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restaurantLife2025-12-25

A Developer's Cooking Diary

From takeout dependency to cooking 3 meals a week — a kitchen adventure from zero, signature recipes, and spectacular failures.

As a programmer, my life was once governed by two things: code and takeout. Until the pandemic locked me at home, forcing me to confront the kitchen — that room I thought was just for housing a microwave.

How It Started

Forced to learn cooking during the pandemic. But what actually kept me going was discovering that cooking shares surprising similarities with programming — both involve combining ingredients step-by-step to produce results.

The difference: code bugs can hide in unexpected places, but food quality is immediately obvious in one bite. This "instant feedback" feels luxurious for someone used to waiting for CI/CD pipelines.

In the kitchen there's no undefined — just "tasty" or "not tasty." That certainty is incredibly reassuring.

Starting with Failures

Early cooking was a disaster zone:

  • First scrambled eggs: forgot the oil. An entire layer of burnt egg skin stuck to the pan
  • Cooking pasta without salting the water: completely flavorless noodles
  • Added way too much soy sauce to braised pork: inedibly salty
  • Cutting onions without soaking them first: crying for 20 minutes

    • But each failure was a debug session. You remember the bug and never repeat it. Exactly like coding.

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    The most important beginner cooking tip: learn heat control first. Most disasters come from too-high heat. Like code — going slower is actually faster.

    Signature Dishes

    After half a year of practice, several recipes reached "stable release":

    Tomato Beef Stew

    My proudest dish. The key is slow cooking — blanch beef chunks to remove impurities, then simmer with tomatoes on low heat for two hours.

    Tips:

  • Peel the tomatoes (quick blanch makes skin slip right off), the broth becomes silkier
  • Add a small spoon of tomato paste for color and depth
  • Patience — the lower the heat the better. Time is the secret to tender meat and rich broth
  • Finish with chopped scallions before serving

    • Garlic Broccoli

    Quick dish, perfect for worknight dinners when you don't want to spend much time.

    Simple enough to write as one line of code: `broccoli.blanch(2min) -> oil.sauté(garlic, 30s) -> add(broccoli).stirFry(1min) -> season(salt).serve()`

    But one detail matters: add a pinch of salt and a few drops of oil when blanching — the broccoli stays vibrant green. Like a small code optimization: same functionality, but the user (your eyes) experience improves dramatically.

    Cola Chicken Wings

    Highest beginner-friendliness rating. Nearly impossible to mess up.

    Score wings → cold water blanch → pan-fry until golden on both sides → add cola to cover → soy sauce, pinch of salt → reduce on high heat

    Total: 30 minutes. Success rate: 99%. That 1% is forgetting to reduce the sauce, turning it into cola-braised chicken wings.

    Fried Rice

    Sounds simple but genuinely hard to master. Took me 20+ attempts to find the feel:

  • Rice must be day-old; fresh rice is too soft
  • Scramble eggs first, don't break them up too finely
  • Press rice flat with spatula, high heat stir-fry
  • Drizzle soy sauce along the wok's edge (never directly on the rice — creates salty patches)
  • Kill the heat in the final seconds, let residual heat dry things out

    • Kitchen-Code Parallels

    The more I cook, the more it resembles programming:

  • •Function thinking：Each dish is a function — input (ingredients), process (cooking), output (finished dish)
  • •Debugging：Taste is off? Adjust — too bland add salt, too dry add oil, too rich add vinegar. Like tweaking CSS
  • •Version control：Tweak the recipe each time. Too much salt last time? Half a spoon less this time. Continuous iteration
  • •Separation of concerns：Prepare sides, mains, and soup separately, then assemble. Just like component-based development
  • •Documentation：Good recipes are good docs. I now record my formulas — no different from writing a README

    • Reflections

    The most healing part of cooking isn't the eating — it's the entire process: the rhythm of washing and chopping, the sizzle when oil reaches temperature, the aroma when plating.

    These sensory experiences are something coding can never provide.

    Cooking three times a week has become my fixed routine. It's not an "extra burden" — it's a "life anchor." After a day of logical thinking, recharging through sensory experience.

    Next Steps

    Want to learn:

  • Japanese cuisine (especially ramen — broth preparation looks challengingly complex)
  • Baking (dessert precision requirements are even more code-like)
  • Chinese dough-based dishes (hand-pulled noodles, steamed buns — handmade items bring a special sense of accomplishment)

    • Once I master these, I might just open a "Developer's Canteen."

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