First Meal in Taiwan

We made it to Taiwan on Tuesday night!  What a crazy trip.  14 hours over the ocean and here we are in a whole new culture.  It's overwhelming to realize that we'll be living here.  But the food is pulling me through so far.  Yesterday we had lunch at a local chain, Kiki Restaurant which was absolutely amazing.  It won me over.  I think I could get through anything if I could just eat this food every day.  It is a Sichuan place.  Our guide for the day took us here. We ordered four dishes for the three of us.  We got three small bowls of rice and then the dishes came out.  We took a little off the dish and put it in our rice and ate.

They brought out the beef first.  It was tender slices of beef in a red chili broth with bean sprouts and green onions.  The Sichuan peppercorns were intense and had a strange numbing effect on our tongues.  Believe it or not there's beef in that broth!

Next we ate bitter melon with boiled salted egg.  My husband didn't love this one - he has a thing against eggs - but I thought it was delicious.  It sounded a little weird, and it was a little bit of a strange flavor, but it was perfectly salty and bitter.

The next dish was both of our favorites.  Green beans with diced pork, scallions, and chilies.  Fantastically salty and delicious.  Everything had so much flavor!

Finally we had this amazing tofu dish.  It was tofu that was mixed in some way with eggs, making it really creamy inside, like a custard almost.  The outside was fried - not until it was crispy but it was more spongy, kind of like a pancake.  It was drizzled with sesame oil and coriander.

The best part of the entire meal was the rice bowl.  As I kept adding little bits and more broth from the beef it became this delicious stewy mixture of all the dishes.  The last few bites were fantastic.  I can't wait to eat here again!