Been busy lately, haven’t had much time to cook, so this one is good for half-assing breakfast. Just simple egg pancakes. The method is dead simple: one bowl of flour, one bowl of water, 2-3 eggs, half a spoon of salt, chopped scallions. Dump it all in, stir until smooth, then grab a flat pan and you’re ready.

The saying that “premium ingredients often need the simplest cooking method” hits harder with this dish than with anything else I cook. It’s really not much work at all, but there are exactly two things to get right: You need 「yellow lantern chili sauce」— this is the core of the flavor. If you don’t have it, a 「sour soup beef seasoning packet」 works just as well; it’s basically the same sauce inside Good-quality sliced fatty beef. The quality of the beef directly decides how this dish eats

A while back we had way too much rice at home, and stir-frying it over and over got old, so I decided to try something new. I figured, with all that rice lying around, why not make guoba? So I got to it. There are generally two ways to turn rice into guoba. One is deep-frying: press the rice into patties, drop them in hot oil, and the result comes out pretty close to the guoba you get in “guoba with squid.” But deep-frying is obviously a hassle and needs a big vat of oil. So I went with the other lazy method.

Honestly, this is a great breakfast thing. And I learned it from Xiaogaojie. For most people the annoying part is needing an oven and a skillet, and ideally a whisk. If you’ve ever done any baking, none of that is a problem.

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.

Fries made at home. They might not be as thin and long as the ones you buy out, but you have to admit the thicker ones are actually better, and they don’t taste bad either.

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 made soy sauce fried rice more times than I can count, but there’s always one fatal problem I can’t solve: The rice gets stickier the more you stir-fry it—it’s damn near impossible to separate the grains I’ve watched a ton of fried rice tutorials online, and not a single one explains why this happens. Most just say: use day-old rice. But I always use day-old rice! So why does it still come out wet? In the end, the ever-reliable Chef Wang Gang gave the answer.

I wanted meat skewers, but they’re too expensive outside, so I ended up making them myself.