A dish I picked up recently. It’s basically stir-fried noodles, except it’s done the Dingding stir-fry way — stir-fried noodles with no Dingding in them.

I got tired of pan-frying chicken cutlets every morning, so I decided to try baking them in the oven. The tricky part with oven-baked chicken cutlets is keeping them from turning dry and stringy. We want them juicy. After a few attempts, it turned out pretty well.

The hairy crabs were a gift from someone, some kind of gift voucher I think — you book through WeChat and then just go pick them up. I’d never actually cooked hairy crabs before. My wife knows how to eat them, though, so I decided to give it a go myself under her advice.

I’ve been eating fried eggs for breakfast so often lately that I’m getting sick of them, so I decided to add some stuff.

Asparagus is a good thing, or at least that’s what I gather from all the foreigners I see eating it for breakfast. Nutritious, not too heavy on calories, and it crunches nicely when you bite in — for a moment there you feel like a panda… I spent a while figuring out the best way to eat asparagus. Pan-fry it straight? Stir-fry it with rice? In the end I decided bacon is the best match. Hence this bacon-wrapped asparagus.

This time I made fragrant roasted chicken legs — the kind that can hold their own against what you buy on the street. Not much work to it. The main thing is the marinade: scallion sections and ginger, light and dark soy sauce, a little salt and chili powder, two chicken legs, and let them sit. Overnight is what I’d recommend.

I’ve been cooking every day lately, breakfast especially. Breakfast has to taste good, and it has to be fast and convenient. Best of all if nothing goes to waste — this time the house was sitting on way too much mantou, so I stir-fried it.

A supremely unglamorous dish. As the name says, you chop up a flatbread or scallion pancake and stir-fry it. First, chop the pancake into bits, then chop some lettuce too. If you don’t have lettuce, skip it… or swap in cabbage. Beat two eggs, heat the wok, add a tiny bit of oil, toss in a little chili to bloom the aroma, then pour in the beaten egg and the chopped pancake bits and just start stir-frying. Finally add the chopped lettuce, give it a quick toss, and you’re ready to season. Add black pepper, add a bowl of warm water with salt stirred in, keep stir-frying — this makes sure the pancake softens up and improves the texture. Then add a splash of light soy sauce, and it’s ready to come out of the wok. ![DqjODaoXcAEQ9Ej.jpg:large.jpeg][1]

Egg fried rice made from leftover rice, with diced beef tossed in. The method is a total ripoff of Kuan You Wang’s video. The key is frying the egg whites and yolks separately. Except I didn’t have fresh shiitake mushrooms, and no cured meat either. I used beef paste, the kind with lots of diced beef in it. For the mushrooms I subbed in diced carrot.

Honestly this dish isn’t that hard, but after making it myself once, I gotta say it turned out way better than what I’ve had at other people’s places.