Mint tea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)