How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons

The best thing about living two floors above a great chef is the leftovers.

"I'm down at L.'s," the husband said on the phone. "She has something good for you, a little surprise." The surprise turned out to be hot glögg stirred with a stick of cinnamon, and tiny gingerbread men topped with blue cheese and fig jam and slices of fresh fig.

L., the chef, had been filming a pilot for a television series for channel four - a cooking show, of course. They'd filmed her in her apartment preparing for a party with her own version of glögg and gingerbread. Everyone's trying to copy the success of that guy who claims to cook naked but in fact never seems to take his clothes off, dammit. Sweden does have its own increasingly popular home-grown female version of Jamie Oliver, but I think L. could do better. She's a curious mix of funny, serious and enthusiastic, and she's already done well on cooking segments of some of the morning magazine programs.

The Swedish word for the day is pepparkakor. It means gingerbread.

- by Francis S.