was given the helpful answer of “oh, a couple of more months, probably”.

Sigh. Swedish health care at its best. I’ll take some Glee on that, I think.

Am on fifth day (or fourth?) of pathetic illness that is flooring me. Shamelessly. I dubbed it the Man Cold, because I feel just as whiny and oh-woe-is-me as my dad is when he’s sick. The thing that makes me whine the most is a) the inability to focus enough to write, b) the inability to stay upright long enough to cook, and c) the madness of the kitten, as she bored out of her mind climbs on everything in an attempt to get me to play with her.

She’s seriously displeased, in case you were wondering, although she seems to enjoy the daytime napping nearly as much as me…

Anyway.

When I say that I’m too weak to cook I mean that things like this happens:

Still, broken cookies are better than no cookies, yes? And besides, had I not let you peek behind the scenes like that it would’ve looked this good:

Tea, ricecakes with spreadable cheese, banana and two of the aforementioned cookies. And after I took that picture and collapsed on the couch from the sheer ENERGY needed for all of this I added a glass of orange juice. Because I hear it’s good for you.

Also, since yesterday I have watched seven episodes of Scrubs and bought the new Indelicates album. About the former I can say that I never knew I hadn’t seen it from the beginning (and OMG, JORDAN, I love her so), and about the latter? You can buy it for any sum you want to here. Yes, even zero pounds, although if you do, how cheap are you?

PS. Today Alisa tweeted the word SCHMEKL. It’s so awesome I want to start using it in daily speech, but um, I’m not Jewish. And I have no idea how to pronounce it. But seriously? So awesome. I love myself a good “sch”-sound. I suppose I could say “sjutton skjutna kyrkor tjohoade klyschigt och rysch-pyschigt” instead. No, that sentence makes no sense even in Swedish. And no, those are not swear words. But yes, they are all real words. And yes, they are all variations of ways we spell the “sch”-sound. Because why makes things EASY?

Easter dinner with the parents was a nice little thing, only the three of us as my brother realised ten minutes before the food was done that he had to be somewhere drinking beer RIGHT NOW. And because it’s been at least a week since the last time I did this, some pics of it all…

Instead of taking sprigs of birch inside and dress them up, as we do (forgot that in yesterday’s Easter post), Mum brought the feathers outside. So cute.

Sign of spring #1: one lonely green bud surrounded by dead flowers from last year.

Sign of spring #2: Crocuses, the first flower to bloom here. And yes, they really are THAT blue and yellow.

Sign of spring #3: Kaia wearing a dress. Sadly the best pic I got of it, and yes, then I cardigan-ed it up, cos it wasn’t THAT warm.

Sign of spring #4: Barbecue! Okay, so, we never do this before the end of April, normally, but I convinced them that it was more fun than Easter food, and they agreed. Score.

While they cooked and marinated and barbecued and all I watched this. 1-0 in the 95th fucking minute. No wonder I’ve got grey hairs coming in. And yes, I’m a spoiled brat. At age twenty-nine plus eleven months and a few days.

New knitting project makes for a very happy Kaia. This is Gaenor by Picnic Knits in a far too heavy yarn, but I don’t care. Probably should’ve gone up more than two needle sizes too…

Hunting for shoes (and coming out with a table, two lamps and said shoes) I made Mum pose with the remaining snow. Hard to believe it was as much as it was, really.

My Dad is a nerd for all things from the 60s (and can you blame him, women back then were HOT), so my sister gave him this calendar. Lovely, lovely black-and-white photos all through it.

And finally, a classic. We call this Try To Get Five Kids To Pose Prettily At Once, Anno 1984. That would be me in the middle, glaring at my boy cousin (same age as me, a head shorter until we turned 16) for making little A. cry. Our older cousin in the back is seemingly unaware of the drama…

This recipe I started without reading it through to the end. If I had I wouldn’t have expected to throw them together in ten minutes, because, um, it took way longer than that. Still, they are delicious and don’t float out into infinity as most gluten free cookies I’ve attempted…

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Ingredients:
1.5 tablespoons oil + 1 cup / 2.5 dl / 250 ml walnuts (or 125 ml peanutbutter)
0.5 cups / 1.25 dl / 125 ml light brown sugar (farinsocker)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (vaniljsocker)
0.75 cup / 1.75 dl / 175 ml oat flour (or whatever you have on hand, really)
0.5 teaspoon baking soda (bikarbonat)
0.5 teaspoon salt
0.25 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 cup / 2.5 dl / 250 ml rolled oats
some dark chocolate, I used four pieces chopped up

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350°F (that is, 175°C).

Blend walnuts in food processor 30 seconds, or until ground into a fine meal. Add canola oil, and blend 2 to 3 minutes more, or until mixture has the consistency of natural peanut butter, scraping down sides of food processor occasionally. Transfer to bowl.

Whisk together brown sugar and 0.5 cup (1.25 dl) water in small saucepan, and bring mixture to a boil. Pour brown sugar mixture over ground walnut butter, add vanilla extract, and stir until no lumps remain.

Whisk together oat flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon in separate bowl. Stir oat flour mixture into walnut mixture. Cool 10 minutes. Fold in oats, then chocolate chips.

Shape cookie dough into 2-inch balls, and place 2 inches apart on prepared baking sheets. Flatten cookies with bottom of drinking glass dipped in water. Bake 8 to 10 minutes, or until cookies begin to brown and tops look dry. Cool 3 minutes on baking sheets, then transfer to wire rack to cool completely.

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I was about a million times less exact when making this, because I’m a fan of chucking things in and see what happens. The result is of course that my cookies look less than perfect, but damn, they taste good.

Will attempt with peanut butter some time, because the walnut butter making was a bit tedious. Also, the walnut taste is a bit over powering, but still OMG SO YUMMY.

And yes, there’s no eggs. Apparently the walnuts + oil mix replaces both eggs and butter. Not sure HOW that works, exactly, but it so does.

I think today’s game (1-1, stupid stupid STUPID Birmingham equalised in the 90th minute, final score 1-1) can be best summed up this way:

Millie (17.39)
YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Kaia (17.40)
omg. really?
YAAAAY
do they HAVE to wait to the last ten?

Millie (17.45)
obviously they want to make a point against people leaving early.

Millie (17.48)
damn, arshavin.

Kaia (17.49)
gah
OH MY GOD

Millie (17.50)
oh god.

Kaia (17.51)
oh my fucking god

Millie (17.53)
sigh.

And yes, that was the part of the game when everything remotely interesting happened. We really needed a win as Chelsea beat useless Villa 5-1 and are flyyyyying ahead of us, but… yeah. Theo was the luckiest member of the squad. That says kind of a lot.

But once the game was over I went and made my cheapest trick for dinner, vegan style Pasta Alfredo, which always cheers me up. I have no idea how Alfredo is normally made, but I suspect it’s about 100% more cream and/or eggs, but this one’s just brilliant and easy.

You put some sneaky amount of oil (say two tablespoons) in a pan, sautee a few cloves of garlic and a handful chopped walnuts in it. When fragrant, add the same amount of flour as oil, in this example two tablespoons. Stir and let sautee brieeeeeefly. Then add some milk and spices (I use salt, pepper, chili powder and basil, fresh is better but dried is okay). A cup or so of milk, I guess? I never measure. And then, let it cook on low heat until it thickens.

That is all. So easy yet has a fancy French name (roux).

I’m eating it with pasta and steamed vegetables. I usually make some kind of breaded tofu on the side, but I couldn’t be bothered today (see stupid draw).

I blame Arsenal’s bad luck on me, by the way. In the last two days I’ve run out of yarn fifty separate times, broken a grocery bag as I lifted it out of the trolley, two minutes later flipped said trolley over, nearly emptied a full plate of (very hot) food in my lap, accidentally locked the cat onto the balcony (twice), missed a bus by two seconds and burned a piece of fabric so badly while ironing it that I had to start my project over.

So, yeah. All my fault. Sorry boys.

I have however written a lovely blog post in Swedish about Gabourey Sidibe (and learned how to spell her name!) that I may translate some time, written an OMG REVELATION moment for my forever-in-editing-process-project, beaten my personal best at the gym (yay!), submitted two semi-clothed pics (that sounds a lot more exciting than it really is) to this Swedish BMI project that a lovely blogger has started, and re-learned how to crochet.

Also, I’ve learned about oxford commas, which I use all the time, only I had no idea that it had a term until somebody tweeted it. I thought I was just a punctuation junkie.

Which, actually, I kind of am.

PS. I can no longer defend anything Amanda Palmer says or does. This makes me very, very sad.