Happy Easter and happy new year

Easter is a very popular holiday in secular Jesus-hating Muslim-loving Sweden. This year the workday ended early on Thursday and we have a four day weekend mostly to ourselves, a much-needed reprieve from the past few weeks of hectic work and other sources of stress. It being April, we have, over the course of a single day, had beautiful sunny spring weather, rain and six hours of soul-crushing snowfall.

In true Swedish fashion we've eaten salmon, various kinds of pickled herring, a ton of eggs and this sauce-like thing you make with a rich type of sourcream, lightly salted fish roe, shallots and lemon. I also squeezed in a large piece of traditional West Bothnian pie :) the signature dishes of Easter are salmon, eggs and lamb, and so I have a large lamb roast sous-videing for tomorrow, pierced through with rosemary, garlic and cinnamon and stuffed with dried lime. The gelatinous juices will be used, together with Cumberland sauce and assorted deliciousness, to make ridiculous quantities of sauce.

This year, Easter coincides with Pahela Baishakh, the counter-intuitively spelled Bengali new year's festival. Unfortunately I'm not celebrating it with my mum (who's in sthlm) and my sister (who's in Beirut), but my Facebook has been full of colorful photos of the celebrations all over the world.

Anyway, hope y'all have a good holiday or weekend regardless of whether or not you're celebrating :) glad påsk and shubho novoborsho