My cat Evee gazes out the window— as I often do when working alone in the kitchen.

Welcome to Lofi Kitchen.

Since COVID, cooking has become an inescapable and integral part of my life within these four walls. All I watch is cooking videos and all I listen to are Lo-fi mixes. As I work in the kitchen, Youtube cycles through these tracks:

• lofi hip hop radio by Chilledcow
  

• sad lofi for late nights Sad & Calm Mix
  

• old songs but it’s lofi remix
  

• waiting in the rain for 10 Hours
  

• code-fi / lofi beats to code/relax to
  

• Lo-fi for Cute Witches (Only)
  

• muffled lofi hiphop playing in another room and it’s raining
  

Lo-fi music is the soundtrack for our collective online alienation, our desire for democratic equity, our I’ll-never-be-able-to-buy-a-house-and-rent-is-due exhaustion. Every day seems the same but in cooking, a repetitious act feels fresh and exciting. A Lofi mix loops as I lovingly bake the same olive oil cake with candied orange slices for the hundredth time.

Between the TikTok-drive pace of food media and the quiet reflections in quarantine world, I’ve developed a lot of opinions about cooking.

Here is where I share these opinions, my reflections on my Taiwanese-Chinese heritage, cooking habits I’ve picked up, conventions of cuisines, my own fusion recipes, and documentation of my meals to share with other millennials who also struggling with what to cook tonight.