Party Game

I'm sort of a film fanatic. My husband has travelled to Malaysia umpteen times for work. I'm a pretty big fan of free speech, not so keen on censorship, and fascinated by the (let's put it lightly and call them) "quirks" of deeply religious people. Put all these things together, and the result is a strange fascination of mine: IMDB's list of films that are banned in Malaysia.

Malaysia is a predominantly Muslim country that also has substantial Indian and Chinese populations. Different folk groups and religious groups are subject to different laws. Some of the list's contents are therefore not in the least bit surprising (Boogie Nights, anyone?). Some are momentarily surprising (Prince of Egypt, perhaps?) before they also become disappointingly obvious. Some are a bit fuzzier and require one to guess at which scene, seemingly relatively innocuous and only slightly provocative to us, would cause the Malaysian censorship board to ban an entire movie rather than simply cut certain scenes, as they often do with kissing scenes, nudity, swearing, violence, single scenes that can be sensitive religiously, and the like. Imagine what Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan looked like when they were finally let through (and they were; it's the full versions that are banned). I imagine they were collectively 5 minutes long.

Then there's Babe. And let's not believe that it was a temporary offense -- Babe: Pig in the City is also on the list.

Now, it's been a while since I've seen Babe. I'm also not a member of the Malaysian family values lobby. So coming up with what themes in Babe might have been so potentially destructive to the ethics of the Malaysian people requires a lot of thought. I notice that Charlotte's Web is not on the list, so apparently it's not simply outrage at the very idea of a talking pig.

So I suggest a new party game: explain why your favorite movie, TV show or book would be banned in Malaysia. I'm currently working on a good explanation for Mary Poppins. The person who comes up with the funniest but most convincing argument gets to take a shot -- which is, incidentally, also banned in Malaysia.

Mustard & Dill Sauce

I haven't written for a while, but perhaps that's okay, because the one person who I know for sure reads my blog seems to have dropped off the face of the planet. But just in case he comes back, here's a pretty tasty sauce.

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Mustard & Dill Sauce

2 T. butter (2 msk smör)
2 T. flour (2 msk vetemjöl)
3/4 cup water (2 dl vatten)
2 fish bullion cubes (1 fiskbuljongtärning)
3/4 cup milk (2 dl mellanmjölk)
1 T. dijon mustard (1 msk fransk senap)
4 T. lemon juice (4 msk färskpressad citron)
1 T. fresh dill (1 msk färsk dill)

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Whisk in the flour until thoroughly mixed. Add water and bullion and bring to a boil. Simmer for a few minutes. Mix in milk, mustard, lemon juice and dill, heat until warm.

Servings: 4
Calories per serving: 104
Protein: 2 g
Fat: 7 g
Carbohydrates: 7 g

Comments: The reason I've written 1 bullion cube in English and 2 bullion cubes in Swedish is that the typical bullion cube here is for a half a liter of water, whereas the bullion cubes we always had at home in the states were only for one cup.

We ate this with salmon, fresh pasta and green peas. It turned out to be, ahem, 745 Calories per portion -- fresh pasta apparently has quite a bit more calories per "serving" than your traditional boring dry pasta. But still, it's a tasty sauce for fish and pasta!

High Maintenance

According to the Dagens Industri article Söner dyrare i drift, it costs noticably more to raise a boy in Sweden (from the ages of 4 to 18) than to raise a girl. The cost for navigating a boy through those ages is said to be 391,000 Swedish crowns (about $66,000 at today's exchange rate) whereas a girl is said to cost 302,000 Swedish crowns ($51,000). Strangely enough, a good chunk of the descrepancy is said to lie in the fact that the boys apparently cause twice as much monetary damage in the clothing department.

In a way, since the cost of living is higher in Sweden, and whatever can be bought for 391,000 SEK in Sweden could perhaps be bought for, say, $40,000 in the States, $40,000 would perhaps be a more accurate translation.

The website Babycenter.com has a little tool for calculating the cost of raising a child in the States. It asks you to fill in a bit more info about your own situation, including what part of the U.S. you live in, how much money you make, whether it's one or two parents in the family and what kind of college, if any, you plan on sending Junior to. I filled out info that most closely matches our own, including "No College" since university is fee-free in Sweden, and was told that it would cost us over $270,000 to raise a kid.

Huh.

Us Americans are clearly very high-maintenance creatures.

Incompetence

The comic duo of Puke & Snot that is the main attraction of the Minnesota Renaissance Festival always included a one-liner in their show that runs through my head over and over again in life.

I feel like I'm riding through the sewer in a glass-bottomed boat. I'm in this shit, but I'm clearly above it.

If you've read my earlier posts, you already have the impression that the Swedish health care system doesn't earn a great deal of respect from me or strike me as full of competent people (and that's quite an understatement). This week I'm having a new experience with bloated and dysfunctional bureaucracy, and it's a two-fer involving both Försäkringskassan and the post office!

I've been on 50% sick leave since the beginning of June. This means that a doctor has declared that there is a good reason for me to work only 4 hours a day, has signed an official form stating such, and that both my employer and Försäkringskassan have received a copy of this form. Försäkringskassan are the people who are to pay me for the hours of missed work. Essentially, if you live and work in Sweden and cannot work for a medical reason, you get 80% of your normal pay for the time you've missed. Försäkringskassan, FK, are the people who pay you this money. They also pay lots of other things, like pension, maternity/paternity leave money, a monthly payment to anyone who has a kid under 16, subsidies to people who can't afford their rent, etc.

I've never received money from FK before, but I was aware that it would likely be an uphill battle -- if for no other reason than it's just typical that you'll have to end up fighting with a disorganized fiasco of an organization when you are sick and don't have the energy for it.

I have lived in Sweden for 6 years, and have been an official resident (folkbokförd) during that entire time. (I don't even get how you can live here without being folkbokförd, unless you're an illegal immigrant, in which case I would presume you don't have the right to money from FK, which makes the point moot.) I'm also a Swedish citizen, so I figured that I didn't have to do anything special in order to get my sick-leave money. The HR lady at work agreed, saying that it's supposed to work automatically after she sends them my bank account number and the number of hours I've been away from work. She should know -- it's not like I'm the first employee here to be on sick leave.

Still, I wanted to make sure, so I checked at FK's website. According to them, if you are officially a resident of Sweden, you do not have to register with FK. (For the benefit of Swedish readers, it reads thus: Är du folkbokförd i Sverige behöver du inte registrera dig i Försäkringskassan.)

This turns out to be a lie.

As soon as my employer had sent in the papers about my sick-leave, I received a form home in the mail. It was called Information for Registration (Uppgifter för registrering). It came without instructions or explanation, and the questions were very difficult to answer. Why have you come to Sweden? How long do you plan on staying? In what country are you a citizen? Are your spouse and children coming to Sweden with you? When did you start working at your current job? Where did you work in your home country? They even had a section where I was supposed to check off which documents I was attaching, with the note "NOTE! Some attachments are required!" But, of course, it didn't say which attachments were required. The only documents that they seemed definitely to want were a copy of either my residence permit or my work permit -- neither of which I have because I'm a bloody citizen.

I called them and complained of the paradox that they had placed before me. When I explaiend that I've lived here 6 years and have been a citizen for 3, she sheepishly (and stupidly) said, "We're not used to people already being citizens before they get involved with the welfare system." (It sounds better in Swedish: "Vi är inte vana vid att folk hinner bli medborgare innan de blandar sig med välfärdsystemet.") She encouraged me to fill in the form to the best of my abilities and add an extra sheet explaining everything.

She also said I would have to send a copy of my employment contract. Apparently the fact that it's my employer that reports me sick and tells them how much money to pay me isn't good enough; I have to send my own written proof that I work here and have that salary. Friends of mine who have gotten various forms of payments from FK have not had to provide this much proof; and by this point I was really starting to tend towards outraged. The extra burden of proof on me can not be said to be a result of me being a foreigner, because I am not a foreigner -- I was a foreigner, and quite some time ago.

Anyway. I sent off the form, the explanatory letter, and the copy of my employment contract to the address that was written on the form. It said, very clearly at the top of the form, "Send this form back to the following address." I had also asked the lady on the phone, "Is it this address in Malmö that I send it to?" She confirmed. Alright then.

The letter was sent on June 30, and seriously, ought to have been delivered July 1. But just yesterday when I came to work I got an e-mail from our HR lady saying that just last week she'd called FK and been told that my sick-leave had been denied because I wasn't registered with FK. So I got on the phone to them and started asking what the hell was going on, and was told that "one month isn't enough time for your registration to go through." What?! It takes more than a month to type in my name, address, and how much money I make? Seriously? They said they would contact the person in charge of my case and have them call me.

This is where it gets fun, and where the post office gets involved.

I went home from work -- without having received the promised phone call from FK of course -- and found that the registration form had been delivered back to me, three weeks after I had sent it, and with a note from the post office saying "Address does not exist."

Upon contacting FK again today, I was told, "So sorry, here's the address you want. It's in Visby." But... what? I can understand if some schmuck had wrongly written an address to some FK office in Malmö on my form when it was really an FK office a thousand kilometers away that was supposed to be handling it, but the part that gets me is that they would have written an address that doesn't exist.

So I do a little investigation of the envelope and at the post office's website. The address was P.O. Box 4080, 302 11 Malmö. My envelope clearly did make it to Malmö, as it was stamped as coming from Malmö on its return to me. At the post office's website, I see that P.O. Box 4080 is very much in existence in Malmö -- but the post code is not 302 11, but rather, 203 11. The fact that the post office apparently wracked their brains over this for 3 weeks and apparently couldn't figure it out anyway blows my mind. I can just see them, standing with my envelope in hand, 3 feet away from P.O. Box 4080, going "Gosh, it SAYS Malmö, but the post code is so totally all wrong! Dunno what to do!"

I called again today to complain that my contact person never returned my phone call as promised, and was given yet another address -- not an address in Malmö, not an address in Visby as I was given by e-mail, an address in Östersund.

So somehow a person at FK managed to write the wrong destination, complete with the wrong post code for that destination; they can't seem to decide what the right destination is; the post office manages to get a letter to the right location without having the right post code but then is unable to put a piece of paper in a box; and all this for a form that I really shouldn't have to fill out anyway, but will now have to send again and apparently wait more than a month to get a response.

That response will probably be something about how sick pay has to be claimed within 45 days of missing work or something.

Wild Rice Pilaf

Wild rice is the state grain of my home state of Minnesota. It's very important to have a state grain; the international community just won't take you seriously if you don't take a stand on these things.

As the name suggests, it grows, well, wild. If you drive through the Borreal forrest areas of Northern Minnesota, every mile or so you see a sign saying, "Wild Rice, 5 lb for $8.99." Or at least that's what it cost when I was 18 and driving up to Thunder Bay; perhaps there has been inflation.

It's one of the things I try to bring back with me when I visit the states, as it's tough to find here, but lately I have seen it popping up here and there as food markets experience a sort of variety explosion here in Sweden.

The award for most delicious use of wild rice has to go to Byerly's Wild Rice Soup, in my opinion. Byerly's is a kind of special phenomenon in St. Paul -- if you've ever walked through the grocery store and thought "This experience could be made better if the floor were carpetted and there were crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling," then you'd like Byerly's.

The following is a side dish I devised to mimic the sort of ready-made blends of spices, white and wild rice (Uncle Ben's, Rice-a-roni, etc.) that are commonly available back in the States.

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White and Wild Rice Pilaf

1 T. parsley (1 msk persilja)
1 t. thyme (1 tsk timjan)
1 t. tarragon (1 tsk dragon)
½ t. onion powder (½ tsk lökpulver)
½ t. garlic powder (½ tsk vitlökspulver)
½ t. basil (½ tsk basilika)
½ t. marjoram (½ tsk mejram)
½ t. white pepper (½ tsk vitpeppar)
½ t. salt (½ tsk salt)
½ cup uncooked wild rice (1 dl okokt vildris)
1 T. butter (1 msk smör)
1 small yellow onion, chopped (1 gul lök, hackad)
2 ½ cups broth (7 dl buljong)
¾ cup uncooked long grain rice (2 dl okokt parboiled ris)
1 can green beans, drained (250 gram haricot verts konserv utan lag)
1 can sliced mushrooms, drained (250 gram champinjoner konserv utan lag)

Mix all the spices and the wild rice together.

In a medium-sized pot, cook the onion in butter until soft and clear. Add the broth and the wild rice and spices mix. Bring to a boil. Cover and simmer for about 20 minutes. Add the white rice; cover and simmer for 20 more minutes. Remove from heat and mix in the green beans and mushrooms. Let sit, covered, for 5 minutes.

Servings: 4
Calories per serving: 277
Fat: 5 g
Protein: 5 g
Carbohydrates: 52 g

Comments: You might find that there are two types of wild rice available: whole and cracked. This recipe assumes you use whole wild rice, because that's the only type I can find around here. If you use cracked wild rice, it gets easier and takes less time: blend in the white rice at the beginning with the wild rice and spices, and the whole thing only needs to be boiled for 20 minutes total instead of 40.

I serve this side dish with ham and apple sauce, and the hubby gave it a score of 7 out of 10. With 4 oz of lean smoked ham and some low-sugar apple sauce, this meal has only 445 Calories.

Semantics

Subtle differences in the way two people might say a thing when they (think they) both mean the same thing can make a world of difference. Warning -- this post is not about food.

Losing a pregnancy could, I'm convinced, break just about anyone. Having a miscarriage when you don't yet have any children is, from the mouths of many psychologists, on a whole other level. Having the pretty rare experience of miscarrying after the 12th week of pregnancy brings it to yet another level, especially if you've already "seen" the baby kicking and waving and swimming around on an ultrasound, and been told that it looks "just fine". A whole new form of debilitating grief is introduced if you've had unusual family losses before.

What I didn't need, in other words, was for the handling of my miscarriage in the emergency room to become a case study for Linköping's university hospital's doctors, nurses and students on how not to treat a patient.

During our meeting with the head of the emergency clinic, we were assured that nothing was acceptable about the way I was treated when I came in in the middle of the night, 17 weeks pregnant, in excruciating pain and dripping with blood. I shouldn't have been told to wait, I shouldn't have had to pass a dead child out into a toilet because no one was helping me, I shouldn't have been treated rudely, as though I was disrupting someone's otherwise peaceful night, and my husband and I definitely shouldn't have had to see our baby flushed down a toilet, in front of our eyes.

We should have been helped immediately, we were assured, without waiting or taking a damn queue number. We should have been treated delicately, with regard shown to the loss that still had us in shock. We should have been asked if we wanted to hold our baby, know what sex it was, give it a name and a burial, and been asked if we wanted an autopsy done.

These assurances, I assume, are meant to make me feel better. They show me that they agree with me about my treatment being unacceptable. They tell me that it's good that I wrote letters to all the essential persons, because now they can prevent this sort of thing from happening again. They insist that I shouldn't for a moment expect that this would happen again the next time I'm pregnant and if, god forbid, I come in to the ER for a similar reason. They tell me that my story is so shocking that they can barely believe their ears and they are ashamed. We do not accept this kind of behavior from our staff, and only a fraction of a percent of the time do things go wrong. The ER's resident gynecologist was there as well, also assuring me that I should see my late miscarriage as a freak coincidence; it happened "for no reason" and "next time everything will most likely go just fine."

I sit there in the office of the ER chief, shaking and sobbing and hyperventilating from having to return to "the scene of the crime," staring at the little paper cups and juice that she's set out for our little meeting. I hear these assurances and reassurances and assistances that the behavior of one of her employees is shockingly unacceptable, but I am not reassured. What I hear is this:

"The vast majority of our patients are treated with care and professionalism. The vast majority of pregnancies go to term. The vast majority of miscarriages are the result of random chromosomal errors and happen before the 12th week. For some reason, you are in none of these cases in the vast majority."

And I wonder what that reason is. I feel worthless and wonder what it is about me that puts me among the chosen one tenth of one percent.

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Today Fredrik and I drove to the grocery store. I was driving, as I'm practicing to get my license. I made a mistake entering a roundabout, Fredrik freaked out a bit, and I, already on the emotional edge the last few days, burst into tears. We sat in the parking lot for a good deal of time, me totally broken down and taking choppy breaths through uncontrollable sobbing. Fredrik held me and said:

"You don't deserve the things that have happened to you."

And I agree. I feel just a little proud and strong and give the universe, and that nurse, the finger.

Blood, Sweat and Tears

It's time to get tough, I said, and up the gym visits and lower the junk food. Gotta give yourself 8 solid weeks of being a good girl, eating right, working out, and not giving up if the scale spits out lies and slander the for the first couple of weeks.

So far, I've succeeded in this mission for 5 days. Been a super good girl. Today, I'm a little good-naturedly frustrated with the exponential difficulty of being a good girl.

I've exercised at least one hour every day this week. Every other day it's been intense at the gym, the other days it's been bike trips downtown to run this or that errand. Last night we even took a walk over to our friends' new house, and thanks to our mutually poor sense of direction, we were walking for an hour.

The rate at which my strength and cardio endurance improve are fascinating. I did the exact same workout on Monday, Wednesday, and today: 35 minutes on one of these X-country ski-like elliptical machines and then 45 minutes of weight lifting according to a program I got from the PT at my gym. The trusty Polar pulse watch was with me, of course. On Monday, my heart rate was up above 180 -- which is not super super high for me, because if I run it's up around 200; I'm like a small rodent -- on Wednesday it was about 170, and today the same elliptical workout kept me around 160, despite the fact that I was consciously trying to spin my legs faster than before and keep the RPMs above 50.

The upside is that it's a reminder that the body really does get stronger quite quickly once you manage to stick to a routine.

The downside is that getting stronger is my secondary goal -- losing weight is my primary (well, arguably, losing weight in order to get stronger). And where I burned around 500 Calories during my workout on Monday, I only managed to rid myself of 390 today. Plus, if these workouts are making me stronger and giving me more energy, someone tell me why it's tough to drag myself out of bed at 8 in the morning and why I must wince every time I raise my arms above my head 3-4 days after each workout. Anyone?

Whining aside, I'm quite proud of myself. Aside from the exercise routine, I've had a week packed full of fruits, veggies, no alcohol (admittedly, not tough), very little coffee (a little tougher!), and only one bout of "I'm too lazy to cook" that led me to eat at McDonald's. But it's okay -- I had a Happy Meal, only 590 Calories. ;)

Italian Sausage and Lentil Soup

Here it is, as promised, the recipe that hubby gave 8 out of 10! God, I hope it’s not a big anti-climax.

This recipe was inspired by a meal that we had while on our Honeymoon in Rome. We ate at a wine bar called Trimani, and I definitely recommend the place. I’m also a big fan of Italian sausage, at least in the sense that I always ordered sausage and mushroom when the occasion called for pizza back home. I wanted to learn what it was that gave it its unique flavor. Turns out it’s anis seed! I got some help from Emeril Lagasse, actually, as I snuck a peek at his recipe for Mild Italian Sausage and adapted accordingly.

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Italian Sausage and Lentil Soup

6 oz dry lentils (2 dl linser)
1 lb ground pork (400 g fläskfärs)
1 egg (1 ägg)
½ cup milk (1 dl mellanmjölk)
1 ½ t paprika (1 ½ tsk paprikapulver)
1 t anis or fennel seed, crushed (1 tsk anis- eller fänkålsfrön, krossade)
1 t salt (1 tsk salt)
1 t black pepper (1 tsk svartpeppar)
1 t cayenne pepper (1 tsk cayennepeppar)
1 t garlic powder (1 tsk vitlökspulver)
½ t tarragon (½ tsk dragon)
1 T fresh parsley (1 msk färsk persilja)
1 ½ T butter (25 g smör)
1 yellow onion, finely chopped (1 gul lök, finhackad)
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped (2 vitlöksklyftor, finhackade)
2 T flour (2 msk vetemjöl)
4 cups broth (1 l buljong)

Soak the lentils in cold water for 2-3 hours. Boil them in fresh water for about 20 minutes. Drain and set aside.

Mix the meat, egg, milk and all the spices; set aside.

Cook the onions and garlic in butter until the onions are soft and clear. Add the flour so that it coats the onions and garlic. Add broth and bring to a boil. While the liquid is simmering, drop the meat in small spoonfuls into the water. (You can roll it into little meatballs if you have the patience; I didn’t.) Finally, add the lentils and cook until everything is warm.

Servings: 4
Calories per serving: 479 (with 20% fat pork and 2% milk)
Fat: 28 g
Protein: 29 g
Carbohydrates: 27 g

Comments: 53% of the Calories in this recipe come from fat, and since the fat is from ground pork and butter, it’s probably a lot of saturated fat. So this isn’t the kind of thing you want to eat every day if you’re super picky about taking care of your heart. However, it’s low calorie, contains a good helping of legumes, which most people don’t get enough of, and it tastes good!

Recipes

Like I said in my first post, I hope to post a lot of recipes here on my blog. Again, I don't consider myself a super fabulous cook, but I enjoy cooking and am getting better all the time. It was Sunday night's dinner that rated an 8 out of 10 from my hubby (a level that he has descibred as "I wouldn't mind paying for this at a restaurant") that inspired me to finally start writing a blog.

But just to add to the suspense a bit more, I felt it was necessary to make a pre-recipe post, explaining a little of this and that.

I play around both with American recipes and Swedish ones, but in the end, it's a Swedish kitchen that I have. That means that the measurements in my recipes tend to be in grams and deciliters, especially the recipes I've made up myself. It also means that a recipe of mine might not work as well in the States -- I've discovered, for instance, that flour here doesn't have the same amount of protein and that that can really ruin a cake. When I write the recipes in English I will write with the American system of cups and ounces, but that means some of the measurements might look quite strange. I will, however, attempt to post the recipes in both English and Swedish. This is surely fun for the whole family.

I use a kitchen scale to measure a lot of my ingedients, which I know is uncommon in America. However, if you're interested in food, or especially if you're interested in losing weight or watching what you eat, I would heartily suggest you get a kitchen scale! And that you learn the metric system. And that the U.S. nutrition labelling guidelines switch to "Nutrients per 100 grams" instead of this "Nutrients per What Some Committee Has Decided Is One Serving" nonsense.

But I digress.

For me, cooking is fun not just because I like food and like to try out new ingredients and meals. It's also a challenge to try to make the food healthy as well as tasty. Both the Swedish and the American governments have departments whose job it is to decide how we should eat. To American ears that all sounds very big-brother; perhaps most of us don't actually know it, but it is The USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services that came up with that food pyramid that was all over food packaging about 10 years ago. In 2005 they revised their Dietary Guidelines in a way that accounts more for the fact that we're all different sizes and genders and that children eat, too. In Sweden, the body that tells us how to eat is Livsmedelsverket. I know that the U.K. has government dietary guidelines as well, from hearing Gillian Keith mention them often on the TV show You Are what you Eat.

It may not come as a shock to anyone, but all of these dietary guidelines are very similar. The U.S. version now suggests we eat 2 cups of fruit and 2 1/2 cups of vegetables per day. The Swedish version states that we need 500 grams of fruit and veg daily, about 250 grams of each. This works out to the same amount, basically (and it's also an example of how Americans measure by volume and Swedes by weight!). What I like about the USDA Dietary Guidelines is that they go into detail about different kinds of vegetables and why we need them. They've also included appendixes with lists of calcium, fiber and vitamin content of various foods, different diet suggestions depending on age, gender and activity level, etc.

Okay, what am I getting at? I know that most people are not the types to sit and read an 84-page PDF about how the government thinks you should eat. But it's the kind of thing that I admit to thinking is pretty fun, and I like having a goal to strive towards in my quest to eat more healthily. And it's nothing extreme, like becoming a strict vegan or only eating raw food or never eating bread and meat on the same days or drinking gelatinated flax seeds every morning to get your proper weight-loss chi activated.

So the recipes that I make for my little family reflect these guidelines to the best of my ability. I try to make every lunch or dinner portion contain at least 125 grams of vegetables, and make an effort to vary them among the 5 types of green leafy, orange, beans, starchy, and "other". I try to use whole-grain carbs and pack in some fiber here and there. I try to vary the type of meat we eat and choose lower-fat alternatives when it won't drastically affect the taste or consistency of our food. You won't find a lot of dairy and fruit in my lunch and dinner-type recipes, however, because I pack those in for breakfast and snacks.

Aside from trying to follow guidelines for what our food should contain, I also struggle to make sure we don't eat too much of it. I've been overweight since I was 16, and at its worst I weighed 115 kg. When I moved to Sweden, rather than the pounds melting away as everyone predicted (it's magic fairy dust in the air that keeps Europeans slim, don't you know), I stayed at the same weight while Fredrik went up about 15 kg under my influence. A few years later, Fredrik found the website Viktklubb.se, where members can devise a personal weight-loss program and, by writing in what they eat and what exercise they do, get their Calories counted up for them as a tool to keep them on track. This website has been nothing short of a miracle for me. I'm a mathematician and obsessed with numbers (ask me how many steps it takes to get from my house to my office), so having a concrete and simple way to count my Calories was just the thing. When you count Calories, no food is forbidden; it's much better to make that pasta with cream instead of skim milk; the key is to eat a reasonable amount of it.

I lost 35 kg in 2 years, and then hit a plateau. That plateau was named "full-time employment with paid lunches." But I'm still workin' on it, dag-nabbit. (Fredrik also lost his 15 kg, and I'm very proud of him!)

So, the point at the end of my rambling is this:

• My recipes may look strange to an American if they call for five-twelfths of a cup of something, or give the amount by weight instead of volume, but now you understand why. But I will attempt to round off to the nearest sensible unit.
  
• I try to pack in lots of veggies and grains and goodness into dinner when I can.
  
• Lunch and dinner recipes are almost always under 600 Calories, and if you're a follower of Atkins or GI or the Pineapple Method or whatever, that's great for you I'm sure, but this is how I do things.
  
• I'm a geek who reads and re-reads government publications.

Swenglish

This is the first of a few introductory, explanatory posts that I plan on making. It's a warning about how, if you read this blog often, you will likely encounter a lot of Swenglish.

I moved to Sweden in 2002, when I was 24 years old. Up until that point the only language I could speak was (American) English. I'd studied two years of French in high school, but done an exemplary job of forgetting it all. I'd also studied ancient Greek to get my language points for graduation from St. Olaf, and you can probably never really say that you "speak" ancient Greek. We mostly read and translated Plato and the Bible, and even that at the rate of about two sentences per hour. It did, however, leave me with a sick level of understanding for the complexities of grammar and a thankfulness that I didn't speak a language with severely declined nouns and both imperfect and aorist verb forms.

That might be why I had a pretty easy time learning Swedish. For the first year I lived here, I tried to learn the language on my own, and it didn't go so well. I had learned lots of food words, since my main occupation was buying groceries, but otherwise I wasn't prepared to have more than a very simple conversation. If I tried to practice speaking Swedish, people would hear that I stumbled and had an accent, so they started excitedly speaking English to me, in order to show off and/or practice their own English skills. It became clear to me that I wasn't going to get a job here unless I learned the language and bowed to their view that Swedish degrees are oh-so-much better than foreign ones, so I got myself into a program at the university that both taught me the language and turned my American degree into a Swedish teaching license.

My Swedish teachers were, well, brutal. We had two language and grammar teachers, one pronunciation teacher, a history teacher and a civics teacher. We had class 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, from the beginning of August until the end of May. We had mountains of homework every night. We didn't have school breaks when the rest of the university students did, except for something like one week at Christmas. Every time we made a mistake -- typically with word order i subclauses, for all you other non-native Swedish-speaking grammar freaks out there! -- the teachers snapped their fingers and made us say it over again. It was all about creating good habits and nipping the bad habits in the bud. By Christmas, I was suddenly a fluent reader and writer and could understand the news anchors on TV; by May I could speak fluently about just about anything. After our final test, which essentially gave us a Swedish high school diploma, there was much drinking, smoking, and swearing (in English, let's be honest). We got kicked out of a pub and our Australian classmate broke his nose after an impressive drunken flying bike incident. Good times.

However, no matter how much I wanted to learn Swedish or how well I speak it now, we still speak English at home, Fredrik and I. Some people have a hard time understanding this, not least of whom the head teacher in our Swedish course. She felt I would learn even faster if we spoke English at home. I felt, on the contrary, that either Fredrik or I would end up strangling the other and I'd be packing my bags for the U.S., which is the definition of shooting oneself in the foot. I learned Swedish well enough that people are now shocked that I'm not a native Swede when I tell them, and our relationship and patterns at home, a life very much built around the English language, are happily intact.

But something happens when you live one life in one language and another life in another. I not only spend much of my outward social life and work life in Swedish, but I got my teaching degree here, so there are words and concepts that I never spoke about until I spoke about them in Swedish. Some words about the educational system or the welfare system or mortgages or fertility or stock markets or things that are peculiarly Swedish -- I never spoke about them in English, so my mind doesn't find the English words for them. It happens that I need to run to a dictionary in order to translate something from Swedish into English -- and now, keep in mind, I'm not just a native-speaking grammatical-freak type English speaker; I'm now a Master degreed licensed teacher in the stuff. So this mental block is, to say the least, a little sad.

But this is where Swenglish comes in. Or svengelska, as it is called in Swedish. It's difficult to hear a conversation in Swedish today that isn't peppered with English words. The whole of Sweden is suffering from the same disease I am -- an inability to speak in their own language without throwing in words from another, because English so permeates every aspect of this society. My coworkers look at me a little funny when I say "mjukvarupaket" instead of "software package" and if I pronounce "integration" in the Swedish manner instead of in English. So it's not so terrible that I speak in English of having a faluröd house with vita knutar (a red house with white trim, part of the Swedish equivalent of the American dream) or if I have a conversation with my husband about paying our "fastigshetskatt" because my mind is a split-second too slow in providing the word "property tax," or, even more subtly, if I say that these blueberries are awful because they "don't taste anything" instead of saying "they have no flavor".

It's tough to fight it but, hey, I think I'm in good company. Henrik Schyffert is Packed on the Jobb.

You're fascinated already.

My husband keeps telling me I should write a blog. I've never quite understood why, and it seems to me there can only be two possible explanations:

1. He thinks that what I have to say is fascinating and that I ought to share it with the rest of the world.
   
2. He thinks that what I have to say is getting really old and irritating and wishes I'd vent it out of my system on the web so that he doesn't have to hear it anymore.

The title of this blog is The Pessimist's Cookbook. Which of the above two explanations I am leaning towards will be left as an exercise for the reader.

Who are you then?

That question most likely doesn't need to be answered. You are here at my blog; that means that you can correctly spell my name; and that means that you're probably related to me. Lori Caeng... Seangi... Ceange... call me Tildy. For now. I will tell you more later, when you've proven that you want to know.

Pessimist?

Indeed. I officially come out of the closet and declare that I am a devout pessimist, impressively steadfast in my adherance to Murphy's Law and my conviction that everything will go down the pisser in much more creative ways than you've ever thought of. If you've ever read How to talk Minnesotan then you know that giving a thought to the worst-case-scenario is a time-honored emotional survival technique among my people. But wait -- we decided that you're probably related to me. This means you knew this already; that I am the local champion in competitive måla fan på väggen. But on the off chance that you are a person that doesn't share genes or maritally binding relations with me, what I'm trying to say is that some posts in this blog may be very negative, misanthropic and generally not very uplifting. Unless, of course, you are of a similar bent -- us types know for sure that misery loves company. A more specific warning is that some posts will inevitably revolve around a recent source of severe grief in my life, a late miscarriage we suffered in April while 4 months pregnant with what would have been our first child, and our attempts to get pregnant again.

Cookbook?

I'm not really as bad as all that. Some people might be downright surprised at the suggestion that there is actually a vitriolic people-hater under this milquetoast exterior. Well, it comes in waves, and between you and me, I'd love for the happy-positive-I-like-puppies-and-butterflies waves to be much more frequent. There are things and people that I love to see and do and talk about and that fill me up again when I'm feeling empty. What I really love the most, I've learned, is taking care of people. I love to be the one that brings an aspirin and a glass of water to my husband when he's got a headache. I love to be the one that has too much to do because I'm helping other people with their work. I love teaching people things so much that the word "love" is inadequate.

Those of you who have read How to talk Minnesotan, here comes your advantage again -- taking care of people, to me, has a whole lot to do with feeding them. It's become my hobby to plan meals and weekly menus (my husband might call it an obsessive-compulsive fixation, but I fail to see the difference) and, after losing over 35 kilos and still working on losing some more, I'm also very interested in constantly improving the nutritional quality of the food we eat and making sure we take care of our bodies. So I figured -- hey. That's what I could write about. Food, recipes, nutrition, losing weight. I'm not going to say here that I'm a really good cook, but I think I'm a person with an interest in cooking and a few nifty kitchen tricks that is on her way to becoming a really good cook. And I actually think that I know enough about "nutrition for the non-hippy" that I could teach other people about it. Although I am kind of a hippy. Sort of. To some people.

Fredrik?

So there you have two of the three most prevalent themes in my life. Cynicism and food. (Or did I mean right-wing type misanthropism and bleeding heart leftist hippiness? More on that later.) What's number three? That's my husband, Fredrik, of course. A man so infuriatingly positive and uninterested in baked goods that one can wonder why I moved across the Atlantic Ocean in order to build a life with him. The way to his heart might have been through his stomach, but it took me a while to figure out that it was a route better traveled by meat than by cakes and pies.

All of these three themes in my life are intertwined. I need to continue taking good care of myself and providing my body with quality fuel, nutrients and exercise in order to improve our chances for a successful pregnancy next time. My love of taking care of people (and feeding them) makes me more and more anxious to add a person to our family. And of course, Fredrik is the reason both for my desire to have a baby and my love of cooking. My father-in-law, who is the very talented cook in his household, apparently eats macoroni and falukorv (for you non-Swedes, it's about as classy as Kraft Mac n' Cheese) when my mother-in-law or anyone else isn't around for him to cook for. I totally get that. It's all about taking care of people.