Back in the kitchen after a long break. Today’s project: fish-fragrant puffy omelet. The proper high-end version comes out fluffy and legit impressive. But the pantry’s limited… so a stripped-down version first. Eggs are the main event, fish-fragrant sauce is the supporting act. Let’s take them separately. Eggs first:

October was a shit month. I spent almost all of it revising a dumbass thesis. Short version: my workplace recommended me for some graduate program. Two years passed, and now it’s time to graduate, which means writing a thesis. Except the topic wasn’t even my choice — someone else picked it, and the content is dumb as hell. The kind where you look at the title and immediately know it’s just flexing with zero substance. Fine, flexing is flexing, it’s not like I’ve never written a bullshit paper before. But after I turned it in, the review crew started howling: “This content is kind of meaningless, isn’t it?” Yeah, I know it’s meaningless, thanks. If you’ve got a problem with that, go yell at the idiot who assigned me the topic!

I actually thought about making sushi last week, but some bullshit paper thing dragged it out until now. So I finally had time to actually start making sushi… I’ve always figured sushi was pretty easy to make! And yeah, it’s actually stupidly easy!!

Fried udon — I made this once before a while back. This is round two. Last time had plenty of problems. First, it didn’t taste great: I used soy sauce instead of XO sauce. Second, way too oily and way too dark. Third, it took forever. So this time I learned from that: Kept the vegetable prep fast Synced the udon blanching with the stir-frying so everything moves together Bought XO sauce, went easy on the soy sauce, added the greens last. At least efficiency improved a lot — the whole thing took 15 minutes.

Haven’t cooked in a long time. It’s been a while. Recently I’ve started trying to handle the whole shopping-and-cooking routine. Picked up shrimp at the supermarket — actually a “green peas and shrimp” combo pack — and also grabbed okra, cherry tomatoes, cabbage, and cucumber. The last three are for a fruit salad. The weather was nice today, so I made the shrimp and the okra. The okra is dead simple: chop the garlic, drop it into medium-hot oil, stir it around, take it out. Make a dressing with light soy sauce and a spoonful of sugar. Blanch the okra in boiling water for 1 minute, and after taking it out you can run it under cold water to make it crisper — I didn’t, because I forgot. Then plate it and pour the dressing over. Done.

Tamagoyaki is apparently a simple Japanese dish; in China we just call it “yuzishao” — basically scrambled eggs. Except Chinese cooking is crude: crack them in the pan, stir, plate. The Japanese are fussier, so they insist on cooking the egg into a block and rolling it up…

Last week was my first time making these. Sticking to my plan of doing it at least 5 times, this week was round two… Plating looks a bit better than last week:

I used to cook, back when I was still in school. All things considered, it’s been years since I last cooked anything, and even back then I didn’t do it all that often — so starting again now is basically starting from zero. Anyway, I’ve decided to stop being a useless lump and pick the cooking skill back up. The rough plan is to nail a few basic dishes first, then go after the harder stuff. If the everyday stuff works out, I’ll try desserts.