So much food in my fridge, but am not complaining!

I began cooking when I was 12 years old. One fine day, I picked up the kitchen knife and the rolling pin, not because I wanted to but because if I didn't turn flour into noodles, my elder brother and I would have had to starve during lunchtime.

My parents, both working, were unable to come home to prepare lunch for us. My elder brother was in middle school and I in primary school. As his morning classes ended half an hour later than mine, the important responsibility of cooking for both of us fell upon me.

Nobody taught me anything. I picked up cooking mostly by observing how my parents trimmed, washed, cut and fried vegetables and how they turned flour into noodles and steamed buns.

There wasn't much to learn, anyway, growing up during a food scarcity in a northwestern city half a century ago. Even the best chefs could not have churned out something from nothing in those times. So, for a long time, my lunch remained simple: noodles plus pickles.

My cooking skills improved when I gained access to more kinds of ingredients while attending university in Shanghai.

There, for the first time, I saw and ate shrimp, crabs, saltwater fish and many vegetables that are popular only in South China.

An eager learner, I asked my classmates from different parts of China how they cooked their food, and surprised people back home by rustling up a very different kind of meal during the Spring Festival holiday that year.

My cooking career peaked in 1984 when I was studying in Honolulu in the United States. To express my gratitude, I sometimes invited my professors to dinner in my dorm building.

It must have been one of my journalism professors who told a local daily about my cooking skills, because soon a reporter and a photographer from there approached me for an interview.

I treated them to dumplings, braised chicken legs, mock crab roe eggs and sour and spicy shredded potatoes etc. I got the ingredients cheap — as a poor student who lived on $300 a month, cheap ingredients were all I could afford.

A few days later, the newspaper devoted half a page to my cooking skills. It carried a huge photo of me smiling while standing next to the stove, wearing an Aloha shirt and holding a chopping knife.

It was the first time I had been interviewed by a newspaper while learning reporting skills from the Americans. I was disappointed that only my poor cooking skills, and not my other talents, made headlines.

That publicity probably helped me retain my interest in cooking for the rest of my life. While enjoying food from other countries and from different regions, my interest lay, very often, not merely in the taste or the flavor but in speculating how it was cooked.

Returning home after work, the first thing I usually did was to rush into the kitchen, and put on my apron. The kitchen had become my battlefield where I struggled with crabs, shrimps and chicken, be they alive or dead.

Since retiring several years ago, I have been cooking three meals a day for my family. But after 55 years of doing this, I find cooking for my family more and more difficult.

Each morning at the breakfast table I ask the others what they want to have for dinner — beef, mutton, fish, shrimp, chicken or pork.

Once we decide on the meat, I ask if they want it fried, boiled, steamed, braised or roasted. Once that is settled, my last question to them is what flavor they want — spicy Sichuan, sour Guangxi or sweet Shanghai.

Deciding what to eat is the easier part. Cooking at home is becoming more complicated by the day. Thanks to online grocery stores and express delivery, raw ingredients from around the world — such as salmon from Norway, beef from Australia and avocado from Mexico — have made it to my refrigerator.

Inside the deep freeze compartment of my refrigerator are six or seven kinds of fish, some I can't even name. But I have no clue if they are good for roasting or steaming. I have the same doubts when I pick up the vegetables — some I have never come across before.

But then, in the past 50 or so years, I have experienced both food shortage and surplus. So, when I complain about food abundance, I am not serious. Trust me, I am not serious at all.

The author is former deputy editor-in-chief of China Daily.