What is That Smell?

One of the most unique dishes I've ever experienced is stinky tofu. I'm pretty sure you can find it in several Asian countries but I'm told that it is traditionally a Taiwanese dish. It basically smells like feet, really really stinky feet. You can smell the stuff before even approaching a stand or restaurant.

Deep fried stinky tofu with sauce and pickle

The idea is that the tofu is fermented in a brine for several days or even several months. Each vendor has their own brine which is responsible for any flavor differences you might find. The brine is a pretty ugly sludge of vegetable, spices and herbs, and sometimes meat material. After the tofu is soaked for the required amount of time it is either steamed, stewed, or fried (my favorite kind). It is usually served with some sauce and some very vinegary cabbage pickle.

Food Markets, Taiwanese Style!

 A couple of weekends ago a friend of ours met us out early on a Sunday morning in the rain to walk us through a food market in Taipei. I'm pretty sure the trip was fueled by my recent posts of French and Spanish Food Markets that she'd seen. She wanted to show us what Taiwan markets had to offer.

A rainy day at the market

Meeting us on the corner, she warned us that it wouldn't be anything like the European markets she saw on my blog - this quickly proved to be true.


As soon as we walked into the market we found this gentleman. At first glance there's not much to see - a bunch of bottled water. But oh no! This is actually home-brewed rice wine. Easy to sneak into the boring afternoon meeting or class. I know a few people from college that would have been regular customers.

Several stands sold fresh seafood. And I'm talking fresh. One in the middle of the road had a bucket of large shrimps that were literally jumping out and onto the ground. That is until they had their heads ripped off by the proprietess.

A few more oddities you would definitely have a hard time finding in Europe - a stand of all tofu products, blocks of taro cake bigger than your head, and brains on hooks.

All vegetarian products - mainly made from tofu

Slabs of taro cake

There's nothing like brain on a stick to make a person feel primeval

And since I've gotten you all disturbed with that last picture I might as well go into the most disturbing part of all - the chicken slaughter. I eat a lot of chicken. I know where it comes from. I'm not an animal rights activisit or anything, but this seems a little extreme and cruel to the chickens.

It goes like this - there is a big cage with a bunch of live chickens stuffed inside, squawking and stepping on one another (sorry about the picture quality - there was a lot of bustle around the stand and hard to get a steady picture).

Above the cage you may notice a yellow tray on which several chicken organs rest. The smell of blood and sounds of murder surround these chickens - they know what's in store for them. The smack of the butcher block above brings them one step closer to the bloody and horrible death that's already come to their friends and neighbors. There is no way to escape your fate buddy.

On a happier note, there was a lot of really beautiful produce - fruits I'd never seen before, piles of ridiculously cheap herbs (an entire basket of basil for about 30 cents US), and long poles of sugar cane and taro, dumplings and cakes. Stunning variety.

Dumplings and shu-mai

Hibiscus flowers

Our friend was right - the market was nothing like the ones I experienced in Europe. But this is a good thing! So much variety in what people eat around the world is exciting and inspiring. There's so much out there to try - it's a big world with lots of great food!

You Had Me at Sushi

Oh Japan! Why did you have to create such good food? I was already sold at sushi - determined to love you forever. Did you really need to add one more thing to push me over the edge?

Tonkatsu. Fried pork cutlet chopped up and served with a cabbage salad, miso soup and condiments.

Sushi had already changed my life. After the initial shock of something so foreign it became my favorite food and because of it I will be  forever in love with Japanese cuisine. But then this tonkatsu stuff came along and I don't know if my life will ever be the same. I might have to pick up and move to Osaka. Don't tell my husband.

We went to a chain restaurant here in Taipei called Saboten. We first got a big bowl of thinly sliced cabbage and a small bowl of white and black sesame seeds with a wooden mortar. The bowl the seeds were in had little grooves all throughout so when you grind the seeds they mash up very nicely.

You grind up the seeds, then add this amazing sweet barbecue like sauce, and some vinegar if you want. This becomes a salad dressing for the cabbage and dip for the crispy fried pork. I don't know how to describe it except to say that it is amazing! Sweet and a little spicy, salty too. The perfect accompaniment to pretty much anything.

We were also served a small dish of pickled daikon radish cubes and these amazing black beans that I'm craving right now writing this. The beans had a really chewy texture, almost like mochi, and tasted just a little bit sweet.

After the salad the main course came out. I got pork and prawn, both had a perfectly flaky and crisp outer crust and tender inside. My side was a potato salad which was an excellent balance to the salty fried meat. I am in love with this stuff! I just hope I can find it back in the U.S. when I  come home...

Chicken Soup for the Expat Soul

I know it's been forever.  It's almost like I dropped off the face of the earth.  I'm sorry for my neglect.  I just got caught up in this crazy new life I'm living.  So what have I been doing the last two months I haven't been blogging?  Traveling (San Francisco, Malaysia), eating of course, a very little cooking (it's still pretty tough to cook around here), and writing, although obviously not my blog.  I've been working on a new project, a food book for Taiwan along with a few other things.

But this post wasn't really going to be about me.  It was going to be about soup!  One of the first meals I made here in my new kitchen was this chicken soup.  We were going through a little bit of a rough patch, homesickness sticking to us like peanut butter sticks to a three year old.  So I decided to make some good old fashioned chicken soup to cheer us up and scratch our homesick itch.

It turned out really well for the most part.  I didn't have the patience or refrigerator space to make homemade stock, so I looked around our local supermarket for stock or boullion cubes or chicken base.  This is what I came up with.

It did taste a little like chicken, but it was also really salty, so I couldn't use a whole lot.  I have a feeling there was some serious MSG action in there too.  A side note - I am not against MSG per se.  However, it does tend to make both my husband and I swell up like balloons and give us raging headaches, so I try to stay away if I can. 

Anyways.  I used this as the base for my chicken soup.  I thought about going for the whole chicken and cutting it up to make the soup, but I was deterred by the chicken's head.  I can get used to a chicken's feet still being attached, but when he's got eyes to stare me down as I hack apart his body, that is a line I'm not ready to cross.  So I used a few different cuts.

I also found some really nice looking vegetables, all the things I would use for chicken soup back home - carrots, celery, onion, potato.

I basically just threw it all together with some herbs and some garlic and let it get happy.  And when it was done it made us happy.  It's nice that although we can't go home, we can have a meal from home every now and then.  Maybe not everything we want from home (especially without having an oven), but some things.  And that's good enough for us.  Well, for now at least.

Spicy Hot Pot - Oo La La!

Okay, this is one of my new all-time favorite things to eat.  One of our friends took us to a spicy hot pot restaurant and now I can't stop thinking about it.  You sit down at a table and get a bubbling vat of broth.  It's separated in the middle; on one side is mild but delicious broth, kind of like a light chicken broth and on the other side is deep red beauty of spicy broth, large chunks of tofu and duck blood (resembles the tofu in appearance, texture, and taste).

They set the cauldron on a burner in the middle of the table to keep warm and you go up to coolers to choose meat, vegetables, tofu, noodles, or any other number of things you might want to add to the broth.  The place we went to was all you can eat, so you could just go up and try anything you wanted.

We chose some meat and seafood, vegetables and dumplings.  You dump it all into the broth until it's cooked then enjoy!  At the we put a package of ramen type noodles in, and they just soaked up the broth and all the flavor from the meat and the vegetables we'd cooked.  It was a slurpy delicious finish to the meal.

By the way, as far as the title of this post goes - no I did not have a momentary lapse and think I was in France and not Asia.  La is the Chinese word for spicy :)

Weekend Lunch - Shanghai Style

Last weekend Dan and I went out exploring - first to Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall (see my post about it here) and then to a couple of weekend markets.  In between the hall and the markets, we stumbled on a great Shanghai style restaurant and had an amazing lunch.

We started with pork steamed dumplings.  The little packets of dough were filled with perfectly salty pork and a lot of juices.  If you set the dumpling in a soup spoon and pierce it before you eat it, the juices run out and you can slurp them up after you eat the dumpling.  It really is delicious.

 The dumplings were so steamy it was hard to get a good picture

According to Dan, who has been to China (without me), there is a golden ratio for the dipping sauce that goes with the dumplings.  At the table is a container of soy sauce and one of vinegar.  When you order dumplings they bring you a little dish of shaved fresh ginger, to which you add the soy sauce and vinegar.  The golden ratio is 3 vinegar to 1 soy sauce added to as much ginger as you want.  You dip the dumplings in, get a little of the fresh ginger along with it and it all creates a really complex taste; salty pork and soy sauce, sesame oil, a little sourness from the vinegar, and the bite of the ginger.  All with a little chewy dumpling skin.  Perfect.

Vinegar on the left, soy sauce on the right.  Ginger and the finished sauce in front.

We also had some great fried chicken pieces in a sweet and sour sauce.  It was a lot like what you might expect to find in a Chinese restaurant in the U.S. although the flavor was a lot more sour, less sweet and sticky.  The peppers and green onion that were sauteed with the chicken really added to the flavor too.

We had what Dan calls an Asian tamale.  We actually don't know what this is called.  It's good though - kind of a sticky glutinous rice surrounding some pork floss.  Tasty.

 

Finally a little soup.  Definitely the most mundane thing we had at this meal.  The broth was tasty, although the noodles were a lot like ramen and the beef was a little chewy.  I'll stick to the dumplings thank you!

Taiwanese Beef Noodles

A couple of weekends ago we spent the day with a friend and for dinner she took us out for beef noodles.  The beef noodles are a famous Taiwanese dish - I've never had anything like it, but it is so delicious I don't know what I'm going to do when I have to go back to the states and can't get it anymore!  It's a huge bowl of heart-warmingly delicious food.

They take their noodles very seriously around here.  Every year there are competitions for the best beef noodles.  The place we went to had one the competition a couple of times and I can see why.  The noodles had a great handmade texture and taste, and the beef was perfectly cooked and juicy - just right for the fantastic broth.  You can order with a combination of different beef cuts and different broths.  I got the broth with tomatoes and my husband got the house broth.  I think his was a little better, but just barely.

The inside of the restaurant was so tiny and unassuming.  You would never guess just passing by that they have such fantastic food!

Here is our order card.  I'm so glad we had our friend with us!  I took a picture so we could remember what we ordered for the next time we eat here, in case we're on our own.

We also tried some of their dumplings.  Dumplings in Taiwan are delicious.  There are so many little stands and shops selling them.  I don't know how people stay as thin as they do in this country with such beautiful food all around!

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!