A week to eat and cook

I am entering Solo China time. Max has, regrettably, left - it was a fantastic couple of weeks roaming up and down this big land with him. Now, it is Wednesday, and I don't leave for Turkey until next Wednesday. What to do with a week in China?

The choices, it turns out, are immense. I could:

-- Take a train to Lhasa and explore the Tibetan plateau

-- Venture to Guilin and Yangshou and see the karst peaks that have inspired so much art

-- Land in Chongqing and try to find the spiciest of all hot pots

Or one of at least 245 other options, all of which are incredibly enticing.

However, I want to keep it simple. Plus, I have to leave some stuff to do for future adventures. So I resolve to do two things over the course of this week: cook and eat.

To cook, I have enlisted the services of two cooking class operators here in Beijing: Black Sesame Kitchen (http://www.blacksesamekitchen.com/) and Hias Gourmet (http://www.hiasgourmet.com/). Black Sesame will go first, on Thursday and Saturday, with Hias taking it from Sunday through Tuesday.

To eat, I will try to get my arms around some of the great restaurants, especially the cheap ones, in this city of approximately 22,000,000 people. I recognize I will, if lucky, only scratch the surface.

I have a couple of guides for this week. On the cooking side, the twin tomes of foreigners who have come to China to learn a bit of cooking (more than me) will serve as instructive and entertaining stories. The first I read back in Indonesia; it is called Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Memoir of Eating in China, by Fuchsia Dunlop.

The second is the memoir of the founder of Black Sesame Kitchen; it is called Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China, by Jen Lin-Liu.

Finally, I would be lost trying to eat in this large place where I don't speak the language without a bit of help. So I've secured Beijing Eats, a guide to the best of food here in Beijing, sorted by the region from which the cuisine hails. It promises to be a helpful navigator both to which places and which dishes.

And so, to launch this week of epicurianism, I raise my glass of bourbon and say "ganbei"!