wonton soup

Since I've been here, I have learned how to make a fair wonton. But my home made version can't match this stuff I buy near my work (at the same place as the beijing tsong yo bing.) It contains at least three kinds of onion, with a funkyness that smells a little bit like lamb (I find this odor inexplicable.) The broth is rich and deep, with a nice stock flavor. The wontons are full of flavorfull meat, and they are generous with the wontons. You can have this with noodles added, but why bother. The wontons are the point, and they are delicious. Whenever I get this at work, at least one of my female coworkers will exclaim "hao xiang!" (good smell!) and look around to find the source and ask me where I got it. This place is a little expensive by local standards (this soup costs $2 us!!!) so others seldom go. But I love it.

tu two u gang

This is a fish soup that I quite like. It is a thick soup, with egg and probably corn starch thickening the broth. Mixed into that are pieces of cilantro, nice chunks of fried fish, and usually a little of the chili paste I like to add. It's not overwhelming, but there is a soft sweeness mixed with the herbal cilantro flavor and the flavor of the fried white fleshed fish that makes this an enjoyable meal, especially when the weather is a little bit cooler than it is now.

stinky tofu

So this is the fried version of stinky tofu (cho dofu). It is sold in little stands, seemingly in every neighborhood in Taiwan. You can usually smell it before you see it - it smells a little bit like old, foul gym socks. But when you eat it the stinkyness is just one of many strong flavors, alongside chili paste, sweet/sour pickled cabbage, minced garlic and/or ginger, and salty soy sauce. My favorite is the fried, though the bbq is ok. I don't usually like the stewed version - though that was Richard's favorite. A little too stinky for me. We used to get an extremely stinky version of fried tofu at work that would make the whole office smell awful. Everyone seemed to like it better and it was more expensive, but again, too stinky for me. I do like this version though. At night after 10 or so, the only food available is fried, so this is often a late night option. Like fried rice or congee, this seems like another example of not wasting old food that became a favorite as time went by.

My local fried rice

Fried rice is a pretty basic staple in chinese food. It's a good way to use up leftover rice and it tastes great. The place I get it here is always busy and always good. I think the key is a well seasoned wok on a very high flame. They bang the hell out of it too - Lots of banging and clanging as they stir the rice. The ingredients are fairly simple - you can see the one I get just has green onion, shrimp, and egg along with salt and possibly msg. But the high heat must carmelize the rice or some such thing as the flavor has a subtle smoky-ness. I always get some vegetable along with my rice - on this day it was fried cabbage, which they prepare simply with sweet, salty brine shrimp. Chili paste is involved and I get a delicious meal.

Chinese Class

This week I have started back into a chinese class with a private teacher. We meet every monday, tuesday, and friday for an hour each time. I really think this is going to help my chinese, especially my speaking and listening skills which are currently very weak. I don't understand everything my teacher says, but I like struggling to understand. I am doing homework every night, trying to write sentences with any new vocabulary I pick up and writing a short diary. It feels good to be getting back into my studies in a more serious way again.

Bing (ice)

If I haven't mentioned it before, the summers here are monstrously hot. Because of this, Taiwanese people have created a lot of delicious drinks and ices. This is one of the iced deserts you can find in most neighborhoods here. Basically, it's shaved ice, but whereas in the US shaved ice consists of just ice and sugary, artificially colored syrup, Taiwanese people bring the Chinese focus on texture and contrasting flavors to their ice. This particular ice has some sour apple green jelly (i usually get sour mango, ching ren guo, which literally translates as lovers' fruit, I think), black jelly (which has a subtle flavor almost like tea or coffee or chocolate, but is softer and isn't really any of those) and those strange little pearl things, which don't really have much flavor but add interesting texture. I may try to post a photo of one of the shops soon - there are usually a great many options including various flavors of jelly, various starchy creations (like these pearls, tang yuen (gooey rice balls), and other tapioca based things), along with fruit in syrup and other unidentified items. In Keelung, I used to get a simple version with taro soaked in simple syrup and an unsweetened custard. This was nice and not very sweet - I enjoyed putting a little lemon juice on it to give it a sour touch. Recently, near my work I had this with tang yuen (entirely textural), taro, and sour plums (the syrup gave the whole thing a nice flavor - for me the sour flavor is important). On a hot day this can be really good.

gua bao

I may have mentioned before that I'm not a big fan of the Taiwanese take on western bread. I have yet to have anything here that was better than okay, and most of what I have eaten is terrible. The same cannot be said of chinese style bread, which is great. This is a gua bao, sort of a Chinese version of a hamburger. It is wrapped in a steamed bun, the chewy, slightly sweet, breadlike thing that they do very well here. Inside, they put a big hunk of stewed fatty pork. Yum. They smear some chopped, pickled, salty cabbage on that, then throw cilantro and sweet, ground up peanuts on that. Peanuts and cilantro are an excellent combination, especially combined with the richness of the fatty pork, the salty goodness of the pickled cabbage, and the spongey base of the steamed bun. To top it of, I usually throw some Taiwanese chili sauce on top, because that's just how I roll. I get a bowl of some kind of soup and one of these little numbers, and I'm very happy.

Cold beverages 1

Because Taiwan can be so hot, there are an amazing variety of drinks available. And 7-eleven, center of life, has half the store devoted to drinks. Above, top left is cantaloupe juice. I am increasingly fond of cantaloupe and I often get this sweetened (only 20% juice) punch. They also have some cantaloupe sodas, which can be too sweet. The next one, honey herbal jelly, has a soft honey flavor with little bits of jelly floating in it. Taiwanese people seem to enjoy texture in their drinks, and while it takes a little getting used to, I'm getting used to it. The jelly has a delicate, slightly herbal flavor with just a hint of something like menthol that makes your mouth feel a little bit cool. The last beverage here is almond milk, which I love. Many stores have stands selling a version of the stuff and the smell is hard to resist. Unfortunately, I often find the stand version has more odor than flavor. This store bought stuff has a perfume-y flavor that is especially good hot in the winter (7eleven is happy to nuke it for you), but also good cold in summer.

Vietnamese Food - Keelung

Here are some shots from my favorite vietnamese place in Keelung. It's just a stand, at the end of the textile section of the market, with uncomfortable stools and a cd stand next door that keeps the same taiwanese song on repeat for the entire night, and has had that same song on repeat for going on a year, and my god, it drives me crazy, though I think it may be teaching me taiwanese. But I go there because the food is delicious and the old vietnamese lady who runs it with her husband is nice and usually understands my poor mandarin. Anyway, I get pretty basic stuff there. You can see the spring roll above, a rice flour skin with bbq pork, rice vermicelli noodles, basil leaves, and green onion inside. My favorite part is the sauce, which is a sweet brown bean sauce with peanuts, chili, and this sour-sweet pickled carrot radish concoction. You can also see it on my huh fen on the left. Those are fat rice noodles (I'm particularly fond of the) that you find in thai rahd nahr. This dish is served cool, with the noodles, slices of imitation turkey, actual pork preserved in it's own skin with black peppercorns and flavors I can only describe as french, peanuts, chili, more of the sweet-sour pickled radish-carrot concoction, chopped mint and basil, fried shallots, bean sprouts, and a sauce that is a mixture of lime juice, fish sauce, and sugar. On a hot day, this "cold" dish really hits the spot. I tried to create it at home, but, no.

Mohinga!

This is the mohinga I get in the burmese neighborhood near the nan shi jao mrt station. You can't see all of the details, so let me explain. It is an incredibly rich and thick fish broth with sweet little onions, rice noodles, boiled eggs, cilantro, and a cracker made of deep fried yellow dal, which adds wonderful texture. The richness of the flavor comes from whatever else they do to the broth as they liquify some unknown fish. You can see some chili in the right hand pic - that went in there too. It's a great mix of south asian and southeast asian flavors, and is the national dish of Burma, or Myanmar, or whatever. I usually order some burmese tea, which is the same as thai tea (orange, spiced with some unidentified spice - I've heard tamarind seed - and mixed with condensed milk) as far as I can tell. These pics were taken last friday - I went with my friend Lyon. He ordered 2 bowls of mohinga to go, and told me he ate one for dinner and couldn't resist eating the second. And I'm not surprised - it's the kind of thing you will eat even if you aren't hungry.

Crap!

The other night I noticed I had a very large moth in my apartment. How odd, let me just get a shoe, oh it banged into my arm and fell on the WAIT A MINUTE! THAT'S NOT A MOTH, THAT'S A GOD DAMNED COCKROACH! Needless to say, I pounded the hell out of it with my shoe and took a shower, scrubbing my infected arm thoroughly. I sometimes forget that those fuckers have wings - I wish that I could forget that forever.