Last time I made cranberry cookies. This time I wanted to add some flavor. My two favorites are black pepper and matcha, and black pepper is obviously out of the question, so matcha it is.

The bake-it-yourself bread series. A bloomer. The European kind. Probably the most classic, most beginner-friendly one out there — Paul teaches you to bake bread, from the BBC Recipe channel. Paul Hollywood’s bloomer http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/paul_hollywoods_bloomer_84636

Sort of a copycat of Zhongwang’s little cookies? Making them is actually really simple.

Still the oven. This time it’s small drumsticks, not the big thigh kind. And the flavor is my favorite again — black pepper!

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.

I bought an oven recently, so cooking has a whole new frontier to expand into.

A breakfast I stumbled on while randomly watching Japanese cooking videos on YouTube. Takes about 10 minutes. Ingredients: Sliced bread Soy sauce Eggs Lettuce Chicken bouillon

I’ve made salad before, but only recently have I started getting slightly better at it… Usually the ingredients are these: A head of romaine. (Not regular lettuce — the little ball kind.) Lean beef Cherry tomatoes (I just like them, so sue me) Cucumber Boiled egg Avocado Black pepper

Kung Pao Chicken is a famous dish, and plenty of people love it. But there are actually two versions of this thing. One is the northern version, the one that spread the widest—supposedly tweaked by Shandong cuisine. That’s the one you get with peanuts, cucumber, diced carrot, and the chicken itself. What’s the original, then? The original is the Sichuan version. No extra cucumber or diced carrot, the chicken has to be thigh meat rather than breast, and the finished dish shows only chicken—none of that other stuff. Of course I’m not making the original. Maybe next time, if I get the chance. After all, Sichuan and Chongqing are full of perverts and gays, and to show off my northern traits as a non-pervert non-gay, I’ll make the northern version of kung pao chicken.

I was going to make ehōmaki today, but Zhengzhou’s PM2.5 is at 400 and I don’t want to go outside. The leftover rice can only become fried rice.