Last week, while recovering from bad restaurant overload, I cooked at home every night. The rain and gray skies were making me thoroughly depressed. Jacob was in Shanghai on business, so I was cooking just for one. I started to rely on fast fixes for food, including my all-time quickest, unhealthiest, and yet oddly delicious comfort meal: fried eggs and rice doused in hoisin sauce. No wonder my palate was deadening.

In the essay "A is for Dining Alone" from An Alphabet for Gourmets, MFK Fisher wrote,"It took me several years of such periods of being alone to learn how to care for myself, at least at table. I came to believe that since nobody else dared feed me as I wished to be fed, I must do it myself, and with as much aplomb as I could muster." After discovering that dining out alone meant a succession of bad seats and pitying stares, she settled on making well-planned meals for herself at home.

But how often do we really cook a nice ittle meal just for ourselves, with no one else to impress? Were the elaborate preparation of past meals for the sole enjoyment of other people? And should I feel guilty about spending as much for premium choice lamb chops for one measly dinner, as I could for ground pork for 7 meals?

Until 3 or 4 years ago, I had an aversion to lamb. My father hated lamb, so we never ate it at home. My first experience with lamb (that I can remember) was at a Greek restaurant in Boston when I was a teenager; I ate a decidedly unfresh hunk of meat that left a horrible aftertaste for hours. After that, I swore off lamb. And Greek food.

Fortunately, after college, I decided I needed to expand my culinary horizons. In The Man Who Ate Everything, Jeffrey Steingarten writes about how moderate exposure to hated foods is the key to getting ride of aversions. He creates a 6-step program to dealing with a bunch of his own food phobias, including kimchi, Indian desserts, and yes, Greek food, by trying everything 8 to 10 times. I can't say my own culinary enlightenment was this organized, or steadfastly recorded for publication. But I do know that over the years of going out of my comfort zone I have come to love anything Greek I used to loathe, including olives and feta. And especially lamb.

Lamb has become, quite possibly, an addiction. Cooking at home or dining out, I can't help but crave the gamey taste of this meat. (Of course, Steingarten also writes that repeatedly eating the same foods is also as bad as specifically avoiding certain foods. Let's hope I'm not one of those people.)

Living in Beijing has made me develop a severe addiction to 羊肉串 (yángròuchuàn), otherwise known as lamb skewers. The intense aroma of cumin- and chilli- coated lamb on a grill makes me salivate like nothing else. And the heavy Mongolian and Xinjiang influence on Beijing's foodscape means that 羊肉串 is everywhere, on the street, in regular restaurants, in chuan bars.

If you're nowhere near Beijing, or want to satisfy your lamb-and-cumin craving at home without a grill, this stir-fry is the next best thing. Mark Bittman, who writes The Minimalist column in the NY Times' Dining Section, is a pro at translating mouth-watering dishes into simple recipes for home cooks. He based this stir-fry off the same lamb skewers I often dream about. It's a good dish to serve on busy weeknights or hectic dinner parties, because all the prep is done beforehand. Once you're ready to cook, take the lamb out of the fridge, toss it in a hot wok, and you have a mouth-watering stir-fry in about 5 minutes.

To get the most out of this dish, it's imperitive to use fresh cumin seeds. Ground cumin has nowhere near the aroma or bite of just-toasted seeds. For the garnish, Mark Bittman suggests cilantro. I didn't have any cilantro on hand, so I heated up some fresh red chillis in a wok until they're blistered.