And people did feast upon the lambs, and sloths, and carp, and anchovies, and orangutans, and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats, and large—
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Finally, a place where I can record my culinary (mis)adventures. As a male undergrad studying computer science, you can just about guess at the level of my culinary ability. Before the COVID-19 lockdown, the pinnacle of my cooking was pan-fried egg (炒鸡蛋). Ever since living on my own in Pittsburgh (and not having access to CMU dining), I’ve started cooking for myself, and surprisingly I’ve enjoyed it. At first, my cooking was mostly Western, but now I do more Chinese cooking.
Actually, this isn’t quite the first time I’ve had to cook for myself. I can remember one week during the summer before my senior year of high school when I stayed at home alone. I survived mostly off of Salerno’s pizza, gifts from various moms at church, and boiled dumplings.
I think I’ll try including some Chinese text with the Chinese dishes. Although I can speak Mandarin well enough to get my point across to grandma, I can’t read or write it at all. (I think I spent about a year in Chinese school—I mostly picked up the language from speaking at home.) Maybe I’ll eventually get familiar enough with the basic dishes that I won’t be entirely useless with Chinese menus.
Perhaps I ought to include recipes here. Hopefully my cooking knowledge will not regress much below where I am (for that would be quite low indeed), but at the same time it might be funny to look back on how I used to cook. Perhaps it would even be of use to some other poor undergrad who is on his own during a pandemic without the faintest idea of how to cook anything beyond an egg!
That would turn me into a proper food blogger…then again, isn’t that pretty much what this is? You can tell I’m not a professional food blogger by the appalling backgrounds in the images below.
Note: I am still in the process of uploading many dishes. This may take a while.