I've been lost in the forest of bad news for a while, but these arrived today to put on my work lanyard and they made me smile so much that they're worth sharing. Beautiful, aren't they! Helpful for students and helpful for me. I'll be fluent in no time...

I finally made it. Verdict: it smells like old socks but surprisingly it tastes nice. There are 15 cloves of garlic in it!! Good job I live alone. It's VERY obvious from the picture that I'm not an Arab 😂

This lovely haul is the result of my second brave visit to the Syrian market stall to buy the ingredients for a famous Arabic biscuit, maamoul, shown made properly (by someone else) in the other pic. The recipe looks entirely doable, which means it's probably fiendishly difficult. We'll see!

My mum brought me some homemade, traditional, English Christmas Cake yesterday - it's December today so completely fine to break into it now, right? I already know it's not going to last another 25 days... 🍽️

Time for cheap rental-house window insulation again. Not pretty, but effective. Goodbye view of the other side of the street. See you in Spring.

Horribly introverted and scaredy-cat me finally bit the bullet and spoke Arabic in a Syrian shop in order to buy these. Tomorrow I'm going to make Mloukhieh, something I only discovered existed yesterday. Forget skydiving, this is as exciting as I like my life to be.

I just had to explain this to my Swedish friend (which of course ruined it). You get it, right? I laughed my head off.

I now need to not let them down! Here goes...

Sunday is for cooking in my quiet life and today I tried making something with an ingredient that a Syrian student told me about: freekeh. It's wheat, harvested while still green and roasted, giving it a smoky flavour and making it much higher in protein. It's different and really tasty.

Jag cyklade förbi detta hus (som ligger nära Orsa i Dalarna) för en vecka sedan. Det ser ut som ett hus i vilken skräckfilm som helst.