While everyone else was eating chicken, I went with shrimp. This isn’t my first time baking shrimp in the oven, but this time I went with something more direct: fresh shrimp, marinated straight up, then straight into the oven, with a sauce on the side. Tastes pretty fresh.

Another day, another excuse to fire up the oven. I can’t get through a day without black pepper, and this time it’s shrimp. The usual version of baked shrimp is garlic shrimp, where you stuff the garlic into the meat. First, wash the shrimp, snip open the back of the tail and pull out the black intestine, then score it with a knife so it opens into two halves. Add Shaoxing wine, a little oil, and a tiny bit of salt to marinate. No need to marinate long — about an hour is plenty.