Noodles and Congealed Pork Blood YUM!

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

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

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

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

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

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.