Homemade, I guess. A mashup of pizza and mashed potato. Tastes good, presentation could use some work.

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.

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.

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 figure a lot of people spun pens back in school. I mean you at least imitated it, or tried it. In middle school I happened to see someone holding a ballpoint in his hand, gave it a flick with two fingers, and the barrel went dancing between his fingers. Looked sick. So I copied him. And of course the result was predictable: the useless thing spun less than 180 degrees across the web of my thumb before plummeting out of my hand. But I wasn’t discouraged. Practice makes perfect, and spinning badly doesn’t get anyone pregnant, doesn’t hurt you either. Idle hands, so why not. Over time my right hand, whenever it wasn’t writing, kept endlessly messing with the pen between the web of the thumb and the index finger. They say persist at something long enough and it becomes a habit. So one day in class I suddenly noticed my pen had dropped to the floor from a failed spin, and realized I’d been spinning for over 40 minutes without noticing. That was when it hit me: I’d picked up a bad habit called pen spinning.

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.

Salt and Pepper Fried Shiitake — I made this once before and it basically failed. Simple reason: the batter I mixed was way too thin. This time I learned my lesson.

January 2017 was, all in all, a fever dream. First, on New Year’s Day, I was bored and sent greetings to everyone. A matchmaking girl who’d kicked me before replied immediately, saying she wanted to meet again and explain a misunderstanding from last time. When we met, she said it was all a misunderstanding, hoped we could start over as friends, and thought my values were really upright, blah blah blah—basically a bunch of praise. After I got home she kept reaching out, which scared the hell out of me. All I could say was, okay okay, I got it, and then, “I get how you feel, but I’m not sure if I like you, so why don’t we hang out and see…” Though that line felt weirdly familiar… like someone else had said it before…