Bottom picture, from left: chicken juice flavored (literally, usually just salt and chicken broth), Thai "leaf" chicken flavored, and regular ol' sour cream and onion.
*the baseball player you see on the nori package is Wang Chien Ming, Taiwanese pitcher extraordinaire for the Yankees.
A typical soup dumpling meal starts with condiments. From the left, starting from the cup of tea: ginger, vineagre, and two things of soy sauce on the caddy.
I suppose this is a form of what English speakers call Kimchi. It's marinated/pickled/preserved cabbage, but it's simple and not spicy at all. There are no complex scales of acidity or mix of spices. The cabbage is stored in a salt solution and eaten while relatively fresh.
Seaweed and do gan appetizer. I've never encountered the occasion where I had to use do gan in an English context. I guess you would call it dry tofu, but when I think of tofu I think soft. Do gan is actually pretty tough or chewy or crumbly. Not soft at all.
Swan La Tang: literally, sour and spicy soup. English speakers know this as hot and sour soup. I dare not try the versions they serve in Chinese take-out type restauarants because they add too much cornstarch and the soup turns into more of a slime. This soup was just the right consistency - thick but not goopy.
...and the famed soup dumplings.
In every steaming chamber there are exactly 10 dumplings, and each dumpling has the same number of folds at the top (15 or 16, I forget). The skins that hold the meat are very thin and very stretchy, one wonders how they possibly stay intact to keep the savory soup inside the little delicate pouch. At lower quality soup dumpling places like Joe's Ginger/Joe's Shanghai, they don't pay enough attention to the skins and they break inside the steaming chambers or when you pick them up with your chopsticks. The meat is soft and slightly chewy full of juice, with the flavors perfectly balanced so that the carnal taste of meat is a mere subordinating shade contrasted with the other ingredients. There is no way anybody could stop at just one. Din Tai Fung soup dumplings are perfectly shaped and orgasmically flavored bites of joy; a food group in its own right worthy of being placed on your "ten-things-to-eat-before-I-die" list.
On our way out we saw the true secret to consistently great tasting soup dumplings: a gaggle of masked chefs quickly folding their way through gajillions of dumplings every night. All this, just to satisfy the hungry regulars (my aunt) and tourists who make the pilgrimage to Din Tai Fung.
This is the blueberry creme cake that my aunt and I bought for "our birthdays," since they're pretty close to each other. The other side is a bit smashed, but it was wonderlicious.
I have no idea what these breads are, but they look like monster clams made from pate feuilletee, the same type of dough with which you make croissants and pains-au-chocolat. It looks like there might be complicated knotting involved too?
This reminds me of animals. I think it's a pretty standard bun with a spiral of purple batter and coconut on top. From the looks of it, I postulate that the inside is either redbean paste or some sort of sweet coconut paste.
Checkerboard Tiramisu, I presume.
These just look suspicious. Smooth chocolate with egg-imitating custard? I should have gotten one just to see what's under that veneer of tastiness.
Coffee sponge cake, probably.
Hmm...this one puzzles me. I know it's probably some sort of berry creme icing with chocolate sponge cake and chocolate shavings on top, but other than that, your guess is as good as mine.
Not only did I think it was overpriced (I was in a bind, but normally I would NOT pay more than 2 dollars for a can of ubersalty soup.), it was just gross in general.
I did what I usually do when I make things I've never made before (every time I cook), and looked up ingredients online. Since we don't have any yeast, I had to go with yeast-free dough, making the dough a bit tough. Kneading dough is so much fun! I think I had too much fun and produced too much gluten in the dough to add to the toughness. At one point, I was tossing the dough with one hand and talking to Fish online with the other.
It isn't bad if you bake it so that it's like a crispy thin-crust, which was what I was going for in the first place. Also, I mixed in a bit of dried oregano into the dough. It made for a very fragrant bake.
Corn
Fresh basil leaves
These three are elaborate contraptions for ice cold brewed coffee. How do you cold-brew something? you ask. The truth is, I don't know. I have never seen these contraptions EVER, but they seem to be the next big thing in Taiwan. It's even more expensive than already-overpriced espresso! In a country where $100 NTDs (around $3 USD) can buy you a feast, spending close to $200 NTDs on a beverage is a WILD concept. It was worth it though, the coffee was smooth and mild without lacking in flavor. SO GOOD. All I know about it is that there's ice cold water in the top compartment that flows into the middle compartment, and the resulting mix dribbles down throw the spiral into the round bottomed flask at the end of the set up.
Ledena kava, Taiwanese style, in the clutches of my big aunt. Coffee flavored ice cream with coffee bits, in a glass of Fong Da's excellent cold coffee.
I got this frozen concoction, which was much easier than the other cold coffee drink to make, but definitely did not taste as good.
Left: Giant asparagus spears with a sour plum sauce. Very strange feeling, eating asparagus with plum. If you disregard the internal instinct to gag when you think of plum sauce, it's actually not bad.
Cone, I think this is salmon.
The REAL train pulling the sushi. Many revolving sushi restaurants have a conveyor belt that passes little covered dishes in front of diners. This restaurant put the effort into building a huge set of train tracks that went all the way around the dining room, from the front of the store to the back, taking great care to pass through the window display so that people outside can see too. They had to weigh down the train in certain areas because the food it was pulling was too heavy and would make the pulling engine tilt.
Giant shrimp tempura. I love tempura because the batter is so light and crispy. The key to having excellent tempura batter is to mix the powder with ice water right before dipping food in it. This makes the batter light, and non-chewy.
If you wanted me to find Cafe Oh Hum again, I probably couldn't tell you where it was. All I know is that we walked through Shih Da (National Taiwan Normal University) night market and wound up somewhere in a back alley beside an empty elementary school and a bunch of houses. The entrance was so secluded and hidden in vegetation that I was actually shocked to find the cafe almost full. Among the hip coffee bar crowd were some French people, and some people who pretended like they spoke French. I did not pretend like I spoke French, but secretly I was listening in on their conversation. It might have been about poodles...
I don't really understand why an Indian/buddhist themed cafe would have a kimono, but I'm not a professional at differentiating asian clothing, so that's ok.
My iced coffee was perhaps overkill after the huge dinner we had at flower hotpot. The iced coffee part was a little too sweet, and there was too much cream at the top.
I would have probably been better off getting the citrus tea, something light to counteract overeating.
This ensemble was my childhood bestfriend's. I think it was the "beautifying" package, with a special blend of flowers in the tea that apparently "beautified."
This ensemble is my nextdoor neighbor's. I think it was "body fortifying", because she had been feeling a bit out of sorts.
I still can't believe it was paper that was cooking on top of an open flame.
The body fortifying package included little baby squids. So adorable to look at, a little creepy to eat.
Mine was normal. Thinly sliced chicken, taro root, a bit of a gourd, shrimp, and part of a daikon.
This stuff was already in the hotpot when they brought them out. Green leafy vegetables, fish balls, quail eggs, taro root, daikon, carrot, corn, and broccoli rounded out the stew.
For dessert, despite having eaten a pot full of food each, we had small pieces of cheesecake and iced jasmine milk tea.
Shi Men Ding
Shibuya. V-Dub, representing Deutschland!
We rode the train back from Taitung to Taipei, bringing us past miles and miles of green, vast expanses of rushing waters. It felt like a page out of Goodbye South, Goodbye, only through the windows of a train and not on a motorcycle. We were going north. They in the movie were going all over Taiwan.
Beverages are big. This is not the first or last time I rant about beverages in Taiwan. This bottle from the local 7-11 (or just "seven", in colloquial Taiwan-speak) is chocolate milk tea. What it actually tasted like was sugar plus water plus cheap non-fat dried milk and a hint of tea. I don't care. I still like beverages.
Even when the food stands have gone to bed for the night, you can still find all sorts of hot and cold food 24 hours a day at 7-11. This riceball has a very complicated system of packaging that keeps the dried seaweed wrapped around the rice separate until right when you remove the plastic for consumption. Don't ask me how it works. I just pull the arrows in the order they're numbered, and a fresh riceball with crispy seaweed appears.
This is what I am referring to when I say pudding. It is most similar to Spanish flan, but more gelatinous and less creamy. When we were little, this was our snack of choice. There are a variety of ways to eat it. Perfectionists choose to dump it out inverted on a plate, like the serving suggestion pictured on the packaging. Some people eat it without mixing the dark caramel part with the eggy part. Me, I blend it all up into the smallest pieces I can possibly manage.
How do you eat yours?