Eating My Way Across The World

Brussels Sprouts are the New Black (with Coq Au Vin)

2010-11-11T12:28:00.004-04:00

In today's episode of bobo-corrupts-classic-recipes-and-makes-an-overly-elaborate-meal-for-a-weeknight, I attempt a coq au vin. I studied in Bourgogne (Burgandy, in English)for a semester in college, so it may come as a shock to know that I did not consume any coq au vin nor any boeuf bourgignon at all, during the entire stay. My first encounter with coq au vin was at Gordon Ramsay's restaurant at The London Hotel in New York City, and it has now become my go-to dish to try at new French restaurants as a guage of authenticity and tastiness. I had a bag of brussels sprouts that needed to be cooked, as well as a bottle of Argentinian Malbec (bought it because the label was a pretty purple color) that was a little too tannin-y for my taste; both of those seemed perfect companions to chicken.

When I cook things that are not my own creation, I usually read a few different recipes and get the spirit of the dish, then improvise when I actually start cooking. Instead of rooster (coq), I used plain ol' drumsticks with skin. I omitted the mushrooms and pearl onions, because I always end up picking them out of the meal anyways. Here is a brief and rough synopsis of what I did:
-bread and seasoned drumsticks (9) in whole wheat flour (didn't have white flour)
-chopped bacon and 1/4 of the onion into little pieces and then fried them, put the bacon and onions in the large pot and browned drumsticks in remaining grease. saved the grease and browned stuff for the next day's sauce-making.
-chopped carrots into large bite-sized pieces (this prevents them from being too mushy when you cook them the next day.)
-thinly sliced the rest of the onion and placed in a large pot with the carrots, bay leaves, thyme, 1 can of chicken stock, the entire bottle of Malbec (or any other strong red wine). Left the whole pot in the refrigerator overnight.
THE NEXT DAY
-take pot out of refrigerator and cook some more. I separated the meat from the carrots from the onions and other little bits, and simmered the remaining liquid until it was thick, for the sauce.

When I plated the coq, I took one leg, some carrots, and then poured some of the thickened sauce over the leg. It IS a week night, we don't have time for cutting off the knuckle and pushing back the meat, as Gordon Ramsay demands.

I paired the dish with mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts, mostly because I love brussels sprouts. They are totally making a come back. It might just be me subliminally ordering dishes with brussels sprouts, but I see them every time I eat in a restaurant now. The other day, I was watching one of those competitive cooking shows and one of the challenge ingredients was brussels sprouts. The problem is that Americans are not brought up to properly cook brussels sprouts, so all of the contestants failed (at least in my book). One contestant tried to cook brussels sprouts with bacon, which seems like a delicious idea, but they undercooked the sprouts and overcooked the bacon.

Brussels sprouts don't demand your bacon, they demand your love. Never steam brussel sprouts to death; they are not supposed to be yellow.

This is how my mom taught me to cook them:
-halve or quarter the brussels sprouts, depending on their size, so that each piece is a comfortable bite-size.
-heat up a little bit of cooking/vegetable oil in the pot and add a little bit of chopped garlic.
-put the brussels sprouts in and toss them so that they are coated in the oil. Add a little bit of water and cover with a lid. Let them steam for a while until you can see that their green color is even greener.
-Uncover, add some salt, and toss/cook for a little bit longer to evaporate some of the liquid.
If you are a fancypants like my mom, you can add Japanese fish-flavored powder and less salt - the fishy flavor really makes the brussels sprouts sweeter and less bitter. I don't know how. It's Japanese magic.

I attempted to make haricots verts aux amandes but it wasn't as good as I remember. Probably because I had to slice the almonds and roast them myself. DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO SLICE ALMONDS BY HAND?!

Abyssinia, Raleigh, NC (Ethiopian)

2010-05-29T01:02:00.005-03:00

I have long known about Abyssinia, a hole-in-the-wall Ethiopian restaurant near NC State's campus, but due to a bad experience with Ethiopian food in Washington DC when I was a teenager (throwing balls of injera at each other? anyone?), I never tried it until this year. Park in the lot in front of Cup A Joe, and you should be able to see a sign for the restaurant. The door is not clearly marked, but rather covered in old posters for Ethiopian dance parties of yore. When you walk into the restaurant, don't be fazed...the tables are hidden behind a wall, but a friendly lady will come out and greet you. I don't know what it takes to sit at one of the mesob (round tables), but we automatically got put at a normal table.

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These triangular shaped things are called Sambusas. They are the Ethiopian counterpart to Indian samosas, and if you order them, definitely get the lentil ones...they are better than the beef sambusas. The outside is crispy, and the inside is a bit more juicy than Indian samosas.
We ordered different tibs (stewed dishes) that come on injera bread. They also give you an extra roll of injera bread on the side. The two blobs of red-orange on the very outside of the piles are lentils. They are so spicy and flavorful that it makes you forget you are eating boring lentils. Definitely not boring lentils. Be prepared to drink a lot of water, as everything is pretty spicy (but it hurts so good!). The downside of drinking a lot of water is that the injera majorly soaks up liquids, so then you're full after eating relatively little.
The is the "after" picture. Note that it looks like we barely ate anything before we felt full.
Tips from the friendly lady: don't eat too much injera at first. Use only a small bit of injera to pick up a large amount of meat. The parts where the spicy grease soaks through the injera are extra delicious, so be sure to eat those first. If you have leftovers (which I am sure you will), just pop them in the microwave with the injera wrapped around the tibs.

新仕 Hotel 的早餐（breakfast at shin shih hotel)

2010-05-27T22:39:00.007-03:00

Having stayed in my share of hotels, I'm used to "continental breakfasts" offered in addition to a room for the night. In my experience, continental breakfasts usually include coffee, a few haphazard breads, maybe milk and orange juice, and if you're lucky, fruit. Since 新仕 Hotel markets itself to business travelers, I thought maybe they would offer more western styled food. In fact, they serve 稀飯 (rice porridge) and 家常菜 (everyday dishes), 米粉（rice vermicelli), the requisite bread (do not recommend eating), eggs and ham, and coffee. They also have milk, which is reconstituted from non-fat dry milk, but it is SO rich and flavorful...just like how mom used to make it when we were little.

Below is a sampling of what they usually make, minus any strange dishes with 木耳 (literally wood ear, or properly called jelly ear fungus). I haven't liked 木耳 ever since I was a child. The 豆干 (hard tofu, top right) was good. The little fish (bottom right) were not as crunchy as mom makes it, but the flavor was good.
The bowl of white stuff to the left is 稀飯, and you eat it with the stuff on the plate to the right. Notice the crumbly stuff at the bottom? That is 肉鬆 (dried pork). I felt a little badass eating squid for breakfast...they really know how to make it though. It wasn't tough and chewy at all.
A few words about the hotel itself. We think it's a family owned business, as some of the staff seem less formal than most hospitality workers in Taiwan. The hotel only has 7-8 floors, 4 rooms per floor. Rates range from 1800 NTD - 3000 NTD (~$56.00-$93.00 USD), depending on how big the room is. Breakfast is from 7am to 10am every morning, and included in the room rate. The hotel is located in the block immediately next to MRT Shuang Lian Station (捷運雙連站), across from Mackay Hospital (馬偕記念醫院) emergency room, making it very convenient for exploring the city and having heart attacks.

Bonus: my grandma being a ninja and breaking a banana clear in half, unpeeled.

Fakhr El Din, Amman, Jordan

2010-05-19T18:37:00.012-03:00

Once again posting because I cannot sleep - this time it is because my grandma looked at the clock wrong and woke us up at 5am instead of 6am. We are going on a tour of 龜山 today, and needed to meet the tour group at 7am. The following are pictures I took in Jordan last year, at Fakhr el Din, one of the nicest restaurants in Amman. It sits in a residential area up on one of the hills, and is a short walk to east Amman.

To start off, the centerpiece is edible - carrots, tomatoes, celery...supposed to dip it in the olive oil, but I think it's better if you don't.
You can also dip the vegetables in this garlic whipped cream looking sauce. It is light and fluffy, and the proper way to eat the garlic whip is to spread a little on a fresh tomato and sprinkle a little bit of sumac powder on it all. It is a flavor I have not tasted before. The sumac is tangy and the garlic is spicy, which surprisingly brings out the sweetness in the tomato.
The menu is much loved, and includes familiar western dishes for those who aren't daring enough for Middle Eastern food.
The bread is like pita but thinner, with a puffier pocket. The way to eat the different dishes is to break off a little piece of bread and use it to dip in the sauce-y dishes.
The plate of brown is tangy beans, sort of the consistency of baked beans, but without the sweetness and goopiness of baked beans.
Shanklish (shang-kleesh)! Shanklish is dry hard cheese that is orange, mixed with olive oil and spices. There's also some basil and tomato as garnish.
It is necessary to break up and mix the shanklish before eating it, as demonstrated below.
Eating tabbouleh makes me feel like I'm eating chopped up grass. The flavor is great, but I can't get over the texture.
This is a cup of minty lemonade. It is very reminiscent of the lime-ade that I used to have at VVG in Taipei.
Fried batata - spicy and crispy fried potatoes. Not so Middle Eastern, but very tasty.
Garlicky mushrooms. Once again, not so much Middle Eastern, but very tasty.
Kebab Halawbi. The kebab part is actually strips of meat with bumps. The yellow thing to the right is very thin bread. I think you're supposed to eat a bit of meat covered with a bit of the bread with a little slice of onion and tomato.
After dinner they pass small cups out and a guy comes by with a kettle of dark digestive "turkish" coffee. I have turkish in quotes because the coffee is not exclusively turkish, but refers to the style of finely ground coffee and how it's made.
Every meal ends with slices of fruit, EXACTLY like in Taiwan!!! I bought a small watermelon at the farmer's market in Chapel Hill for $5 the week before I left for Jordan, thinking it would be juicy and sweet and what have you. It was not. It barely had any flavor, and was mostly just watery and tough. And then I had the watermelon from Jordan. OH MY GOSH FARMER'S MARKET I HATE YOU! The watermelon in Jordan was amazingly sweet, juicy, and flavorful! The cantaloupe was also quite sweet.
I do enjoy the habit of eating a bit of fruit after a large dinner, especially since Middle Eastern desserts tend to be on the sweeter extreme.

Thaiphoon, Raleigh, NC

2010-05-18T14:14:00.003-03:00

I'm jetlagged in Taipei right now, and missing my homeslices a little, so I thought I'd post some long-overdue pictures from Thaiphoon. Whenever O-face and I can't figure out what to do about dinner, we go to our default - Thaiphoon. It's just behind Hibernian, off of trendy Glenwood South area of Raleigh, although there is also an entrance next door to Sushi Blues.

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The decor is super posh, and the menus come in DVD cases. They have a full bar, plus a lot of Asian beers, sake, and soju.

If you are unsure of what to get, definitely start off with the chicken satay. The chicken is always extraordinarily tender, and the sauce is not spicy at all (for those of delicate pallate). Seriously one of the most amazing things I've tasted. The sauce is peanut based, and the cucumbers on the side are drenched in sugar syrup...a little too sweet for my taste, but it is quite delicious nonetheless.

O-face always gets the beef penang - it is quite spicy but not so bad if you eat it with noodles or rice.

I always get the pad ki mao with shrimp. There's something about the spiciness and the texture of the noodles that make it so good. It is the perfect balance of spicy, sweet and salty.

You can modify how spicy you want the dish to be by adding the red pepper powder to the dish.

Good for: groups, drinks, pre-gaming before going out on Glenwood South. Our favorite waiter (I think his name is Justin) "don't work there no mo'," but the ladies there are all super nice - they'll take care of you.

Tinto, Philadelphia

2010-05-02T01:00:00.000-03:00

Tinto

I spent most of Labor Day weekend in New York, but because of the holiday and airline tickets being as jacked up as they were, I flew into Philadelphia for a day trip before taking the train to NY. For dinner, we went to Tinto, a wine bar/Basque restaurant near Rittenhouse Square.

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The restaurant and its tables are very small, but it makes for a very cozy and romantic dinner date. (Extra points for the scallop-patterned tables, wall to wall horizontal mirror behind me and wall of wines in front of me).
Their menu changes constantly, so go to their website for the latest version. Below are cheese crisps as an amuse-bouche, with a roasted red pepper sauce for dipping.
Frisee salad with a very hard dry goat cheese - very nice contrast in character between the richness of the cheese flavor and the lightness of the greens.
Arugula salad with figs and fried cheese balls - the fried cheese balls are as good as they sound.
Tinto's version of moules frites - mussels and herb encrusted fries. The fries alone are amazing, and even more amazing dipped in the tomato based moules sauce.
We didn't order the pork belly, but somebody was looking down on us and they delivered these to the wrong table. Marinated pork belly with cucumber garnish:
What we did order was the duck confit - the duck flavor highlighted by the sweetness of black cherry at the end of the bread.
Herb roasted chicken with truffle mashed potatoes - AMAZING. I don't know what the little green pea-like things are, but they are more sturdy than peas, and definitely more delicious than peas. The skin of the chicken was crusty and crispy. Truffle mashed potatoes are simply the most delicious thing ever. I wanted the aftertaste to last in my mouth forever.
I would have voted the seared scallops on creamy corn puree the best dish of the night, except for the truffled mashed potatoes above blowing everything else out of the water. The creamy corn puree was not mindblowing, but the scallops were pretty great - slightly crispy on the outside and soft in the middle. Best eaten with the lardons scattered on the corn puree.
I don't have any pictures of dessert because there simply was not time. All these dishes were delivered as soon as they were made, one at a time, and it took quite a few hours because of the sheer number of dishes eaten. There was also a slight snafu with the pork belly that came that we did not order, and them forgetting to deliver our last two dishes - the scallops and the chicken. All the food paired with wine, I was happily tipsy and distended to the max after this delicious meal.

Incredibly Overpriced Chopsticks by Tukaani

2009-11-28T21:41:00.002-04:00

For that rich cousin who already has everything except for skills when it comes to using chopsticks, Kayiwa has some sterling silver Tukaani "eating utensils" that cost as much as a trip to the dentist. According to BLTD, the metal eating utensil does not include a napkin/wrapper and holder. If you buy all three, it comes out to 357.50 EUROS, which costs around $534.64 in today's inflated dollar.

Good thing you can get the same utility out of free disposable bamboo chopsticks eh?

Curry Cream Cheese+Pastrami on wheat, The Bagels Shop

2009-11-01T21:46:00.005-04:00

The first time and only time I've seen curry cream cheese offered for consumption was in Barcelona, six years ago. Since then, I will sometimes have spontaneous cravings for it but lament that it is nowhere to be found. I think the place is called The Bagels Shop, or The Bagel Shop, if you want to be grammatically correct. It's off of las ramblas in barri gotic.
It was the end of a long day of walking around, and since dinner was still 4 hours away (it is not rare to have dinner after 11pm in Barcelona), I needed something to hold me over until then. The only bagel they had left was jalapeno and cheese, and for some reason I wanted to try the curry cream cheese. It was amazing (also amazing that I can still find the picture of it I took in 2003). I still have dreams about it.
I had afternoon tea (which ran until 10pm!) a couple of weekends ago, and wanted to recreate the deliciousness with some spare mini bagels I had left (Thomas's mini bagels in wheat). The pastrami is sliced from the deli (I asked the deli lady to slice it thin and she misheard me so it is extra thick.). To make the curry cream cheese, I assume you just mix curry powder with cream cheese. There was no curry powder to be found at whole foods (I wish America had spice shops), so I mixed tumeric and cumin in with the cream cheese. It was almost as good as the curry cream cheese in Barcelona, except since I only used 2 spices instead of the usual suspects, I felt perhaps there was something lacking. In any case, the pastrami-curry cream cheese-wheat bagel was a winner with my tea companions.

Cocoa Bar, Lower East Side, New York

2009-10-27T13:38:00.004-03:00

I had forgotten I took these pictures at the Manhattan outpost of Cocoa Bar back in March. I made record time in a cab - 20 minutes from LaGuardia to LES, and had dinner at Frankies 17, at 17 Clinton St, and took a short walk over to Cocoa Bar, which is at 21 Clinton St. Perfect date trajectory, if ever you find yourself on the Lower East Side.

It's a pity I didn't take any pictures of the food at Frankies 17 (too dark, plus, was too hungry and therefore occupied with eating). If you do go there, definitely try their cheeses. They always have a great list of cheeses, mostly Italian, and sometimes contraband(!) from which you can pick 3 to try. Map below:

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If you do go, don't forget to use their tiny bathroom. The restaurant itself is very narrow, and the tiny bathroom at the back of the store maximizes space with a sink no larger than a 2 Liter tupperware container. I totally love how the metal pipes were exposed (obvi cause there's no place to hide them).

I hear Cocoa Bar resembles a bustling coffee shop during the day, but when we went, there was only one table that was occupied. There was, however, a constant stream of neighbors and regulars who were dropping in to say hi to Bahman Soltani, the owner. From what I could tell, they were grabbing a quick cup of coffee and then moving on to their main entertainment for the night; at the same time sharing their evening plans with Soltani, at the same time finding out what else was going on in the neighborhood.

Hot chocolate, more like liquified chocolate, with generous chocolate shavings on the rim, made personally by Soltani. It's a pity the cup wasn't any bigger, because it is everything you imagine a rich hot chocolate aught to taste like.

We also got a hot toddy, which mostly just tasted like whisky - the best!

I think this is some sort of chocolate truffle cake covered in white chocolate ganache. The inside is dark chocolate truffle.

The Balad + Fruit and Vegetable Market, East Amman, Jordan

2009-09-15T14:15:00.007-03:00

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Pretty self-explanatory pictures from my trip to Amman last year. These shots of various markets were taken in East Amman. Below, a vendor looking at me with a quizzical brow.
Freshly squeezed fruit juice to relieve the unbelievably hot days.
Spices in large sacks. I definitely suggest stocking up on hard to find/expensive spices if you ever go. Saffron, for example, is about 1/10 the price.
Every so often, the shopkeeper of the spice store takes a trowel-like piece of metal and sculpt these neat little pyramids of ground spices.
Cactus fruits are juicy and refreshing, but I don't really know about the flavor. I'm not a fan. That white bucket on the bottom left corner is catching the juice that leaks out from the fruit while they are waiting to be purchased.
The market is a lot of fun, every vendor sings or chants the entire time, to get you to come buy their produce. The only time they take a respite from singing is when they broadcast the call to prayer (there is a mosque just next door to the market.)
Our bounty from the market: "French" peaches - they taste like white peaches from California, but are flat instead of round.

Hashem, East Amman, Jordan

2009-09-02T03:03:00.001-03:00

As my Lonely Planet - Jordan tells me, one cheap and extremely delicious restaurant you should not miss in Amman is Hashem. I think it's actually called Hashem Cafe or Hashem Restaurant or Hashem Alley, but everybody just calls it Hashem. If you walk down the hill into east Amman from Rainbow St., Hashem is tucked away off the main road with all the shops on it. We actually got turned around while trying to find it (it really doesn't have a sign and is just some tables in an alley), but if you say Hashem to anybody, they'll point you in the right direction.

If you are worried about having digestive problems while eating in Jordan, Hashem is the ultimate test. With no utensils and no napkins, if you can survive eating at Hashem, you can eat any ol' thing from the side of the road in Jordan.

The servers all wear green long sleeve polo shirts as uniforms despite the stifling heat, and stare especially hard if you are a woman unaccompanied by a man, and even more so if your hair is uncovered. The service is really quick - there are no menus, and you can only choose among a handful of dishes.
From front to back: Foul (fool) madamas, a bean dip with olive oil; extra spicy chili sauce reminescent of my Sechuan grandmother's chili sauces; hummus drizzled with olive oil; small balls of falafel. The falafel at Hashem is really and definitively the best I have ever had, just like Din Tai Feng soup dumplings are definitively the best in the entire world. I had a dream later that night about ordering a giant bag of falafel and just having it in my purse to snack on while we toured around Jordan.
You also have the option of getting fries and large balls of falafel. The large ball of falafel has onions and other spices mixed in. We traded some small falafel for the big one because it was quite good. The proper procedure for eating at Hashem is to tear off a bit of bread, dip in foul or hummus, and eat it with a bit of tomato/onion/mint and a ball of falafel.
The great thing about Hashem is that it is cheap. We thought that with a full table of food it would be at least a few JD per person, but our total (includes all the dishes above, 3 bottles of water and hot tea) was only 4JD or so. To pay, you simply get up and walk to the platform in the middle of the alley, on top of which there is portly middle aged man sitting with a small desk. He is the owner, and also the one who takes your money. Expect to pay maybe a little more than 1JD per person (~$1.40) for a very filling meal.

Gratuitous night shot of east Amman

Souq Jara, Amman, Jordan

2009-08-16T12:16:00.009-03:00

I recently returned from a vacation to Jordan with Elizabeth to see our friend Natalie. We landed on a Friday afternoon, when most shops are closed for prayers, so we headed towards Rainbow Street (near 1st circle). If you walk down the street from the circle, you head towards Jebel Amman and East Amman.
From Rainbow Street, take a detour to Souq Jara, a market that sells handicrafts and food. The food section is separate from the craft section. You have to buy tickets with which you pay for your food, so that the vendors don't have to touch food and money at the same time. It feels like a night market, selling clothes, jewelery, soap, dead sea products, etc.
I didn't get a bottle of sand, but apparently they are popular souvenirs.
There are also a few stalls with street artists showcasing small portraits and paintings.
We started out in the food section of Souq (market) Jara (the name of the co-op that runs the market; stands for Jebel Amman something or another), so the lighting might seem anachronistic.
On the way to the souq, we got free cans of Coca Cola.
I wasn't hungry, but I got a "chipstix" for the road (to dinner). They're potatoes cut in a spiral shape, deepfried, and sprinkled with seasonings. (the picture is blurry because i was trying to be stealthy taking a picture of the kid)
Seasonings include curry and ketchup (yes, in sprinkles)!

Historic Da Shi (大溪老街)

2009-05-07T15:30:00.001-03:00

When I went back to Taoyuan, we went to Historic Da Shi; I only have vague memories of going there as a child. We got some bubble tea "to go" for the excursion. What you see here is a "beverage thong" (丁字褲). Back in the day, if you got a bubble tea to go, they would put your cup of bubble tea and a straw into a small red and clear striped plastic bag with maybe some napkins. In an effort to cut down on waste and cost of buying plastic bags, you can carry your beverage in a "beverage thong". It is basically two loops melted together, one to hold and the other one to go around the cup. Very good for delayed consumption of beverages while wandering the streets of historic Da Shi (大溪).

Historic Da Shi is made up of rows of shop-houses (store in front, house in back) that sell anything from hand-crafted toys to household goods. One thing to note is that there are no less than 4 stores that sell dou gan (豆干) within a single block, as it is the specialty of the region. All the shops are connected by a common covered sidewalk.The seal says "Taoyuan Hsien Tahsi Hoping Old Street," which is half literal and half translated into English. Hoping is actually pronounced huh-ping; it means peace. Old street is probably best translated into historic street.
The facades to the street is an odd mix of western style Japanese colonial architecture and traditional Chinese flourishes.
You can see towards the rear of the photo, someone build more floors to their unit, reminescent of how people added apartments to coloseums in Europe during Medieval times. The restoration people left one Medieval apartment but tore down the rest at the amphitheater in Arles, France (les arenes d'Arles). (The bear's name is Guy. He accompanied me around Europe in 2003)
The prices are:
"vegetarian chicken" (素雞）-15 NTD
"hundred sheets" (like mille-feuille?) (百頁豆干) -30 NTD
"vegetarian stomach" (like meat-free offal?) (素肚) -25 NTD
"black dou gan" (黑豆干) -8 NTD
Those round things in the pot are the "vegetarian stomachs". They are basically just dou gan shaped like a pouch (which is supposed to resemble a stomach).

You order whichever variety of dou gan and they prepare it for you. In the pot, they are whole slices or whole rounds; when served, they slice it, drizzle condiments over it, and stab some sticks into the dou gan for ease of eating. To the bottom left are the black dou gan, to the right is the round shaped vegetarian stomach. To me, the vegetarian stomach was more "Q" (bouncy, chewy) than the others. Our condiments were a soy saucy sauce, red pepper sauce, and lots of cilantro. There are other options, such as bonito flakes, curry, etc.
Here is a site that shows the packaged type of dou gan as well as the snacks (小吃) you would buy off the street. The most famous makers of dou gan are Huang Da Mu (黃大目) , Huang Ri Shiang (黃日香), and Da Fang Dou Gan (大房豆干). It doesn't matter which one you buy your dou gan from, they are all tasty; they are all stemmed from the same family of dou gan makers, but the different brands came about after infighting among the brothers, as explained in fact #7 of this site.

Chocolate Billionaire

2009-04-30T14:05:00.004-03:00

Of all the extremely wealthy people in the world, my favorite has to be Michele Ferrero, the guy whose father and uncle started Nutella. They also make Kinderchocolate and Ferrero Roche, two other of my favorites. There might not be a better way to make a living than to make chocolate for a living!

Making Sticky Rice (Yo Fan) (油飯）

2009-03-12T22:53:00.006-03:00

Feeding myself presents its problems, as making large batches of food is much easier than single portions. I have a few go-to meals that I can stand eating for lunch every day; one of them is sticky rice. Sticky rice, (or 油飯, literally oily rice, yo fan) is a Taiwanese specialty mostly associated with Tainan (台南). The ingredients are simple:

Sticky rice (糯米）
mini shrimp (蝦米）
mushrooms (香姑)
soy sauce (醬油)
sesame oil (麻油)
meat, any type, cut into little pieces
peanuts, soaked in water first
carrots
The two secret ingredients that are a must-have are fried onion and white pepper, pictured here.
The process is very similar to making a risotto. Once you cook the meat and add in all the ingredients that had been soaking (shrimp, mushrooms, peanuts), add soy sauce to taste and cook on low heat for a long time.
Here's what mine looked like. I was running low on mini shrimp, so it's not very colorful. The consistency should be sticky but not soggy like glue. It should have a bit of Q to it (chewiness).

A Poultry Valentine's Day

2009-03-11T13:20:00.005-03:00

I realize it has been a month since Valentine's Day, but I am really quite proud of the entire chicken that I baked. I am not one who enjoys the sappiness of Valentine's, but I rather enjoy challenging myself with food (whether it is preparing it or attempting to eat roast chicken for an entire week). I have to give credit to Gudbjorg, because she and Kyle were the ones who inspired me to try baking my own chicken after a glorious dinner at their house in January.

As they teach you in home ec, always prepare vegetables before you prepare raw meats. Here, I chopped carrots, potatoes (red skin and russet), and celery. You can choose any combination to form your bed of vegetables.
It's an octopus! No, it's just half of an onion shoved under the skin of the chicken. Our old transcriptionist gave me this tip in reference to shoving 2 halves of an onion under the skin of a Thanksgiving turkey. It makes the meat more moist and naturally flavorful (and gives the bird some boobs).
Gingerly detach the skin of the chicken without perforating it, starting from the rear end, to make the pocket for your onion half. Side note: my mom made me that apron for Christmas! It is made out of waterproof upholstery fabric so it feels great but protects me from chicken juice and dishwater splashes! Also, note the Franziskaner in the background. No good cooking is done without a beverage near by.
I always have a grocery bag around for easy disposal of any rinds, skins, and in this case, chicken neck and internal organs. Creepy. I definitely would not choose to eat chicken internal organs.
I think I used 2 sticks of butter and a ton of different herbs and spices. I don't quite remember what all I used, but I think there was salt, sage, and a lot of basil.
Drizzle your butter and herbs over the chicken. I have yet to figure out how the meat on the inside gets its flavoring (I did make some cuts under the skin and try to baste the butter inside, but it didn't seem like it made a difference).
I wish I had taken a picture of the chicken when it came out of the oven. The herbs and butter formed a delicious golden crispy shell out of the skin. I know chicken skin is not healthy, but it was SO good. In the process of baking, the chicken juice and butter will cook the vegetables underneath. It took close to an hour of baking, but you should check the doneness of your chicken with a meat thermometer or make a cut in the deeper part of the thigh.
I ate roast chicken for a week. I don't want to eat any more chicken for at least a few more months.

VVG Bon Bon!

2009-02-02T09:03:00.003-04:00

I was looking at my friend Candy's pictures on Facebook one day when I recognized the interior of the restaurant she went to was VVG Bon Bon. I would describe it as the patisserie embodiment of Kirsten Dunst's dresses in Marie Antoinette. Everything is either pink or frilly, including all the desserts and candies. I haven't been back to Taiwan, but hungryintaipei introduces VVG's newest offspring just as well.

VVG also has a brand new website. It looks like they converted the offices of their interior design entity into luxury condos. If you can afford the price, they are really in a great and trendy location in Taipei (with the added bonus of being across the street from two of Taipei's finest restaurants.

Vietnamese French Coffee

2008-12-17T23:02:00.003-04:00

on a cold day a few weeks ago, Jench and I went to eat Pho at a Vietnamese restaurant. I had been for Pho many times before, but it was the first time I could finish the entire bowl AND have something afterwards. I prepared myself for the meal by not pre-eating (as is customary while waiting for one's dining partner), and was proud of myself for finishing the giant bowl of noodles and soup. After accomplishing my goal for the night, I ordered a cup of "vietnamese french coffee" to finish up the night. The little filter contraption used to make it is surprisingly cheap; you can get it for less than $5 here, and $6, $7, and $8 on Amazon. Because it typically takes a dark French roast, the coffee that is brewed is amazingly rich. Paired with just the right amount of condensed milk (a favorite of mine anyways), it is the perfect end to a big meal. You can also recreate the same flavor with turkish coffee, but the bonus of having a filter (no filter in turkish coffee) is that you don't drink any grounds at all.

Here is a primer on how to make Vietnamese French Style Coffee

How to Break Up Petrified Brown Sugar

2008-11-30T14:00:00.003-04:00

I bought a bag of Trader Joe's Brown Sugar (pictured is just the sugar, without the brown) and left it in the cupboard for a very long time. When I wanted to bake cookies last night the entire bag of brown sugar was solidified into the shape of the bag. Good thing Trader Joe tells you how to re-soften brown sugar. I had to use a hammer to break up the solid piece into small enough pieces to come out of the bag. The proper way to make petrified brown sugar soft again is to put the sugar in a large bowl and drape a wet kitchen towel over the bowl over night. It worked like German engineering!

Melamine in me?

2008-11-18T22:22:00.006-04:00

On a trip to the big Asian Food Market, I gave in to nostalgia and bought a jar of Horlicks - the gigantic-motherlode size. Horlicks is a malted dairy based drink (or is it because you mix it into milk that it is dairy based?) that we used to drink all the time while being happy bouncy kids in Taiwan. Mix a few scoops of the straw colored powder with some warm milk and you have yourself one sleepy kid. My favorite was when, sometimes, the powder didn't melt completely, and would form sweet sticky blobs at the bottom of the mug. Horlicks is made by GSK (holla! my former employer), and is widely sold in Asian countries, Jamaica, and England. I have only been able to find it in the USA imported from Asian countries. Usually, the jar is 400 grams, as you see on Amazon. The only size available at the Asian Store was 2 kilograms! FIVE times the size of the normal 400g jar! I've found the 2kg jar online for 10.99 British pounds, and also in Euros at 29.00 euros. According to google calculator, that's $16.42 and $36.59, respectively, for 2kgs of malty goodness. I think I paid $19.95, or about $1 per 100g.

When the whole melamine-in-milk scandal blew up in China and its associated businesses (which practically includes everybody), I got a little worried that my $20 worth of Horlicks would tragically be tainted with melamine as well; I would be enjoying its rich flavor at the risk of giving myself kidney stones. :-(

Luckily, it seems GlaxoSmithKline still sources its milk from English-speaking countries (UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand). I looked specifically for Malaysian lists of safe dairy products because my 2kg jar is meant to be sold only in Brunei and Malaysia (translation: if you bought it in any other place, drink at your own risk). This list includes source information provided voluntarily by the companies themselves, which means it may not be 100% accurate. The products probably have to be tested individually to be sure. Although some of the sources for some of the companies look quite suspicious, (Campbell Cheong Chan (M) Sdn Bhd - Milk ingredient from Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, France, Indonesia and USA...I don't quite believe that they could get milk from Singapore and Indonesia and not from China) I think (hope) Glaxo is a trustworthy company and would stick to their British roots.

If I get kidney stones, you know who to call. Until then, I will be scraping the sticky blobs of Horlicks off the bottom of my mug.

UPDATE: Hong Kong tested a bunch of dairy products and these are acceptable

Kiddie Food Critic!

2008-11-18T00:07:00.002-04:00

I read this article in the New York Times and could not stop myself from "awwwww"-ing away. A lonely kid was tired of eating hummus alone while his parents were running late, so he went to the opening of an Italian restaurant and critiqued their food! SO CUTE! They should make it into a movie.

Tao, Midtown East, NYC

2008-10-30T15:17:00.003-03:00

I should backdate this post to August, when my computer was broken, but I am too lazy. I went to Tao with 7 other friends on August 8 (reservation for 8 at 8pm, on 8-8-08). While everybody else was watching the Olympics' Opening Ceremony, we were eating copious amounts of sushi in a loud and huge restaurant. Reservations are months in advance, so make your reservation early (unless you are related to Uncle Richie).

Since it was the summer, we gravitated towards more refreshing dishes. Not pictured is the table-full of appetizers that we all shared. At first, the atmosphere was very much like a family dinner in a polite family. We were passing dishes around and making lettuce wraps for each other. When the sushi came out, the atmosphere changed to "fend-for-yourself."
By the time dessert rolled out, we were all in a feeding frenzy, digging madly at the mounds of ice cream and sweets.
Check out the little buddhas in white, milk, and dark chocolate! After dinner mints or after dinner buddhas?

Stanton Social, LES, NYC

2008-10-30T14:00:00.008-03:00

Stanton Social is a bar/restaurant in the Lower East Side that was "the IT place" to go to for starlets back in 2005/2006. It is still a happening place, years later, as we had trouble getting reservations before 10:45pm on a Saturday night. For those of you who only go for the purposes of drinking, you really should try a few (or 10) of the dishes there. On a dark and rainy night, trust that Stanton Social's specialty cocktails and tapas-sized dishes will warm you up. Small groups would have a good time sharing the plates, but if you went by yourself, it is recommended that three plates will be enough to fill you up.

Well, because one of our party was related to one of the owners, we would order things and more things would come out with the things we ordered. Got that? Here are the tasty treats...I apologize for the quality of the photos. It was VERY dark inside the restaurant. I could barely see where I was aiming, much less read the menus lit by small tea light.

Crab cake corn dogs - very crispy, a little heavy to be the starting dish. - Tasty, but would probably have them serve it later in the meal.
French Onion Soup Dumplings - a portmanteau of asian soup dumplings and French onion soup. The cheesy crust is very tasty, but watch out for the HOT HOT HOT soup inside the dumplings. Six dumplings served in traditional escargot plate, with individual dimples for each dumpling. - Interesting combination that works. A Stanton Social special that should not be missed.
Chicken and Cashew Spring Rolls - I would have liked to see the "skins" of the spring rolls less browned and more crispy, but that's just the Chinese girl in me talking. It was hard to tell that there was cashews inside the rolls. - Perhaps it would be better if the sauce were more spicy than sweet?
Red Snapper Tacos - the upscale version of late night taco trucks' fish taco. The dipping sauce on the side didn't really augment the flavor of the taco that much. I was pleased that there was corn salsa inside the taco though. - Tacos with corn = THE BEST!
Herb-dusted Frites with Red chili aioli and ketchup - The fries were tasty alone or dipped in ketchup. Dipping them in aioli was a little hard to justify, as the flavor wasn't anywhere strong enough to warrant the added calories. I had AMAZINGLY delicious truffle oil aioli with frites before at Riviera, and I think that has spoiled me in the frites-avec-aioli category. - fries were good, but again, not very strong in the sauce department, are we, Stanton Social?
Stanton Social Beef Wellington - I could see how this would be the perfect meal if I had not had all those other tapas right before this was delivered. Filet mignon coated with delicious mushroom duxelles (minced mushrooms and spices) and foie gras, all wrapped up in puff pastry and baked. - If you don't get anything else, at least get the Beef Wellington.
Duck Confit Empanadas - duck confit has always been my favorite thing to order ever since I had a taste of its rich and crispy flavor at a restaurant in Arles. The strength of duck confit is that it is at the same time juicy and crispy; putting it inside empanadas is an interesting combination, but loses that crispy quality. - Despite that, I would definitely get the duck empanadas again. TASTY!
Butternut Squash and Sweet Potato Ravioli - I once tried to make acorn squash ravioli and it was probably the worst thing on the face of the planet. These butternut squash and sweet potato ravioli at Stanton Social are a far cry from my acorn version. -Slightly sweet but not dessert-sweet, they are a good bridge between the "meal" and "dessert," at a restaurant where the progression of the dinner and courses are not well defined; eating outside the box, so to speak.
By the time desserts rolled out, my stomach had already left for the day. Note the double shot of dark liquid in the background. I believe it is espresso with Patron (tequila). One whiff of that and fly-weights like me will be drunk in a second. It is a very good way to end dinner/charge up for a night of going out.
The long tray is the Chocolate Sampler - Left to Right: "ring dings" (like truffles coated with nuts?), chocolate muffin, chocolate panna cotta, chocolate pudding (in the cup), chocolate gelato, and chocolate peppermint patties. The peppermint patties were VERY heavy on the mint...I would not eat it in one bite. Chocolate pudding was amazing, definitely try that and the chocolate gelato. The panna cotta was a little thick but very smooth. - For single ladies out there who spend weekends eating Ben and Jerrys Phish Phood while watching chick flicks, I would recommend putting on some clothes and ordering the chocolate sampler plate. Chances are you'll get your chocolate fix and maybe some drinks purchased for you by strange men. Win-win situation for everybody!
Last but not least is the warm donuts. These are the same donut balls you would get at dim sum (Hong Kong's version of tapas). The three sauces are raspberry, caramel, and chocolate. -This dessert wasn't out-of-this-world-omg-amazing, but it was a pretty good end to a very long meal.
Dishes I could not order but wish I had space for: beef carpaccio, chicken mole taquitos, tuna tartare roll; and for dessert, "Coffee for Two"

I definitely recommend getting reservations if you are planning on going as a group of more than 3 people. Each plate is designed to be shared among 3, but they will serve the food in servings of four and just charge you for one extra if you do go in a group of four. The bar scene was pretty lively, a good mix of down-and-dirty-LES-ers and yuppies/trust fund NYU-ers/everybody else. I've had great experiences dining out in groups, and Stanton Social is no exception. The servers are very friendly and eager to give suggestions, and they pace the plates in waves so that you aren't overwhelmed with a bunch of plates but the flow of food is constant. The total bill for 4 people, including 5 drinks, was around 200 dollars. I think that's a pretty good deal for dining out at a posh restaurant in New York.

Shaved Ice, Yuan Shu Ling

2008-10-05T11:52:00.000-03:00

During a frigid torrential downpour in the middle of summer, I went back to the small town in Taiwan where I spent most of my childhood. It was only gloomy when we embarked on visiting our old elementary school, but the day became quite wet by the time we hit the old shaved ice store. I use the word "store" very loosely because it was just some tables set up in somebody's living room. In Slovenija they had similar house-restaurants called gostilnas, interspersed among tightly spaced houses. Unless you live in the neighborhood, these small eateries are hard to find, as they hardly post signs advertising their existence.

My old elementary school - It seemed much bigger when I was a kid. Perhaps if I were looking at the school from the perspective of the child laying on the ramp, it would still appear as big.My friend Angela seeking shelter from the rain under a lamp post. If you look carefully at the ground, you'll see how rainfall in Taiwan is unique (at least, I've never seen it in other places I've been to). When a droplet of rain meets its cousins on the ground, it doesn't merely join them in a big puddle. The droplet forms a bubble, floating on the surface of the puddles. Don't ask me why that is.What to do when there's a drenching storm outside? Eat shaved ice! Here's an alley much like the one where our shaved ice shop is located.
The brown one is chocolate flavored, and the yellow mound is passion fruit.
This one is called "trekking in the snow in search of berries."(踏雪尋梅 ta shue shun mei) The term is usually used to refer to the popular activity in Japan of trekking in the snow to look for cherry blossom trees in bloom, but the last word also means berries. Clever, eh? The little bit of yellow you see peeking out from beneath the strawberry syrup is passion fruit.

New Computer!!!

2008-08-27T21:43:00.002-03:00

I am proudly writing this post on my new computer! The only bad part is that Dell preloads all computers with lame Vista. MWAHAHA by the end of the night it will be partitioned to less than 10% of the hard drive and I will be using linux again!

I really enjoy the feel of the keyboard! and a remote control that plugs into the extra card slot! and a 8-in-1 memory card reader! back-lit LED screen that is eco friendly and power saving! weighs 1/4 of what my computer used to weigh!

Can you tell I'm excited?! Look forward to new juicy posts as soon as I get time to load some pictures!!!

Technical Difficulties

2008-08-06T19:19:00.002-03:00

Wow, it really has been a long time since I've posted. My old ThinkPad exploded, and while I thankfully saved all of my pictures on the external hard drive, I have no way of getting them on the internet. Please accept my apologies as you and I eagerly await the arrival of my new computer.

-the soon-to-be owner of a Dell seXPS

Rue Cler - Durham NC

2008-04-27T14:17:00.008-03:00

Durham, North Carolina is one of the most deadly cities in America. One is more likely to be shot while walking around in Durham than in the most dangerous neighborhoods of LA or NYC. Knowing that, I find it interesting that it is also a city of glorious restaurants. One such restaurant is Rue Cler, found at the corner of E Chapel Hill St and Rigsbee St:

View Larger Map
The sun was just starting to set as we arrived at Rue Cler, and the slanted beams of dying sun flooded the entrance of the softly lit bistro. We picked a table next to the window, so that it seemed like we were almost sitting on the street; giving us a clear view of passers-by. The restaurant itself isn't decorated in any special style. The main dining room had the decor of a typical modern-looking restaurant, but then there was a perplexing little room next door that served as an extension of the restaurant. It was made to be a rustic boulangerie, quite the opposite of the polished main restaurant. Minus one point to whoever thought that one up. Another thing that was weird about the restaurant were the walls. It really seemed like they just took an old and dying turn-of-the-century store front and put up some Ikea-looking things in it, without caring that the ceiling and walls were VERY unfinished. It wasn't even raw-brick-contrasted-against-glossy-paint chic. It was more like there-are-foot-prints-on-the-unfinished-2-x-2's-nailed-on-the-wall-from-a-construction-worker's-boot. Look above the doorway that leads to the perplexingly rustic boulangerie. You'll find the dusty footprints.

The food itself was not bad at all. For the low price of $25 you can get the 2 course prix-fixe menu of something salad-like and something meat-like. For $35, you can get the complete three courses including dessert. What is a French meal without dessert?

Both Shanna and I got the radicchio salad with candied walnuts and little slices of mandarin oranges. I am definitely not a fan of the bitter radicchio. My French mom used to take away the sting of the radicchio with a sweet mustard vineagrette. The chef at Rue Cler skimped on the vineagre, but the salad was still pretty good as long as you made sure to have either a bite of mandarin orange or candied nuts with each bite of radicchio.
I got North Carolina shrimp with goat cheese and yuca. Yuca is also called cassava, and it is definitely not one of my favorite things. Perhaps I was expecting the familiar savoriness and starchiness of potatoes, but the unexpected crunch of the yuca confused my mouth while it was trying to enjoy the tastiness of the shrimp. I'm not sure that the goat cheese was necessary.
Shanna's second course was devine. The asparagus was cooked just right...tender at first bite but still sufficiently crunchy. The lone egg was a "farm fresh egg," which, as I noted before, is yellower and more flavorful than a grocery store egg. The yellow sauce is hollandaise, the CORRECT sauce to put over asparagus. (ahem....bearnaise is for steak).
Always a sucker for duck and brussels sprouts, I seem to have gotten into a rut of ordering duck every time I go to a French restaurant. The sauce was slightly sweet but mostly meaty, (with the added help of the lentils for body). The duck was barely cooked, still tender and juicy like it is supposed to be eaten. One thing Rue Cler knows how to do is meat.
Shanna got a shepherd's pie with a leg of lamb. Har Har, get it? SHEPHERD's pie and leg of LAMB?!
What is a French dinner with no dessert? Below is a crepe drizzled with chocolate sauce and creme anglaise.

Food Identification

2008-04-24T02:17:00.002-03:00

Time to play Guess What This Is! I have always maintained that food is beautiful, not only when you style it, but in general. Are those white blobs not the most elegant thing you have ever seen?Here is a more complete view. Can you guess what this is?

It's a container of frozen lu stock!(滷汁) Here is the English wikipedia for lu wei. The fat from the stock rose to the top to form beautiful little circles. Kawaii!

Mura - Raleigh, NC

2008-04-24T01:42:00.005-03:00

Due to request by some friends who patiently sit through my photo sessions before digging into their meals, I am anachronistically posting photos of my latest food conquest.

Mura is a decently new restaurant in North Raleigh, part of the completely revamped North Hills shopping center complex. I remember North Hills as being a half-abandoned lot back in high school, where store fronts were so cheap that a handful of high schoolers could afford to rent one out to build the decorations for their winter formal. That is not the case today, where Kobe beef at Mura can cost $69.00. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you heard that right. Raleigh - Entree - $69.00. I think we've hit a new high.

We took advantage of the great weather to sit outside, but unfortunately it made for poorly-lit pictures. For that, I apologize. Dinner started off with VERY lightly seared tuna marinated in ponzu sauce, served with a sriracha paste. When I've had tuna before, you could see at least 1/8 inch of cooked edge. At Mura, they try to only cook the surface. I was extremely impressed with the pile of orange paste that presented itself, enough so, that I flagged down our waiter and asked him "what is this and why is it so good?" According to him, it is a puree of crab, shrimp, and daikon, mixed with sriracha. Some food purists might say the spiciness ruins the subtle flavors of the tuna, but I say it was brilliant!
left: TNT Crunch - shrimp tempura with spicy mayo. I made him bring out more sriracha because it lacked the TNT that was promised. If you order the TNT Crunch, make sure not to get it "mild."
center: Ebi Maki - Shanna's choice. Soft shell crab with asparagus, avocado, topped with wasabi dressing and spicy mayo. Very good.
right: the Mura Roll - basically a ton of fish rolled inside of rice, nori (seaweed), and thinly sliced daikon. I wasn't particularly a fan of the daikon on the outside, and the roll is much better without the cilantro in the middle overpowering all the other flavors.
I am sort of bewildered by the tackiness of the logo, "Mura" embossed on the dessert plates. I tried to obscure it with the tiramisu. The tiramisu torte looked a little like a bench. I must admit I am not used to the ladyfingers being on both edges of the dessert. Sauces from the inside, out: dulce de leche, caramel, dark chocolate, enveloped in raspberry syrup.
Shanna's choice of dessert, a chocolate torte with ice cream. Now that I think of it, the weather was perfect for ice cream!

Sappho, Taipei

2008-04-01T20:33:00.006-03:00

Sappho technically isn't a restaurant, but I ate some food there that ended up in my camera, so here it is on the food blog. It is located just off of An He Lu (安和路), between Shin Yi (信義) and Ren Ai Lu (仁愛路). The bar is underground, announced by a small sign and a subterranean garden. The interior is dim and mod, and on most nights, you'll find at least a handful of expatriates mingling with the locals. The window in the background opens up to the garden that is below street level.
The bar is known for its live jazz (the bands are often made up of non-Taiwanese performers as well). On the particular night when I was there, we were treated to the fusion of a professional aborigine singer and a back up jazz band. I would equate Taiwanese aborigine singing to yodeling, as they share vocal fortitude and profound lung capacity as well as the status of being a folk art that is slowly disappearing into the memories of older folk.
They serve bar food like any other bar in any other part of the world. Salsa? Nachos? Pizza? What is this? Why are there 2 sprigs of endive sticking out of the salsa? That being said, the salsa was pretty good, and the tortilla triangles were adequately crispy.
I went back once more to Sappho to watch the finals for the World Cup (yeah, back in 2006. I'm way behind on life), and due to the time difference, emerged to see Taipei 101 glowing with the first light of dawn.
This view is taken outside of Sappho, looking from the alley to the intersection with An He Lu.

E-coffee, Taiwan

2008-03-23T03:00:00.003-03:00

E-Coffee is as ubiquitous (double click on the word for a dictionary definition) in Taiwan as Starbucks is in America. The difference is that E-coffee has had a relatively successful streak with incorporating other foods and drinks into their business than Starbucks. With a drink menu of 40+ different espresso drinks, blended drinks, icees, teas, shakes, you can expect to find something to your taste while you type away at your next blog post. Par contre, in a recent NYTimes article, Starbucks is reportedly scaling back their "big evil empire" by cutting back on the breakfast sandwiches and other stuff they have started selling in addition to coffee.

Many of the posts on this blog happened in an E-Coffee. What else can you ask for in Taiwan during the summer?
Free internet? Check.
Air Conditioning? Check.
Beverages? Check.

I think this is a mango blended ice. The coloring doesn't look like mango at all, but that's because it didn't taste like mango at all. It tasted mostly like ice. Not a good experience with the blended ice drinks. I recommend getting something related to coffee.

Fresh Eggs From the Farm

2008-03-15T17:30:00.004-03:00

Ever since one of my patients raved about the significant difference in taste between fresh eggs and grocery store eggs, I've been meaning to try eggs straight from the hen's butt. I drive through the rural back roads every day to come home from work, passing by a random driveway that always has a cardboard sign propped up against their mailbox that says, "Fresh Brown Eggs." So far, I haven't consumed any fresh eggs, because I always fly past the driveway, or am too intimidated to pull into some random person's house. I woke up this morning at 9am and went to the farmer's market, where eggs are twice as pricy as they are at the grocery store, and thought I'd give their fresh eggs a try. The old farmer man let me take a picture of all the eggs. They are technically "brown" eggs, but it's more like an easter basket than "Brown."In my dozen, there are brown, light maroon, green, even speckled tan eggs!
I am not sure if Latta is the name of the farm, but the old guy had special cartons for his eggs.

Almond Doe Fu

2008-02-18T23:57:00.004-04:00

If you know anything about being Asian, you know that almond tofu not anything novel. I think my mom used to make it as a dessert every time we went to a church potluck or get-together when we were younger. Although some people might actually use very silky soft tofu to make almond tofu, the "tofu" part of the name usually refers to the texture of the gelatin. My mom makes it with milk and Jell-o. Sometimes you put maraschino cherries (gross!) or other chopped up canned fruit in it, and chop the jelly part into small cubes. I really only like the almond milk and the almond-flavored cream based jelly. What is new and notable about this set from Yu Ji is that you get the juice separate from the jelly part, and both parts seriously are melt-in-your-mouth delicious.On the left is the packet of juice. You pour it separately so it doesn't make the jelly part any less jiggly during transport and storage.
Then, you have the option to slice the jelly part into smaller pieces and eat it like a soup; or, you can scoop up big slices from the entire mass. Which ever way you choose to do it, Yu Ji Shing Ren Doe Fu is the best! (于記杏仁豆腐) There is one at Tong Hua Street (通化街) and Guang Fu Street North (光復北路). I don't know where the other ones are, but their addresses are below.
光復店:2756-5395 台北市光復北路5號之一
衡陽店:2370-1998 臺北市衡陽路101號
通化店:2378-1889 台北市通化街109號
樂華店:3233-3933 台北縣永和市永平路168號(樂華夜市內)

Gordon Ramsay's Maze at The London Hotel

2008-02-03T18:43:00.006-04:00

Let's take a detour from the usual Taiwan food and give you a glimpse of what Sunday afternoon was like during my last trip to New York, shall we? My flight left JFK at 6:30pm, which meant I needed to leave the city by 4:00pm to make it through security in time. Originally, the plan was to go to New Jersey to see my best friend's tail-less, meow-less cat who wears a pink sweater, but the transit time to and from there would have been quite a stretch on my already-tight last day. It was fortunate that I canceled those plans, because Elizabeth (one of the 4 filles who went to Dijon in 2003) called and wanted to get lunch somewhere midtown, close to the Port Authority, from which her bus to Boston was leaving. Not being familiar with any restaurants near Times Square (midtown west) that didn't try to serve up a side of consumerism with your entree of tourist, I went with good ol' nymag.com to help me narrow down a decent restaurant that wasn't astronomically priced. I originally started out narrowing down my choices by neighborhood, then cuisine, then price, but I wanted to do something different than the Hispanic or French cuisine I had had all weekend. I chose the "London Bar" because I thought it would remind us of London, and since it was a bar, food would come quickly so Elizabeth and I could make our respective modes of transportation. The number I called turned out to be the common line for "maze," a silver and teal toned, less formal restaurant by Gordon Ramsay in the London Hotel. I had heard of his name before in culinary circles, but had not made the connection that this was the guy who has a show on the Food Network.

I think it worked out well that we landed at such a posh restaurant. If the 3-course lunch was a steal at $35, (2 courses were $25, but who would reject a Gordon Ramsay dessert?) I can only imagine how expensive food normally is at maze.

Elizabeth's elegant white cowl neck sweater went well with the sterile-looking silver and teal of the restaurant. All the dishes were the purest of white, and there were nifty little holders of silver for your silverware.
I was impressed by how the waiter poured my coffee. Usually I just pour a bunch of coffee and fill the rest with milk, unable to control how much cream goes in the cup of coffee. He poured about half of the cup of coffee, then added the amount of cream I wanted, and topped the cup off with some more coffee. In the oval container to the right are actual lumps (not cubes, not crystals, LUMPS) of brown and white sugar.
The first course for me was the hand-dipped sea scallops seared with a coating of curry salt. The dish is garnished with a slightly sweet plum sauce and bernaise sauce. I don't know what the two little crispies in the corners are, but they were delicious. I have a suspicion that they are made with the same type of batter as gougeres.
Another view of the scallops. Each was as big as my cellphone.
Despite having lived in Dijon for a semester, I did not actually taste the complexity that is Coq Au Vin. Coq au vin est un plat bourguigon (dish from Burgundy) that is one of the classics in French cuisine. It is characterized by the red wine sauce (usually a burgandy wine). Here, the coq au vin is served with three small bits of baby carrots (very tender but not mushy), on a bed of salty cabbage. The cabbage is like a sauerkraut that itsn't sour. The buttermilk colored sauce to the left is foie gras veloute. A veloute is a creamy sauce that is not creamy. I can only describe it as velvety - not rich, but not watery, if that helps.
They only coated the top section of the chicken with the thick wine sauce. I think it was a brilliant move, because the flavor would have been very overpowering had all the chicken been drenched in sauce. The sauce actually juxtaposes itself perfectly with the crispiness of the skin of the other two pieces of meat.
For dessert, I went with the blackberry lemon cheesecake. It's only a cheesecake in the loosest of senses. The crust, instead of being at the bottom, was a light dusting of crispy crumbs. The top layer of cream is less dense than a regular cheesecake, and is separated from the richer bottom half (that was flavored with lemon) by a thin layer of blackberry confiture (jam). There is a small surprise at the bottom tip of the glass, in the form of pleasantly tangy lemon custard.
Peanut brittle and chocolate truffles with caramel centers finish off the meal.
By the time we got to the petit-fours, nobody had space to eat anymore, so they gave us this nifty little box (about the size of a lipstick holder) in which to pack the petits-fours.

What Dinner Looks Like

2007-12-23T14:46:00.000-04:00

What dinner looks like if you don't make it yourself, pictures taken at my aunt's friend's house in Taipei. They live in one of the high-rises on the side of the mountain overlooking Taipei City, where the celebrities live. I wish my computer wasn't Linux, so I can mount my old external hard drive and get the nightscape pictures of Taipei 101 that I took from the giant window of their apartment. It's about the most amazing image in the world. Sorry kids.

Considering this picture was taken indoors, I am quite proud of the photo quality of these two wine glasses and the grain of the table surface.For starters, Dong Gua Tang (winter melon soup) with oysters. For hot summers, this is a light but tasty soup that won't weigh down the rest of your meal.
Foreground: calamari pasta with shrimp. Background: anchovy and bamboo shoots with spicy red peppers
Beef with bell peppers, something we make at our house as well. The picture isn't so good because I forgot to take a picture of it until it was plated on my plate.
Tofu in red sauce. I can't remember what the red sauce was made from, but it wasn't spicy at all.
For dessert, the trend of the moment, mille-crepe with mango stuffing.
Almond nai lao (milk pudding gelatin thingy) with blueberry.

Danshui

2007-12-06T00:53:00.000-04:00

A fun and popular daytrip destination, if you're visiting Taipei, is Dan Shui [dan shuay]. On the MRT (Taipei equivalent of subway), take the red line all the way up until you hit the seaside. The interesting thing is that the red line is above ground all the way to Dan Shui, so you can see the city passing by, from super packed urban to slightly more pastoral suburban. The ride reminds me a lot of Tokyo, actually.

Dan Shui boasts of amazing views of mountains and the sea juxtaposed against each other, peri-colonial architecture and historical sites, and most importantly, FOOD. The small town was first settled by aborigines, then inevitably invaded by a variety of Europeans, ranging from Dutch to Spanish to perhaps Portuguese. The location was very popular with the Europeans because even though the water was shallow, it was where Dan Shui river emptied into the sea, providing a key look out spot and fort location. They left a fort (Hong Mao Chen, or, fort where the red-haired people hang out) withing walking distance of the now-touristy wharf that is now a museum worth seeing. On the way to Fort Santo Domingo, I passed by a troupe of random teenagers from Minnesota, singing bad Christian pop to some passers-by, in the courtyard of one of the old churches or houses where George Mackay used to live/work. It's funny that they should choose that deserted area of Dan Shui for their ministry, because it seemed like all the foot traffic was out by the wharf, where the food is, and where pop concerts are often held (the concert du jour was the MRT's promotional 2-day new bands festival).
One of the distinctive things about Dan Shui is that the streets still have an old-timey feel to them, and stores lining each alley sell toys and treats from an era almost forgotten. Note the use of umbrellas as parasols.
Sometimes the food stands come up with innovative ways of selling normal food. The "toilet ice" is one such novelty. Basically, it is soft-serve ice cream in a pink styrofoamy-textured cone that is shaped like a toilet. Notice that it is shaped like the toilets that you stand over, not the western kind on which one sits. I guess the name, "toilet ice" would make little sense to visitors.
The beach is not very appealing, if you're used to the clear blue waters of the Bahamas or something. Dan Shui literally means "shallow water." As you can see, the water really is very shallow, making for a very wet sandbar more than ocean.
Right off of the boardwalk, fishermen sort and count the giant shrimp they just caught. The "fruits de mer" are served right in the restaurants on the other side of the boardwalk.
Steamed crab with a salty broth in the green bowl.
Giant shrimp, seasoned with just salt. Delicious and super fresh (see above photo of fishermen).
A very large scallop with a few chunks of onion. The red-orange part is the egg, I think.
Fish balls in a light broth with green onion.
The notable Dan Shui A-geh. "A-geh" is actually the Taiwanese pronounciation of it, but I don't think anybody pronounces it in normal Mandarin. It is uniquely made and served in Dan Shui, uniquely Taiwanese. The most basic Dan Shui A-geh is made up of ja yo do fu (or fried tofu), hollowed out and stuffed with mi fun (rice vermicelli). The hole where you stuff it with vermicelli is sealed with a fish paste, which solidifies into a plug very similar to the fish balls once it is steamed. The steamed unit is then served in a sweet and spicy sauce.
Here you can see the fish paste plug, the vermicelli, and the pink sweet-and-spicy plum-based soup in which it is immersed. Like any food in Taiwan, there are a million variations to it. You can have all sorts of fish paste plugs, any sort of flavors of vermicelli, any sort of soup or sauce.

Apple Bread

2007-11-08T23:28:00.000-04:00

Hey kiddies! I apologize for the lack of posting lately, but ever since some genius decided to transform my IBM crap-pad into a Linux-running pariah, I haven't been able to get any pictures off of my camera without extensive scheming and complicated logistics. In any case, here is a photograph to keep you satisfied for the time being.
I'm not sure if I could say one thousand words to describe this picture, but I'll try. Starting from the background, this picture has all sorts of different components that make it worthy of a post. The old fortress buildings on the side of the mountain are located very close to the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The National Palace Museum houses the historically significant artisan goods and art-wares through the strong and week years of Chinese history. It has a twin museum in Mainland China that holds the artisan goods that the Commies didn't destroy during the cultural revolution and the Nationalists didn't pilfer during the Chinese Civil War.

I spent a sweaty afternoon navigating various forms of public transportation (MRT and bus) to get to the almost-suburb neighborhood of Taipei where one can visit the National Palace Museum. The trip there was nothing short of enchanted. For the longest time, the bus did not come. Various related routes stopped by outside of the MRT station multiple times, but I had to wait almost an hour for the one I needed. That was okay because I had some Tsong Zhua Bing or Shiong Zhua Bing (bear claw green onion pancake, not to be confused with the flaky pastry sold at coffee shops) from a roadside vendor. I knew about Shiong Zhua Bing because it was the specialty of the parents of a kid named Shiao Shiong (little bear) with whom I worked at a Chanel jewelery line launch. The idea of Shiong Zhua Bing is a newer manifestation of the green onion pancake at night markets in Taiwan. Rather than let the pancake become crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside in the shape of a disc, the cook repeatedly cuts the blob of dough with two sharp spatulas while it is frying on the flat surface. In doing so, the pancake turns into a mass of thin intertwined noodes (much like a nest) that are crispy yet chewy at the same time. It's called Shiong Zhua Bing because when you eat it, you're picking at it like a bear would use its paw to pick at a nest.Er, I digress. Anyhoos, I was sitting on a bench on the side of the road after walking through the museum, just minding my own business, eating my minibreads. The bench faced a bus lane (the two Chinese characters written on the street in front of me say "gong tzhe"). I watched more buses go by, contemplating how the minibreads reminded me of the Ping Guo Mian Bao (apple bread) that my little brother and I used to eat as kiddies.
WHEN ALL OF A SUDDEN, A WHITE SHORT BUS DRIVES BY! You heard it here first, Taiwan has short buses, and they drive past you when you're contemplating the most trivial of thoughts.

Lychees Like You've Never Seen

2007-08-02T00:59:00.001-03:00

I think canned lychees are a pretty common sight these days, even in non-exclusively asian markets. Just today at Harris Teeter (local grocery store), I walked past some fresh lychee, cut individually and priced at 3.99/lb. Those people eating something being sold as "lychee nuts," canned lychees or lychee flavored sweets are absolutely missing out on the real thing though. (read: don't buy the Harris Teeter lychees)

While in Taiwan last summer (I know, I'm very behind on blogging. What can I say? Life is more fun to live than to write about), we bought a large bunch of lychees on the way back to Taipei from Taichung. If you walk around in Chinatown, or any other large gathering of asians, this is how you would buy lychees. Healthy lycheese are plump, firm to the touch, and red. The ones shown below are perfect, if ever you need a perfect representation to go by when purchasing lychees in the future. I included a thumb in there to show how big they actually are. The lychees available to Americans are usually slightly larger than the tip of my thumb.
I apologize for the lack of flash, but here you can see how meaty these lychees were. The pit is but 10% of the volume, where normally it occupies up to 50% of the inside volume.
Itty bitty pit. Shown here next to my thumb.

The Wall, Taipei

2007-07-18T00:30:00.001-03:00

This really isn't food, but I wanted to blog about it anyways. A drink is consumable!!! Music is consumable!!!

There are literally only a handful of places where you can get a dose of rock and indie music in Taipei. Your best bet is to head south from National Taiwan University on Roosevelt, cross the GIANT intersection under the overpass, and fall into the hole that is The Wall. The Wall is one part body art parlor, one part indie record store (much like School Kids or Record Exchange), one part recording/practice studio, and one part performance space. Connecting all these [literally] underground shops is a foyer of sorts, where alternative-looking people gather to talk about the latest band, trend, or just life in general. The Wall has shows from Wednesday night through the weekend, featuring local bands and foreign heavyweights alike. While I was there, Four Tet made an appearance, as well as local darlings Selfkill, Orange Grass (Trng Tsao), and Tizzy Bac.

The 300NTD cover (about 10 bucks), you get a drink and at the least, 3 bands. I'm not sure what it was I drank, but I think it had grenadine in it?
Sombody's highschool band:
Gratuitous photo of Erland Oye, Norwegian indie stud, whose side project "Whitest Boy Alive" is being heavily promoted by White Wabbit Records, token record company of all things indie in Taiwan:

Macarons, East Si-ide

2007-07-10T18:58:00.000-03:00

I'll digress a bit from the usual restaurant and multi-course meals and fill you in on what I did all day while in Taiwan. Work days at VVG, depending on who you are, can range from 20+ hours to just a couple of hours of serving hors d'oeuvres. The mornings are a mad rush to prepare hors d'oeuvres that will be served either late afternoon or that evening. The afternoons are a mad rush of pulling various silverware, china, glasses, and utensils for each event. The platters and cups are carefully selected to coordinate with whatever canape is being served that night. The best day working would be one where you just show up to the event and pass around canapes at posh product launch parties. I had an early day at work one day, and got to leave at about 2pm after I had finished assembling the canapes. I was going to venture out in the fun and exciting East Side of Taipei to find food, as I had neglected to feed myself on the way to work.

The East Side (Not really the east side; mostly just an area of new development) of Taipei is one of the "NEW! EXCITING! TRENDY!" places that you must visit. It spans Zhong Shiao Dong(east) Road and the Shin Yi District. Within the rough bounds of this area contains anything from Taipei 101 and the mega malls to small streets lined with the same kind of shop that warrant nicknames like "tea street" or "beef noodle" street. There are whole streets with lined exclusively with Korean clothing boutiques, or tea merchants (not to be confused with stores that sell bubble tea variations). With so much to choose from, you need more than a day to fully sample what all is there to taste.

Luckily, my boss felt sorry for me not having eaten, and donated a few macarons to the "i need feed" cause. The macarons below come from Franciacorta Maison de Patisserie on Yan Ji St between Shin Yi Rd and Ren Ai Rd. (MapQuest) Christabelle has a good review of the shop, if you can read Chinese. This dude has pictures of them in their nifty boxes on his flickr page. I thought the macarons tasted just fine, perhaps a bit too sweet. My boss and the other culinary masters at VVG decided that they were nothing exceptional. I think a good macaron has to be fluffy with a hint of chewy, sweet but not too sweet. The easiest mistake to make is to make your macaron too sugary...just ask Joel Robuchon.

Indian Cuisine in Taiwan

2007-07-10T17:49:00.000-03:00

When I went to Taichung last summer, we stayed in the Jing Chu Hotel (called The Splendor in English), across the street from the SOGO (chain of department stores recently involved in a scandal with Taiwanese President Chen Sui Bian). Also across the street is an Indian restaurant called "Shiang Liao Woo," or "The Spice Shop" in English. The restaurant is literally a hole in the wall, if said hole were orange and tasty. Recently, Indian restaurants such as the "Andrew" have popped up in Taichung, but I am wary of their authenticity (what kind of Indian restaurant is named Andrew?!).

The decor was mostly orange, with these interesting lights that reminded me of light up boobs in the Electric 6 music video for "Danger, High Voltage". (Do not watch the video if you don't like obscene things. Otherwise, it's quite entertaining.)

One of my favorite Indian foods are samosas. First of all, whoever invented eating tetrahedrons deserves a pat on the back. They are golden and crispy on the outside, with varying fillings on the inside depending on what you order. It can contain meats like chicken, but I prefer the vegetarian ones, with mainly potatoes, peas, carrots, and spices. Samosas are so portable and easy. I was in NY visiting my best friend and we bought a bag of them at Grand Central Terminal and walked around the city eating them. If you are hesitant to try new cuisines, samosas are a good, safe (meaning not too spicy, not too "weird") gateway to deliciousness.
NAAN! To think I didn't know what naan was until I got to France?!?! Naan is delicious flat bread that you eat with the various juicy dishes. It is a little bit fluffy on the inside, with a slightly crispy outside, that, when chewed, turns a bit chewy in texture. It is delicious plain, or with spices baked into it. The one shown below only has butter on it.
This picture is slightly on the dark side, but I'm going to venture a guess that this was chicken tikki masala.
The dish below is lamb.

Independence Day

2007-07-05T12:36:00.001-03:00

For the past couple of years, I have not been in America for the 4th of July. As such, my friends made sure that I had a very patriotic day, with these ready-to-bake flag cookies. I remember in high school, people's parents would bake the slice-and-bake easter cookies with the bunnies on them, or the christmas cookies with the christmas trees on them. Today, we have totally evolved beyond that, with cookies that you can dump out of a bag, READY in cookie form, to be baked. No preparation necessary at all!

Before:After:

Szechuan Cuisine

2007-06-20T15:40:00.000-03:00

Some relatives of mine live in Chicago, and while we were there visiting my grandma, she took all of us out for a full Szechuan dinner at a friend's restaurant. My only remaining grandma is the source of my being 1/4 Szechuan, and probably the reason why I like MaPo Dofu so much. The special thing about "spicy" in Szechuan cuisine is that it's not only flaming hot, it also temporarily numbs your mouth. The peppercorns used are hua jiao, different from conventional peppercorns. The combination of runny nose, numb mouth, and burnt tongue only makes you exclaim, "hao shruang!"

The name of the restaurant is "Asian Bistro," which has nothing to do with it's Chinese name. The Chinese, found on the right hand side of the picture, is "ya shuan."
The first thing they brought out were these flaming fried shrimp, on the house, because they liked my uncle and his family. The ratio of hot Szechuan chili peppers is equal to shrimp. You can only imagine how spicy and extremely tasty these crispy bombs were.
In Chinese, this is su ji, or vegetarian chicken. It is not spicy, and consists of dofu pi (skin that forms on top of the liquid when you're making tofu) wrapped around chopped mushrooms. Very savory.
I'm not sure what this is, but it just looks like some generic stir-fry of some sort that you would find on the "american" version of the menu. The rest of the stuff we ordered were from the "chinese" version of the menu.
Fu Chi Fei Pian!!! This is my first encounter with "married couple (fu chi) slices (pian) of lung (fei). It was actually quite tasty, though I think it should have been spicier. In reality, sliced lung is sliced cow stomach and other tendon-y parts of the cow. I tasted the slices that looked like legitimate cow meat, but I'm sure tripe is good too.
Cheng du liang mien. Cheng du is the capital of Szechuan. Liang mien just means the noodles are served cold. It tastes a bit like peanuts but is not that spicy.
Steamed fish. I was surprised that this fish was fillet-ed, as Chinese people tend to eat the whole fish. The sauce is mostly soy sauce and sesame oil and garlic. The green things on top are a type of chive, I think, with ginger julienne.
Categorized as a dessert, ba bao fan (8 treasures: usually contains 8 different types of fruits and nuts) is not normally eaten after a meal. I only ever remember eating ba bao fan during special occasions like Chinese New Year, never with everyday meals. The rice is supposed to be more colored than what you see below. This specimen is not a very accomplished mound of ba bao fan.

Desserteries, continued

2007-06-20T14:52:00.001-03:00

In a similar circumstance to Room 4 Dessert(see post below) , I went to Chikalicious, another desserterie mentioned in the NY Times article, on another date back in November. No, my life isn't as glamorous as to exclusively involve studly men taking me to dessert parlors on romantic dates all the time; I've just been meaning to go to Chikalicious since my trip to NY right before France (Summer 2003). I finally went last year around Thanksgiving (Fall 2006), after 3 years of delays. At Chikalicious, the prix-fixe menu is always $12, plus $7 if you're going for a wine pairing. The chefs pair your amuse-bouche and petit-fours for you, and you get to choose what dessert you would like. The great thing about going on a date is that you can get two desserts, and try both of them!

I have a feeling that the two ladies who run and own Chikalicious enjoy making ice creams and sorbets that are shaped with their long thin spoons, like the leaf-shape you see below. Our amuse-bouche was butternut squash ice cream with spiced apple jelly, I believe. It's only about the size of a teaspoon, but the butternut squash ice cream was so smooth and subtle, delighting even the taste buds of a squash-hater like me.
On the left is a small molten chocolate tarte, paired with red peppercorn ice cream (with bits of red peppercorn on top), and raspberry coulis. The red peppercorn ice cream was the highlight of the "meal," in my opinion. It was smooth yet spicy, calming yet tantilizing. Quite amazing. The molten chocolate tarte was good, but not as original as the peppercorn ice cream.
This is caramel panna cotta topped with cashews and some sort of sorbet. I can't remember exactly what flavor the sorbet was, but I think it may have been lemon or something. The panna cotta was devine, not too sweet, but just sweet enough to break up the smoothness.
Our petit fours were, clockwise from the top: chocolate truffles, lemon poppy seed shortbread (you can order this online off of their site), and coconut coated marshmallows.

Room 4 Dessert

2007-06-20T13:28:00.000-03:00

An article in the New York Times today mentioned a recent trend of pastry chefs starting their own dessert-only restaurants, two of which I have had the pleasure and honor to visit (on dates!). The first is Room 4 Dessert, a delightful little "sliver" of a restaurant hidden somewhere in Nolita, that Chrissy took me to in May. It is the perfect place to go after a romantic dinner in the Lower East Side (extra brownie points for Chrissy, who took me on the perfect "date"). While walking to dessert, you shift the huge dinner in your stomach around, so that there's more space for goodies! Room 4 has just enough space for a bar, where patrons watch as the baristas and serveurs carefully construct the dessert platters. It reminds me a little of a sushi bar, but less wet and more sweet-smelling.

The head chef, Will Goldfarb, set the menu up so you can get what appeared to be sampling rafts of 4 types of desserts, and each raft had a theme and different wines (red, white, dessert, effervescent, french, german...etc) that paired well with the theme. Some of the themes were chocolate centered, some focused on light and fruity spring time combinations, while the one we got was just whimsical.
The placemats are black vinyl mesh, and the wood counter had the most amazing striated pattern. I have never seen such a refreshing and simple way to spruce up wood. Our dessert platter from left: smooth but tangy apricot preserves on modified ladyfingers; tangy cherry jello; mellow pistachio creme; plum and sugar coated bon bon (some what like a dense marshmallow with fruit sorbet in the middle)
Another view of the bonbon and the pistachio creme.
the bonbon
apricot preserves
pistachio creme
I apologize for the dim lighting...I didn't want to mess up the ambiance of the desserterie with a sudden bright flash.

Noodles and Congealed Pork Blood YUM!

2007-06-19T13:08:00.000-03:00

I put this post up because congealed pork blood soup was a soup that came with school lunches about once a week when I was in elementary school. In Taiwan it's almost like second nature, like clam chowder as a menu option on American menus. Clockwise, starting from the large bowl: Cold udon noodles with minced meat sauce and strips of dried seaweed; clear soup with bok choy and congealed pork blood jello.Here's the noodles (liang mien)
And, congealed pork blood jello in soup. It doesn't taste bad; it just makes you feel like a vampire.

Feng Jia Night Market

2007-06-19T12:19:00.000-03:00

While we're on the subject of night markets, Feng Jia Night Market in Taichung is the second biggest night market in all of Taiwan (Shi Ling Night Market in Taipei is the biggest). The night market sells everything from clothes to pets to food (from stinky tofu to turkish ice cream). It encompasses the entire area around Feng-jia University, where my maternal grandfather used to teach. My brother and I were born in Taichung, I suppose for that same reason...that was where mom's parents were. Sort of hard to pronounce night market fare: ooo ahhh zjen. In mandarin it's "ke ze jien," but nobody ever calls it by it's mandarin name. All I can say is that there's egg, oysters, spinach, some sort of juice that turns gelatinous, and special sauce in it. Other than that, you'll have to try it to see what it is. People sometimes call it an oyster omelette.
I think these are spicy duck wraps, the night market version of the wrap method to eating Peking duck.
OMG yang luh dwo iceeeeee. My brother is green with envy. Yang luh dwo is what my grandma used to bribe me to go to preschool when I was 2 years old, and the special treat that all Taiwanese kiddies drink. It tastes like strawberry yogurt.
Hot pot essentials: various balls of seafood, meat, brochettes, kabobs, fried tofu, all on sticks, waiting to be added to your soup noodles.
Some more hot pot essentials. I think the red things to the right are some sort of inner organ.
This, is a bunch of crap on top of egg and who knows what else. Normal people like to call it Okonomiyaki, but since we got it at a night market in Taiwan, I'll go with "bunch of crap on top of more crap." As you can see, it has corn, mayonnaise, ham, ketchup, egg, bonito flakes, pineapple, pork, probably seaweed, and definitely green onion. I'd rather not eat this ever again.
Ahh, and the lovely hot pot! Daikon, noodles, green onion, dumplings, fish balls, and soup!
A lady selling sushi.
A view of the crowd that shows up for the night market.
This family of handsome men sell fried soft shell crab. Tasty.
I don't know if there's an equivalent in english, but these candy-looking kabobs are glazed fruit. The orange looking things are yellow tomatoes stuffed with candied dates. The glaze over the fruit is special because it's icy cool, something quite refreshing on a hot summer night walking around in the hoards of sweaty people.
They wrap it up in rice paper when you buy a stick, so the glaze doesn't adhere to things. It's sorta fun to eat the rice paper too.
Beverages stands are like espresso stands in Seattle - ubiquitous. This stand sells all sorts of drinks with jellies in flavors like lemon, passion fruit, and almond.
The words on the red lanterns in the back say "Lu wei", or a way to categorize marinating and cooking all sorts of food in a certain type of stock. You can cook anything from tofu to do gan to chicken wings to eggs to intestines in this tasty tasty broth. My favorite is the do gan.
This shady dude "sells" you "turkish ice cream." He scoops the ice cream out with the long metal shovel and packs it into the cone. The ice cream cone sticks on his shovel, and he pretends to hand it to you, but pulls away on the stick many times until relenting. BOOOOOOO. I don't like playing games!
Just another example of a beverage stand. Note giant list of drinks you can get, ranging from juices to teas to flavored milks to milkshakes to jellied drinks. This is why I love Taiwan. Drinks!
Matching girls.
That image in the middle is a large flat screen TV playing karaoke videos, OUT DOORS, IN THE MIDDLE OF A NIGHT MARKET, AT A STAND THAT SELLS SAUSAGES WRAPPED IN LARGE INTESTINES. 'nuff said. Have I mentioned that I love Taiwan?
This lady sells traditional sweets. Instead of candy, people used to eat candied fruits, little biscuits, and all sorts of dried fruits as well.
If you so wish, you can buy a husky at the night market too. (not food)

Chinese People Eat Desserts

2007-06-01T19:04:00.000-03:00

Contrary to popular perception, Chinese people do eat desserts. Cakes and other sweet baked goods that fall into the "dessert" category are usually reserved for western cultures (except for western-style Chinese bakeries), but people who live in Taiwan are all very used to having various cold soupy desserts. This may look like black coffee, but it is in fact melted shian tsao. Usually, you eat shian tsao in little black jello-like cubes in a sweet syrup. The cubes are gelatinous, and when heated, turn into what looks like heavy slime-of-death but taste like heaven. Weird, but not to me or anybody familiar with Taiwanese night markets.Here's a closer look at the consistency of shao shian tsao (literally: burnt shian tsao). You can see how it is sort of slimy, between solid and liquid. It is delicious but hot. I'm so not kidding.
Another soupy dessert that people enjoy is doe hua. Doe hua is like the sweeter, more delicate cousin of silken tofu, reserved for desserts. One usually only eats it with sweet ginger soup with peanuts.
This bowl has the typical ingredients yi ren (or Job's Tears), doe hua, peanuts, and gingery sweet soup.

Afternoon Tea

2007-05-26T19:00:00.000-03:00

We lived close to Shimen Resevoir (shi men shui koo) when I was growing up. I never really appreciated how lovely the flora was around that area until returning to it many years later. According to guidebooks-for-white-people-looking-to-do-things-off-the-beaten-path, it is a great day trip destination if one were a tourist in Taipei.
This is the field in front of the place where we had afternoon tea. Afternoon tea is usually reserved for cultures influenced by the British Empire when it was an empire, but the practice can be adopted by anyone who has nothing better to do in the afternoons than chat with one's friends. I've always marveled at how skinny Taiwanese people are despite how much they eat. If you think about it, they have 5-meal days: breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and latenight snack at the night market...and model-sized is considered "big-boned." I'll have whatever they're having.
Notice we are carrying umbrellas on a sunny day. One should just get in the habit of using an umbrella, rain or shine. Later that day, it started flash-flooding, and the umbrellas that were previously preventing us from tanning sheltered us from the rain.
I think this bottle of mint water was just for decoration, but the commercialized version of that, metromint, is one of my favorite beverages.
Standard offerings at a Taiwanese afternoon tea parlor, clockwise from left: whole wheat bagel, mango flan/custard (mang guo nai lao), green tea and sesame stick of some sort, and whipped cream drizzled with mango coulis. Bagels are a relatively novel food item in Taiwan, and the nai lao is the latest craze in custard-looking desserts. There's even a restaurant in Nei Hu (in Taipei) that sells ONLY nai lao!

Every Taiwanese kid has had an infatuation with boo ding at some point in their lives. It is called flan only to make it comparable to something in the Western world, but the Taiwanese version is actually more gelatinous and less creamy than Spanish or South American flan. Nai Lao hits somewhere between the creaminess of traditional Spanish flan and the bounciness of Taiwanese flan. This ramekin of mango nai lao is covered in mango coulis. I thought it went well with the vibrant fuschia of the flower.
Here's another plate, this time with a blueberry bagel. The green leaves are fresh mint.
I ordered a iced green milk tea, but it came out as matcha-flavored milk with ice and some stewed sweet red beans as garnish. Not the best I've tasted, as it was slightly too sweet, but it makes for a pretty beverage.
I should have gone with the hot green milk tea, pictured below.

Hakka Cuisine

2007-05-24T14:21:00.000-03:00

So I know it's been almost a year since I spent a lovely summer in Taiwan, but I still have gajillions of photos of phood that I need to unload somewhere. Don't be surprised if random photos from long time ago pop up every so often.

I get peeved when people try to label Taiwan as being Chinese. There's really many many different subcultures that make up what is Taiwanese nowadays. Hakka is one of the larger groups, centralized in the western (mid-western) part of the island. Briefly: Hakka people come from the south east part of China, and their cuisine and traditions are different from other groups of Taiwanese people.

We went to a Hakka restaurant in the next town over from where I grew up. The restaurant was essentially the downstairs of somebody's house, but was known to have excellent food. The owner's cat is a tricky one. It insists on drinking and eating out of the plates that they leave for the gods. There's the proprietor of the restaurant, pulling out a bottle of plum juice or plum wine or some sort of alcoholic beverage involving plum.
The style of this painting is very similar to french impressionism. I thought it was particularly interesting, because it shows a scene looking down the historic main street of the little town next to our town.
Two small plates of "pickled" things. The black one I think is some sort of plum. The yellow one is unripe mangos, I think. I can remember how it tastes and what the texture was, but I can't remember the fruit.
Tenderized pork with egg over cucumber. Very subtle flavors for Hakka cuisine.
An interesting peanut duo. On the left, a creamy peanut paste drizzled over cucumbers (very good). On the right, a spicy sauce with bitter greens and peanuts, poured over bitter melon slices. You should note that fresh flowers are usually part of Hakka cuisine as well.
One fish eaten three ways. This dish is just chunks of one simple white fish, presented with three different sauces. The tan sauce on the left is a sweet and sour sauce similar to the taste of Tang Tzu Yuu (sweet and sour fish, literally: sugar and vinegar fish), but more focused on the sweet and sour flavors and not the savory flavors. The next bowl holds a spicy, soy sauce based sauce that reminds me of the random spicy szechuan sauces that my grandma pours on everything. The last sauce was by far the most mindblowing - it is a thick miso based sauce that wasn't pungent despite the wasabi that was in it. The sauce is smooth and warm on the tongue, capturing the flavor but not the burn of wasabi. Miso really goes brilliantly with white fish.
Tofu and thick chunks of fatty pork (like mei gan ko ro). Not too exceptionally weird. Those of you who are not as daring would love this one.
Last but not least, a bit of soup to warm the body. Taiwan is a sauna during the summer months, but one can't let weather hinder the consumption of "chinese voodoo medicine," as I like to call it. This particular soup wasn't as offensive as the real medicinal soups. It had chicken (oh, and ALL parts of the chicken except for feathers), and probably gogi and ginseng, two essential ingredients to making Chinese medicinal soup.

Madeleines

2007-05-11T12:38:00.000-03:00

Madeleines are small seashell-shaped "cookies" that are really miniature sponge cakes. They are synonymous with Marcel Proust (the npr story examines the question: why is my madeleine crumb deficient?!!) and his giant 7-volume memoire, a la recherche du temps perdu. The little seashells look very unimpressive until you actually see, touch, and taste one with tea. I recently purchased a flour sifter and a silicone madeleine mold just for the purpose of cheering myself up. Madeleines are most commonly had with tea, and for a good reason. The sourness of the lemon aftertaste (as with the ones I made, but some other common flavorings are almond, cocoa, etc) goes perfectly with the sweet aftertaste of tea. It's one of those combinations that goes beyond peanut butter and jelly, to enter in the realm of soy sauce and sesame oil - so simple and subtle yet so mindblowing. The only downside to making madeleines is filling each individual mold just right, repeatedly, so that the batter doesn't overfill and leave an unattractive skirt around the edge of the seashell. That took a couple batches to correct, but the baking took almost an entire night.
I highly recommend getting a silicone mold if you're going to be making madeleines. The tin molds stick and tend to burn the madeleines. With the silicone mold, all you had to do was pop the finished cookies out. Clean up for the molds involved light sponging. Non-stick silicone is my new best friend!
Madeleines are usually completed with a light dusting of powdered sugar. It's sort of hard to control where the sugar goes if you're using a sifter to dust, but some people have used stencils to make fun patterns on their madeleines.
The roommate and I had some fresh strawberries and blueberries around, so we made little strawberry (plus rogue blueberries) shortcakes. They are bitesized and SO CUTE! Oh, and the whipped cream was freshly whipped! I've never whipped whipping cream before, but it's not rocket surgery. A bit of sugar and some whipping cream makes for a workout for your forearm and tasty whipped cream. (textbook peak! so exciting!)

I got a little carried away with the tiny sculptures, but you can see how some berries and a madeleine can make for a fun session of miniature sculpting.
Some of the madeleines tasted like our refrigerator (read: don't use butter that has been sitting in the refrigerator for a long time), so as a way to compensate, I used this dirty little trick I learned from Jean Georges. Nothing quite beats the aroma of freshly grated lime zest. Add to that a bit of sugar, and you have a colorful citrus coverup that will do away with any odd flavors (refrigerator or otherwise).
Madeleines can also make good dessert hors d'oeuvres.

Spaghetti Night

2007-05-10T20:43:00.000-03:00

It was Sean's birthday last Thursday, and as a birthday present to him, I promised that I would proclaim the tastiness of his spaghetti on the fblog. Since August 2006, I have spent almost every Thursday night eating Sean's excellent spaghetti. Spag night has become somewhat of a ritual, or a family-dinner-type gathering for our group of young professionals/college students. While our families might drive us crazy at family gatherings, Spaghetti Nights are ALWAYS excellent.
I don't really know all the top secret ingredients that he puts in the sauce, but I can tell you that he makes everything from scratch. From the looks of it, chicken could be an ingredient.
The magic sauce also has mushrooms, though not magic ones.
Give it all a stir...(haha so far from all the hard work that is actually done to make the sauce)
...add some more magic ingredients...
...et voila! Spaghetti night.
The bread is from La Farm Bakery in Cary, NC. (we slather it with garlicky herby butter)
...And in honor of Sean's birthday, a Guglhupf from the bakery of the same name located in Durham, NC.
Guglhupfs are essentially German versions of brioche. Shaped sort of like the top of a fire hydrant, they are dusted with a serious layer of powdered sugar as a finishing touch. This particular round had raisins in it, but the Czech wikipedia page shows that it is possible to make one with cocoa in the middle.

Exotic Fruit Therapy

2007-03-28T23:15:00.000-03:00

What do I do when I've had the worst day ever?!? EXOTIC FRUIT THERAPY!!! Thanks to a tip from my mom, I took advantage of 2/$5 papayas at the local Harris Teeter. What can make me happier than a papaya milkshake? Nothing. Papayas can make you forget all your worries and woes.
At the instant when your knife slices through to the inner chamber of the papaya, the colorful fruit lets out this whisper of an exhale, as if telling you the secret to its glossy black pearls.

In my Asian film class, kids tried to equate the experience of touching papaya seeds to something sexual when we were analyzing The Scent of Green Papaya. I think it's definitely something of a sensual phenomenon, exciting, exhilarating, but maybe not bordering on sexual. Look at the gorgeous color! That's the tip of the papaya.

A lot of chopping and peeling later, PAPAYA MILKSHAKE!

Tea Party #1

2007-03-26T15:07:00.000-03:00

My St. Patrick's Day escapades ended with a sidetrip out to Replacements, Ltd, the giant warehouse of ugly and forgotten china located between me and St. Patrick's Day. You don't even know how hard it is to find PLAIN, WHITE china in that hole for retirees. Seriously, they do have a very wide selection of china patterns, more than I ever thought existed, but the selection also only appeals to the 55-70 age range, who have nothing better to do than to track down pieces of their wedding china broken by rogue grandchildren at holiday gatherings.

After looking over ALL the display items, I finally found 3 sets of demi-tasse and saucers that were JUST WHITE. They're the size of tea cups that Chinese people would use to have afternoon tea, and also perfect for after dinner coffee. I'm quite satisfied with the purchase, as it wouldn't have pleased me had I gotten big British high tea-sized teacups. I also wasn't about to spring for a different tea set for Chinese tea, British high tea, and coffee. When buying a tea set, I say go for what you know you'll use them for. With a neglected crappy teapot that I stole from my mom, a hot water heater (required for all Asian households) and an aluminum tube of jasmine tea from Red & Green Co. of San Francisco (wayyyy coooool....), we were ready to have a tea party. Actually, the only thing we were missing was speculos or madeleines. The best type of food to have with tea is some sort of crispy but sweet plainly flavored cookie, or tea sandwiches. It was too late to eat more sandwiches, so we had to make do with donut holes and scones bought from the grocery store.

Oh, and the exciting thing about these cups is, they're made in Israel! Whose teacups are made in Israel? I'm probably secretly supporting some sort of religious warfare. Go JEWS!

Never-Ending Taco Things

2007-03-25T16:51:00.000-03:00

If you, like me, don't have enough time to cook every night of the week, I have a quick and simple solution for you. Never-Ending taco things! All it is is canned corn (I prefer niblets), chopped tomatoes, canned refried beans, some chicken sauteed with a little bit of green pepper, and some cheese from a bag. Minimal cooking - all you have to cook is the chicken and green pepper. Store each ingredient separately in mini plastic containers, and when you're hungry throughout the week, you have a quick snack. I like to spread the beans and a scoop-full of chicken on the tortilla, microwave it, and then add the rest of the stuff. The best thing about them: you can add as much corn as you want! I love corn!

Avocado Chicken Omelette

2007-03-24T19:33:00.000-03:00

Is it a sin to eat chicken with eggs? If it is, it should be SINfully good! I had one chicken breast left over from making spaghetti sauce and half an avocado from making tomato and avocado sandwiches, so I decided to investigate. To me, avocado has always been great with eggs, and everything tastes like chicken anyways, right? The result is an avocado chicken omelette:

The stuff on the side are my poor attempt to recreate the hash browns from Mary's. Not the same, but not bad - just extremely spicy due to my generous hand when attached to spice bottles.

Blueberry English Muffin

2007-03-24T19:15:00.000-03:00

Brunch is my favorite! I started being a regular at Mary's of Course during the spring semester of my junior year in college. I spent every Sunday after church engaging in intellectually stimulating conversation, admiring the cheek beards of Cheekbeards (Brian Doub, bassist of The Finks), and sampling the down-home yet inventive brunch selections that Mary had to offer. Most of Marys' waitstaff are local musicians or artists, and the dining room is at the same time an art gallery and a display case for all of Mary's kitsch collectibles: Hello Kitty beef jerky, Dolly Parton dolls, and Tammy Faye vinyl records being the highlights.

Last summer I really craved blueberries, and returned to Mary's to see if luck was with me. In fact, they did have a blueberry breakfast item that morning - pancakes or waffles or something of the like. Unfortunately for me, by the time we got there they were down to a tiny ramekin of blueberry sauce left. Cheekbeards, being the adorable man that he is, brought me the last bit of it, with some special cream, and as a compromise I spread it on my english muffin, instead of getting the pancakes.
It was horrendously messy to eat, staining my fingers with blueberry juice with each bite I took.

I can't wait until summer and blueberry season!

I'm Passionate About Brunch

2007-03-19T17:26:00.000-03:00

I can't say that I'm very passionate about anything but food, but considering I haven't been eating much lately, the only thing I'm passionate about is brunch.

My Brunch Manifesto:
-Brunch is something that you do in the city where you live, as opposed to something you do while traveling (though not mutually exclusive).
-Brunch should be consumed at a place where you're comfortable enough to show up with greasy hair from Saturday's partying.
-Brunch should always take more than an hour(preferably more than 2 hours), and breakfast dessert is always encouraged. For the more sophisticated and hardened alcoholics, depending on how trashed you were the night before, brunch sometimes includes a mimosa (not trashed at all) or a bloody mary (very trashed indeed).

Liev Schreiber (Kate and Leopold) and Naomi Watts (King Kong, Mulholland Dr.) enjoy my favorite brunch spot in Soho, Cafe Habana
via Popsugar

Justin Timberlake and Cameron Diaz (no longer an item) like their brunch from Cafe Habana too:
(Note: The corn on the cob you see under the shock of curly blond hair is one of Cafe Habana's specialties.)
via A Socialite's Life

My brunch-mates, a different set of J and Cameron, waiting beside the characteristic metal siding. (There's always a wait at Cafe Habana, but the food is worth the wait.)

Huevos Rancheros from Cafe Habana:

Cupcakes

2007-03-11T22:22:00.000-03:00

Being disappointed in life makes me want to bake. I still don't have an appetite, but at least I have cupcakes to show for it. I want to start making cupcakes with hairstyle frosting. Next time I'll get more decorating supplies.

OOOOoooo red velvet! The "red" part of red velvet comes from either food coloring, or, in the old days, mixing vineagre with buttermilk and cocoa to turn the cocoa into a dark reddish brown color.
Red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing.
The classic way of icing in my book - slicked back.
The "Tintin" curly-Q
UPDATE, 3-13-07: Django ate it
The faux-hawk (if it were a real mohawk, there wouldn't be icing on either side of the 'hawk)

World Cup

2007-02-10T13:19:00.000-04:00

The World Cup was like...a year ago, but here's a horribly delayed picture of a soccer ball bread. GO DEUSTCHLAND! Ich liebe Deustchland!

Chip Flavors For Taiwanese Tastebuds

2006-12-05T00:03:00.000-04:00

For you who are interested in potato chip flavors around the world, here are some found at the local 7-11 in Da Shi, where the bus from Taipei deposited my childhood best friend and I.

Top picture, from left: Cheese flavored, sushi nori flavored*, Korean kimchi flavored.
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.

Din Tai Fung, Best Soup Dumplings In The World

2006-12-04T22:25:00.000-04:00

I can say with absolute certitude, that Din Tai Fung makes the ultimate, BEST tasting soup dumplings on the planet. Standing outside of the restaurant gives you no hint of any of the deliciousness that await you inside. All you see are mobs, waiting, sometimes literally around the block. Right under the red Din Tai Fung sign on the right side of this picture, is a huge line of Japanese tourists. In Japan alone, there are 11 branches of this restaurant, whereas, in it's native Taiwan, there are only 2. You know my theory: if Japanese tourists flock to it, it must be REALLY good. The wait was so long that some people were going to the bookstore next door to waste time before sinking their teeth into the tender dumplings.
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.

The secret to there being actual soup in these dumplings and not in other types of steamed dumplings or buns, is that they put pork broth that has been solidified into gelatin (simply by refrigeration) inside of the skins along with the meat. When the dumplings are wrapped, they are cold and the soup is solid. When the dumplings are steamed, the soup returns to its liquid form and presto! soup inside a soup dumpling.

The proper way to eat these dumplings:
1. pick one up from the steaming chamber and place in soup spoon.
2. bite a small hole to release the hot steam and blow so that the soup does not burn your mouth.
3. drink the soup from the small hole you've made
4. dip the dumpling in the vineagre/ginger dipping sauce that you made while eating the appetizers
5. eat the soup dumpling in one bite.

I don't exactly do it that way, but everybody has their own way of eating soup dumplings. This is how I do it:
1. pick a dumpling up from the steaming chamber and place in soup spoon.
2. bite a small hole to release steam and drink the soup
3. drink some of the soup, leaving about 1/3 of the original volume of liquid
4. chomp the remaining soup and dumpling in one bite
5. chew dutifully
6. smile

After dinner is a traditional Chinese dessert, sweet sticky rice. It's called Ba Bao Fan, or 8-treasure rice. I don't really remember the eight treasures that go in it, but some of them are nuts, or dried fruit.
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.

Gratuitous Saturday Afternoon Sweets

2006-12-02T03:52:00.000-04:00

I've got nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon than to load vintage ppotos of desserts. These are from a traditional Chinese bakery around Shi Men Ding. I've always wondered why Americans have such a hard time adopting the concept of bakery. In France, you have a boulangerie on every block, as dense as coffee shops are in Seattle. In Taiwan you have the same thing. People like sweet baked goods. I like sweet baked goods. The closest thing to that is Panera ... I guess. You can find comparable products (though not as adventurous) at bakeries in Chinatown, like Tai Pan Bakery (pink) or Fay Da Bakery (green) around the corner from it, in the opposide direction as that one fish store on Canal St. (I don't remember the names of stores, just the general color of their storefront. Tai Pan is the pink bakery, Fay Da is green)

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.

Campbell's Chunky Soups To Go

2006-12-01T15:09:00.000-04:00

I didn't have time to make myself a lunch, nor did I have bread or lunch-making materials, so I stopped by the local Teeter and grabbed a bowl of Campbell's Chunky Soup to take to work with me. It was extremely unsatisfying and vile, and I'm pretty sure I'm not going to consume any more of their canned soups.

The offender: Grilled Chicken with Vegetables and Pasta
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.

Complaints:
1. Of the approx. 17 pieces of "white chicken meat", only one(1) piece was free of gristle and/or fat. They even drew brown "grill" marks on the meat to make you think that you're eating a cut up piece of grilled chicken breast. What they didn't realize is, you can't grill chicken fat, and if so, the fat is still not going to have "grill" marks on it.

2. The addition of "smoked" flavor (check the label, it really is one of the ingredients) makes the already unbearably salty soup even more bitter than they intended it to be.

3. The label says the soup only contains 2% or less of chicken fat, but the liquid itself is basically homogenized chicken fat. If you set the plastic lid down on the table after microwaving the bowl, all you get is a ring of beta carotene-dyed chicken fat. MMMMM...delicious! gag.

4. After your sodium levels spike and you're regretting that you even bothered to get a soup with meat in it, all you want to do is shoot Douglas Conant, president and CEO of Campbell's soup. Their #2 or 3 business objective is to consistently "improve the packaging and quality" of their products. What a load of crock. Maybe the packaging has been getting better. The quality of Campbell's soups has definitely been on a dedicated quest to crap on itself in the lowest of low craters on the face of this planet.

I disapprove, and do not recommend this or any other Campbell's canned soup products to anybody who is 1) not suffering from sodium deficiency or 2)living with disfunctional tastebuds.

Borscht for Brains

2006-11-14T14:33:00.000-04:00

I had borscht for lunch. Everytime I think of borscht I think about how Natalya in Golden Eye (my mom's most favorite James Bond movie) says, with Russian accent, "Borscht for brains". Pretty much every culture in the world has their version of borscht. I think wikipedia says it's originally from Ukraine, but even very traditionally Chinese people like my grandma know how to make a version of it. The version of borscht that I had today was the Hong Kong version, substituting the traditional beets with tomatoes. A typical borscht has potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and a variety of other vegetables and maybe meat. Ours has cubes of beef.

It is really interesting how something so Russian (including surrounding countries) can be such an integral part of Chinese cuisine. Luo Song Tang (Luo Song = phonetic translation of "russian", Tang = soup) is definitely on a traditional Chinese menu, and for the longest time I thought it was something Chinese. I'm 100% sure that my grandma never makes anything non-Chinese, but she does make Luo Song Tang.

Ask me what I'm having for dessert

(papaya! I'm having papaya and borscht! <--not many people can say that)

Arugula Pesto

2006-11-05T04:22:00.000-04:00

I had a whole container of fresh baby arugula leftover from a picnic a long time ago. Arugula is my favorite salad leaf. It has the same texture as baby spinach, with a nice mild bitter flavor that isn't unpleasing like dandelion leaves. The leaves weren't wilted but they were definitely not the freshest, so I thought perhaps I could make pesto, because pesto tends to use up a lot of leaves for a small volume. Pesto is typically made with basil, but I didn't have any at the time. The result is something that looks like pesto but tastes entirely novel, like nothing you've ever tasted before. It was pretty good.

Ingredients:
a ton of old arugula
some parmesean I found in the dairy drawer
pine nuts
olive oil
a drop of sesame oil
walnuts
a bit of green onion
one clove of garlic
salt and pepper (i also added white pepper. that stuff is awesome)

I like to fry the garlic and green onion to bring out the flavor before adding it to anything. All you have to do is blend everything together, and PRESTO, you have pesto!

My First Pizza

2006-11-05T04:04:00.000-04:00

Due to an abundance of arugula pesto (see other post), I decided the only way to use a ton of it at one time was to make a pizza with pesto sauce.
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.

Toppings:
Sliced Roma Tomatoes
Corn
Fresh basil leaves
Slices of chili pepper
cheddar, mozzarella, and Maasdam cheese

The final result wasn't too bad:

Unless it's pepperoni or anchovies, I really think you should put toppings underneath the cheese. The tomatoes were my favorite part.

Slices of Lung..mmm tasty

2006-10-31T13:47:00.000-04:00

Chinese newspapers aggregate in the basket of commode reading in my bathroom. I rarely look at them, as I always bring my own reading material. I noticed yesterday that there was an advertisement for a Chinese restaurant somewhere in the Triangle that listed a bunch of names of dishes. This is an uncommon occurance in the US, as people tend to think "beef and broccoli over rice" or "general tsao's chicken" when they think of Chinese cuisine. Not so fast. Those aren't actual names of dishes.

I don't know too much about nomenclature, but I'm pretty sure that Chinese dish names are like proper nouns - there is only one way to make it, and everybody calls it the same thing. Most of the time you can't tell from the name of the dish what it's made out of, simply because the name of the dish comes from some historic story that nobody remembers.

Example: One of the dishes advertised bye the new restaurant was "married couple's lung slices" (Foo Chi Fey Pian). mmmm yummy.

Fong Da Coffee

2006-09-09T18:59:00.001-03:00

My "big aunt" and I walked through this bizarre department store for young people who like to pretend they're Japanese, and ended up at this coffee shop to escape from the heat. Fong Da Coffee has been around since my "big aunt" first moved to Taipei when she was in college. I had no idea coffee, let alone coffee in Taiwan, had existed for so long. The coffee pot etched here in the metal tables of Fong Da Coffee is a Bialetti Moka Express, the original espresso maker. 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.

Big Wheel Sushi

2006-09-09T18:48:00.001-03:00

My first encounter with my mom's oldest sister (big aunt) after 11 years of not seeing her was getting a cultural tour on Taiwanese teens, in Shi Men Ding. Our first stop (after passing by countless stores peddling pink, lacy, and anime accessories to teens with disposable income) was the Giant Wheel revolving sushi bar. I'm not sure why it's called Giant (da) Wheel (treh luen); maybe it has something to do with the train that was pulling the sushi? 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.
Right: noodles made out of a vegetable called mountain medicine (shan yao). It's more like shreds of some sort of root that comes out slimey but very subtle in taste.
Both are served cold.
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.

Om Hum Cafe

2006-09-09T18:20:00.000-03:00

The one thing that I love about Taiwan (and Japan, and France, ok, and pretty much anywhere on earth except the US) is that they don't make a big distinction between commercial real estate and residential areas. It is completely normal to find a bakery, cafe, or restaurant next to somebody's laundry line. In Slovenia, our favorite and the most puzzling jedilnica was hidden somewhere in Vic (veech), next to some houses and the school. Things are so integrated, I can't even tell you where the grocery store was that we used to go to in Ljubljana.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.

Paper Hotpot

2006-09-04T02:33:00.001-03:00

After 11 years of not seeing my 2 best friends (ok, my only 2 friends in Taiwan), they took me out to "paper hotpot." A hotpot can be any variety of things where a liquid is heated in a pot and you dip things into it. It may include shabu shabu, sukiyaki, and I even include fondu, because you're still doing the dipping motion. Clockwise from black spoon on the right: the black spoon is flat and wide, used to manipulate the bits of food inside of the pot so that nothing is over- or undercooked; chopsticks in a paper sleeve; bowl of rice; special sauce that is typically spicy and salty, usually made of some sort of shrimp or brine; the paper hot pot with vegetables, corn, fish balls, taro root, and tofu.

The restaurant not only specializes in using paper as a pot, but using flower teas as the broth for the hotpot. What you can't see is a teabag of flowers somewhere buried under all the food in the pot. The paper pot can last up to 6 hours as long as the liquid level does not go under the first metal ring of the holder, and as long as the flame is burning. The water inside keeps the paper from burning, and the fire keeps the paper from becoming soggy and breaking. This particular ensemble was mine, called the "body trimming" package. It included shrimp, thinly sliced chicken, and some other stuff that you could put in your boiling flower tea.
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.

Gross

2006-08-30T01:15:00.001-03:00

This has nothing to do with food, but I took some pictures for my aunt Josephine while we were wandering around Shi Men Ding one afternoon. Shi Men Ding is a smaller version of Shibuya (Tokyo, Japan) in Taipei. Commonalities: street food, hormone-charged tweens, pink/white frilly "cute things" for girls, cos-play stores, avalanche of advertising.

Shi Men Ding
Shibuya. V-Dub, representing Deutschland!

Dinner on a Train, brought to you by 7-11

2006-08-25T00:31:00.001-03:00

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?

Mint tea

2006-08-14T00:49:00.001-03:00

This is the view from the little house the B&B lady owned by the beach.

On the side of the house there are some mint plants, which, as evident here, can be plucked and placed in hot water to make fresh mint tea.

The color is very light and the flavor is very subtle and refreshing.

Bao-Ze

2006-08-14T00:34:00.001-03:00

Dong Huh Bao Ze (east river bao ze) is the name of a shop that makes bao ze from a top secret recipe. Look! It even says it's 50 years old!

The story is, this store was started by the younger brother of a family that made bao ze. The original store was passed on to his older brother, but the mom decided to give the recipe to both her sons, and so they have a feud going on. The older brother's store has a lot more business, so we decided to patronize the younger brother's store. I mean, they make THE SAME product!
There's no direct translation for bao ze into English, but you can see what they are. Fluffy dough wrapped around stuff. The stuff in the middle can be meat, or a mixture of meat and vegetables, or bean paste.
Every store has a system of labelling their boa ze so you know what's inside. Unlike a box of chocolates, where you never know what you're going to get, the labelling makes it easy for vegetarians to avoid the meat boa ze.
While the meat bao ze didn't have any markings, the swan tsai (pickled leafy vegetables) bao has a pink dot on top.

Roadside Juice Stand

2006-08-14T00:17:00.001-03:00

Papaya milkshake. AWESOME. Thing #238473 that I miss about Taiwan.The lady who makes the juices.
On the left, papaya. On the right, pineapple.
Because in Taiwan, pig skin and intestines are sold alongside wonderful fruit juices.

Breakfast

2006-08-14T00:12:00.001-03:00

What's better than fish eye soup for dinner? FISH EYE SOUP FOR BREAKFAST!!! Clockwise from the fish eye soup: fried eggs with daikon, spicy eggplant, greenbeans. All the dining tables at our B&B had inlays of sand and shells, quite delightful.

Wine and Dessert

2006-08-07T18:38:00.001-03:00

I'm being really slow with the updates, I know. Here's a cheap but good pinot noir from Chile.I'm not a fan of Cabernets. If you want to appear like you know wines, definitely go with the pinots. Little known fact: Champagne is often made from the same grapes used to make pinot noir, a red wine. The type of grape determines not the color of the wine, as wine color is determined by how long the skin is in contact with the juice. I don't know if anybody makes wine with green grapes, but green grapes does not equal white wine. Chardonnay grapes are green, pinot grapes are really dark purple, but !gasp! sometimes a champagne can have both!
For dessert, we had a mille-crepe from a place called Deep Blue in Tainan. There's only one dessertery that makes it just right. A mille-crepe is just that - a thousand crepes piled on top of each other, with a thin layer of cream in between each layer. In actuality, I think they only have room to put about 30 layers before it just gets out of hand.
I really liked the business card that came with our refrigerated-mail-delivered cake. It looks like the size of a normal business card but flips out to reveal the contact information for the store.
What you can't tell is that the other half of the mille-crepe is smashed from the rough handling during transport.
I am a master at taking pictures of tasty things. Or at least, I felt like that after taking this photo, completely avoiding the smashed side while making the cake look presentable.

My birthday dinner, I guess

2006-08-03T20:42:00.001-03:00

There was a cake, and it was almost my birthday, so I guess it was my "birthday dinner"

From left, Faye with the beans, the owner of the B&B with the fish, and my aunt cooking stuff.
Check out the EYE! It's 3x the size of my thumb! This pile of fish was used to make the soup, and the owner of the B&B had the portion with the eye.
The table setting at our B&B. For a few days, we were like family to the owner lady.
The infamous fish soup, with bits of the eye visible in the lower right corner.

Bamboo shoots...one of the better dishes of the night.Green beans...a bit too tough and not salty enough.

Another rendition of bamboo shoots, I think. Decent in flavor.

Fried fish smells great but is not so tasty when it isn't fried dry enough so that the outer skin is crispy.
The same sea vegetable that we had at the noodle shop, with pumpkin looking leaves and curly Q's like cucumber vines.An entire fried fish. In theory, a very tasty idea. In my mother's hands, amazing. In other people's hands...slightly non-crispy and not salty enough.

A Teaser

2006-08-02T01:55:00.001-03:00

Remember when we went to the market to get food for dinner? Yeah. This is only a teaser for the huge meal yet to come. In the meantime, more local fruit from Taitung.
A random neighbor came by on his scooter and dropped off some bananas from his yard. In Taitung, you hardly ever need to buy food, because it's understood that if you have more than you can eat, you pass it on to your neighbors. If everybody grows different things, what you get is a "free" cornucopia of fresh produce.
This, also from a neighbor. Tung Gua's English is either wax gourd or winter melon.
Betel nuts, in their natural form. More to come on the subculture of betel nuts in a separate entry. from the way they are arranged on the tree, I am led to believe that betel is related to coconuts, but smaller.
Lychee, and the tree that bore it. Found in the side yard of a consultant for running B&Bs.

Seaweed Noodles for Lunch

2006-07-25T02:20:00.001-03:00

Lately, Taiwan has been on a health food craze. People are demanding fresher, higher quality food (even organic!)
This lady is an organic farmer. Her dog is named mochi, like the popular gummy rice cakes. Quick lesson on organic farming: growing vegetables without chemicals is hard if all your surrounding neighbors use some sort of chemicals. The water carries it from one plot to the other. Organic farming is basically doing things like people in the old days used to do (that's how people do it in Taiwan normally anyway), except people make TONS more money doing it now than they did before.

The noodle shop we went to for lunch was once such health place. This guy handmakes ALL of the noodles consumed in his shop, and let me tell you, there was a LINE at lunch time.
He measures out the proper amount for one serving...
...about this much.
They take it back in the kitchen and do magical things to the noodles so they taste just al dente enough, but not tough or chewy. By magical things I mean cook the noodle, mix it with some boiled bean sprouts, add one fish ball, and pour some spicy sesame sauce over it. SO good. I can't put in words just how fresh and cool the mouth feel was.
Before the noodle was this soup. It's simple: cook a mixture of land and sea leafy vegetation in a fruit juice/vegetable stock. As long as you have the flavors right, even such a "cheap" to make dish can be amazing in flavor.
Interesting vegetable. I don't believe I've ever seen it in America before. One suspects that it comes from the ocean, or someplace in the vicinity of the ocean. Taste-wise, it wasn't that great; but it does get a 9.2 in the category of "exotic vegetation".
If it weren't so hot in Taiwan, I would have gotten the nio ro mien (beef noodles) too. It is just as it is named: chunks of beef in a salty beef broth.
The equivalent of a roast beef in Chinese cuisine: tons of onions mixed in with beef over rice.

Grocery shopping

2006-07-19T17:46:00.001-03:00

In Taiwan, you have the option of going to a grocery store similar to the ones in America or Europe (Carrfour, Kroger, Wholefoods, Harris Teeter, Piggly Wiggly...etc), but usually, stuff in the city markets are fresher and cheaper. Every city, town, village, small-conglomeration-of-people has such a market, selling everything from vegetables to meat to cheap underwear (US $1 per pair). The floors are usually dirty wet concrete, from the ice and random juices seeping from the various forms of meat sold, and there's a distinct old food smell that permeates the air. To the westerner, it might be appalling, but the truth of the matter is, without these markets, most of the photos on this blog would not exist. Here's a brief tour of the one in Taitung City.
I put the shocker first because I really love this picture. It reminds me of a Chardin still life, elegant but a little gruesome. Yes, children, this is what a plucked and beheaded chicken looks like. It looks like it lost something underneath the platform and is straining its neck to search for its lost possession. Beautiful.
This is the inside of the market, basically movable stands set up underneath the shelter of a large warehouse. It's a maze inside, and you just move around blindly until you find some light peering in from the outside. Of course, anybody who goes to this market can probably navigate the labyrinth of raw foods with both eyes covered.
Bamboo shoots are in season. The little black dots on them are flies. Pretty gross (the flies, not the bamboo)
The old man who sells the bamboo shoots peels them for you on the spot. The outside of the root is really tough and purple. If purchasing bamboo shoots, remember to pick the white, tender-looking ones.
Veggie-palooza! I like Taiwan because Chinese people have so much liberty in the ingredients they use. In America, it's broccoli, spinach, lettuce, and cabbage. If you're adventurous, you might try asparagus. In Taiwan, there are always new vegetables appearing that I've never seen before, despite being an expert eater with a large repertoire.
Brown eggs.
White eggs...that appear to be brown because they probably just left the chicken that morning.
Feeshy fish. There usually would be a lot more on the table but we went to the market sort of late, at 11am. The market is most lively between the hours of 6am and 8am.
I can just hear them:
Fish #1 - "hey! your fat gut is invading my personal space!"
Fish #2 - "why don't you tell those squid behind me to move their slimey tentacles!"
As promised, mango as big as my hand. There's no place like Taiwan. (except for other places that produce juicy juicy mangos) (5 points to anybody who gets that last movie reference)

Gratuitous Exotic Fruit Photo

2006-07-19T17:32:00.001-03:00

Shoutout to Alannah for being such a supporter of my various WWW-ly endeavors.

Today's random fruit is the Jackfruit, a large prickly fruit that grows on trees. Basically, the jackfruit is a poser of durian, the infamous odorific king of fruits. The best way to eat jackfruit is frozen, cut into little pieces. Because I've never had jackfruit at the same time as durian, I don't know which one stinks the worst. BK's (man in photo) mom gave me some frozen jackfruit and it was palatable while frozen. I can't imagine how one could put that offensive yet tasty piece of yellow flesh into one's mouth without wanting to run into a wall to end one's misery.

Jackfruit grows in abundance on the side of the roads in any rural part of Taiwan. There's no way you could starve in Taiwan because all seasons, there are fruit growing on the side of the road. The only problem is that sometimes, the most abundant fruit is jackfruit, whose odor in turn makes you want to kill yourself.

After breakfast coffee

2006-07-17T05:55:00.001-03:00

After breakfast we drove down the highway a bit, to a roadside reststop/lookout point/outdoor cafe. It had perfect views of the coastline, including the small island-connected-to-the-mainland (the mainland...which is actually an island also...). I had one of the best mochas, if not THE best of the 3 continents I've visited (sorry Taylor, this one was really really good). We sat on picnic benches drinking our coffee, reading newspaper, and looking out on the magnificent view. What a perfect life!Need I say anything about this photo?
The island-connected-to-the-mainland; or, "tidal island" in normal geographic terms.
Reading newspapers...
...and drinking what appears to be frozen guava juice or something of the like.
Mmmmocha.
The foam was fantastic. It wasn't too runny or too sweet, but still had enough body to be able to scoop with the stirrer.
The non-caffeinated option was juice.
I'm very intrigued by these small green citrus fruits. They're not limes, nor lemons, nor oranges, nor tangerines. They're green on the outside and orange-yellow on the inside. Their seeds are white with a layer of light green around them. Such intriguing little fruits!

Breakfast

2006-07-16T09:03:00.001-03:00

The bed and breakfast where we stayed is run by one small woman. She is the one who makes the traditional Chinese breakfast you see here. Traditional Chinese breakfasts make rice porridge their main course, with smaller plates of salty foods to go with it. Typically, there is an egg dish, some sort of pickles, shredded meat, and anything else from stewed peanuts to yesterday's leftovers.
Clockwise from the left: yo tiao (oil sticks, basically fried strips of dough); spicy dry tofu with bits of meat; ro song (shredded meat); scrambled eggs with green onions (not my favorite). The rice porridge is in the bottom right.
Our first attempt to eat the wild mangos. They are quite small and soft; very difficult to cut the standard mango-eating way.
It wasn't good enough so I peeled one and ate it straight up with no cutting.
As promised, what the inside of a dragon fruit looks like. The two red fruits in previous post yield white and black pieces of fruit. It is barely sweet, even lightly salty. The texture is like kiwi, and the black seeds are crispy like kiwi seeds.

Gangsters Interrupted my dinner

2006-07-16T07:27:00.000-03:00

We went out to a family style restaurant in Taitung for dinner. By family style restaurant, I mean owned by a family, opened for families. All of the servers were probably the sons and daughters, or at least cousins of the owner. The tables were big and round with a lazy susan on top to facilitate the sharing of large plates of food. In the middle of dinner, this big fat (literally) gangster dude comes in weilding a large metal stick, followed by two smaller gangster kids (probably in their early teens) with various sizes of baseball bats. They make a subtle entrance across the main dining floor of the restaurant until they reach the door that separates the kitchen from the dining room. The large bespeckled gangster smacks the side of the wall with his metal stick, not doing too much damage but making a VERY loud PING, and all three disappear into the back. From what we could make out, a deal gone sour was proceding upstairs, where another wife-beater-clad gangster was having dinner. The three that came in later were reinforcements.

While they were upstairs, one of the waitresses calls the cops, but the cop who arrived shortly after was basically useless. The two smaller gangsters hide their baseball bats in a corner and sneak out, leaving the restaurant owner frantically pointing in their direction to the cop, who just stood there looking stupid. The large gangster happened to come down behind the 2 small ones, and saw the owner pointing them out.

This resulted in the wife-beater-clad gangster putting his arms around the owner's shoulders and conveying what I imagined to be some saccrin friendly threats. He then proceded to sit down at the table across from ours, where the town vet was having dinner with his family. We quickly paid and left before any serious stuff happened.Bamboo shoot soup with what looks like mushrooms.
Battered and fried anchovies, eaten by first dipping in white pepper powder to the right.
Bamboo shoots were in season. One of many bamboo dishes this summer in Taiwan.
Heavily garlicked fish.
Not entirely sure what this vegetable dish was.
VERY interesting vegetable. It is a little bitter and looks like a prickly mini avacado. The textrue is sort of like steamed cabbage stalk.

These covert photos taken from behind the head of the lady sitting next to me. Horrible things probably would have happened had they caught me taking pictures of them. The red jacket and blue shirt by the door are the two smaller gangsters trying to escape.
The big red shirt is the large gangster who hit the wall with the metal stick. The person far away with the hat is the policeman. If he looks like he's running away, he is. The red jacket in the foreground is one of the smaller gangsters.

Eating My Way Across The World

Brussels Sprouts are the New Black (with Coq Au Vin)

Abyssinia, Raleigh, NC (Ethiopian)

新仕 Hotel 的早餐 （breakfast at shin shih hotel)

Fakhr El Din, Amman, Jordan

Thaiphoon, Raleigh, NC

Tinto, Philadelphia

Incredibly Overpriced Chopsticks by Tukaani

Curry Cream Cheese+Pastrami on wheat, The Bagels Shop

Cocoa Bar, Lower East Side, New York

The Balad + Fruit and Vegetable Market, East Amman, Jordan

Hashem, East Amman, Jordan

Souq Jara, Amman, Jordan

Historic Da Shi (大溪老街)

Chocolate Billionaire

Making Sticky Rice (Yo Fan) (油飯）

A Poultry Valentine's Day

VVG Bon Bon!

Vietnamese French Coffee

How to Break Up Petrified Brown Sugar

Melamine in me?

Kiddie Food Critic!

Tao, Midtown East, NYC

Stanton Social, LES, NYC

Shaved Ice, Yuan Shu Ling

New Computer!!!

Technical Difficulties

Rue Cler - Durham NC

Food Identification

Mura - Raleigh, NC

Sappho, Taipei

E-coffee, Taiwan

Fresh Eggs From the Farm

Almond Doe Fu

Gordon Ramsay's Maze at The London Hotel

What Dinner Looks Like

Danshui

Apple Bread

Lychees Like You've Never Seen

The Wall, Taipei

Macarons, East Si-ide

Indian Cuisine in Taiwan

Independence Day

Szechuan Cuisine

Desserteries, continued

Room 4 Dessert

Noodles and Congealed Pork Blood YUM!

Feng Jia Night Market

Chinese People Eat Desserts

Afternoon Tea

Hakka Cuisine

Madeleines

Spaghetti Night

Exotic Fruit Therapy

Tea Party #1

Never-Ending Taco Things

Avocado Chicken Omelette

Blueberry English Muffin

I'm Passionate About Brunch

Cupcakes

World Cup

Chip Flavors For Taiwanese Tastebuds

Din Tai Fung, Best Soup Dumplings In The World

Gratuitous Saturday Afternoon Sweets

Campbell's Chunky Soups To Go

Borscht for Brains

Arugula Pesto

My First Pizza

Slices of Lung..mmm tasty

Fong Da Coffee

Big Wheel Sushi

Om Hum Cafe

Paper Hotpot

Gross

Dinner on a Train, brought to you by 7-11

Mint tea

Bao-Ze

Roadside Juice Stand

Breakfast

Wine and Dessert

新仕 Hotel 的早餐（breakfast at shin shih hotel)