There was a time a few years ago when I would often wake up hungry when I went to bed at night.

Dreams are full of scenes of foraging for food, sometimes lining up in the school cafeteria to get food, sometimes eating stir-fried pork with green bamboo shoots at a roadside restaurant, and sometimes eating steak in a Western restaurant. In short, I eat to my stomach.

I just cooed, and then I woke up from the dream. There was even saliva hanging on my mouth, but I had a long aftertaste.

That period was the most gluttonous time in my life, and it was also the time when my stomach and belly were the most disharmonious.

No matter what good food you have just eaten, you will vomit it all before it has time to enter the stomach for digestion. After eating, you will vomit, and after vomiting, you will finally regain your senses, but after such a toss, you will be hungry again.

At its most exaggerated, it’s common to want to eat sugar cane in the winter or roasted sweet potatoes in the summer. Even when you think of a certain food but can’t eat it immediately, you’ll feel like there are a hundred rabbits scratching your heart.

It's like scratching the liver.

And once the food you want to eat requires a lot of effort to get it, you often lose your appetite completely by the time you buy it.

This perverted and casual, strange but reasonable food and my protracted struggle basically lasted for more than half a year. It sounds scary, but it is commonplace, but people who have not experienced it personally will not have this kind of struggle.

a feeling.

It wasn’t that I had any weird problem, but that I was pregnant at that time. It wasn’t that I wanted to “do it”, it was just that my brain and appetite couldn’t synchronize during pregnancy.

After going through a difficult period of morning sickness, I finally became a mother. I thought I would be able to reach the peak of my life by taking off three layers of skin, but I found that new problems also came with it.

I have to start cooking.

Even if I don't eat, Xiao Maotou still has to eat.

Although eating is a strenuous job, cooking is not necessarily an easy job.

Maybe a real foodie doesn’t need to cook by himself, but a qualified home cook must have excellent knife skills, be familiar with various techniques of frying, stir-frying, stewing, and stew, and be proficient in avoiding burns from hot oil.

The only way to achieve mastery after going through hundreds of battles is through the know-how.

In the first two years of my marriage, I also cooked in the kitchen. Occasionally, if I became interested, I would follow the steps of the APP to cook a few creative dishes, take photos and post them, which gave me some small satisfaction.

But the stories behind those photoshopped food photos were more sensational than the food I cooked.

Let me give you a few examples.

When cooking fish or shrimp, I usually put it in the refrigerator to freeze to death, because I am timid and afraid that if it comes alive, it will jump out of the plate.

I usually slice or dice root vegetables or long strips of vegetables because my knife skills are limited and I cannot cut them very finely.

And every time I cut round potatoes, I feel terrified, for fear that I will chop off my fingers.

And every time I finish cooking and prepare to put it in the pot, I can't remember how many times I added salt.

When it comes to cooking, there may be examples of people who are self-taught, but for me, cooking has no enthusiasm and no foundation.

Even if you sign up for a chef cooking school, you will probably get a zero-level course.

The phrase "I'll make it for you whatever you want to eat" that often appears in movie lines must be the result of unremitting exploration and long-term practice, mastering the characteristics of various ingredients, and how to match them to present the best taste combination.

, none of it can be accomplished overnight.

And based on my ability, the best I can do is "You are hungry or not, why don't I cook you a bowl of noodles?"

As the saying goes, true knowledge comes from practice, and there is no room for adulteration.

The pain and joy of cooking may have a thousand interpretations and interpretations in the eyes of a thousand people.

Just like many people's idol Nicholas Tse, they used to only know him as a rebellious boy who sang, acted in movies, and did all kinds of deviant things.

But since I watched the food reality show "Twelve Flavors" starring him, my understanding of chefs has been refreshed.

Cooking is not only to fill the stomach, but also to satisfy the empty and lonely stomach and heart at the same time.

The process itself is romantic to the core.

And his personal demonstration made me discover that the sexiest moment for a man is not the flirtatious look in his eyes or the moment of banging on the wall, but the back view of him putting on an apron, washing hands and making soup for the one he loves.

But a half-empty cook like me is always wandering between not wanting to cook and not being able to cook.

When we were alone, cooking was a pleasure for me.

Whether we are going to the market hand in hand to kill fish or chicken, or we are going to the supermarket side by side to pick out washed and bundled green leafy vegetables, the content of our relationship is far greater than the meaning of the meal itself.

When we were together, we could discuss what to cook and what to eat. At that time, I could really spend a whole day doing nothing, just to carefully cook a pot of old turkey soup. When he comes back from get off work, he delivers it to the other party at just the right temperature.

But since having a baby, everything has become different.

Cooking has changed from an occasional decoration of life to an inescapable fate of three meals a day.