So ends the 2 year silence.

It’s been a cruelly long absence, and I can’t account for it except to say that I have been happy and healthy in the sunshine — and so, less eager to share my mind. My thoughts have grown smaller as I’ve grown older. They turn to lunch, to dinner, to loved ones and their troubles and triumphs, to the mundanities and minutiae of meeting deadlines and making time for exercise and folding fitted sheets.

Writing is no longer the salve it once was. I’ve made a career of it, so my off hours are spent doing anything — everything — else. But the years weren’t all wasted. I’ve managed to improve substantially as a cook, which brings me to why I’m writing you today.

Today I have the luxury of writing from the backyard of my parents’ home in the northern suburbs of Los Angeles. I can hear my mother inside, making plans for a trip we’ll take to Monterey Park, where we’ll eat soup dumplings and stock up for a weeklong effort to get me up to speed on all the Chinese recipes I’ve neglected to learn until now.

Some of those beauties are pictured here. I am prioritizing the family specialities — the roast pork sandwiches, the pork belly zong zi, the pork egg rolls, the pork and black bean noodles. Sensing a theme?

I’ll share the dishes here in the hopes that it will help me restart the healthy habit of not keeping all my thoughts, and all these amazing recipes, to myself.

Soon, reader…