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...

Penang Market

Fish for sale. This one looked like a whopper - I can't imagine what I would do with it. Also on offer are some stingray, small sardine like fish and various other seafood delights.

On one of our last days in Penang we visited a local Chinese market where our friend was going to pick up some groceries for the week. I always love going to local markets when I'm traveling - you get a much better idea of how the locals are eating than if you just stick to restaurants. This market was really amazing. Not only was there a huge array of fresh produce but seafood like I've never seen, roasted meats, flowers and the fish balls and cakes that are so popular in Chinese cuisine.

Fish and squid balls, stuffed okra, other rolled and stuffed things unimaginable

We picked up some of the roasted pork when we first walked into the market and walked around eating it out of a little pink plastic bag. It was fatty and crunchy, a little bit sweet in that characteristic Asian meat sort of way. The sound of the massive cleavers whacking at the wood cutting boards followed us throughout the market. The meat is really popular and I don't think these women ever take a break from their chopping.

The meats, seafood and vegetables were all in one big open covered space. The concrete floor near the fish was wet and slippery as the ice melted down onto the floor. Not the best place to be wearing flip-flops (although I noticed most of the locals were wearing flip-flops or sandals)

In a second building fruit and flowers were sold. Asian fruits are so exotic and interesting. I've tried many of them now and know what they taste like but I still get drawn to them every time I see them. The hairy rambutans beg for a light brush of the fingers. The spikes jutting from the hot pink dragonfruit bodies catch my eye.

Rambutans (back), Mangosteens (front) and Longyans (right)

These flowers are made into long wreaths that Hindus offer to their deities

It's hard to imagine markets like these in the U.S. The roasted pork vendors would be shut down immediately - the local food police certainly wouldn't approve of the meat hanging in the open air on a hook, women chopping them up with their gloveless hands. Even worse, the seafood dripping its fishy ice water all over the ground just feet away from vegetable stands. But the locals in Penang don't seem to mind (and don't seem to be getting sick). They have fresh seafood and produce available any day of the week that us American foodies can only dream of. I wonder sometimes if our ultra paranoid approach to food is really a good thing.

If you want to know more about my trip to Penang please visit my travel blog A Day in the Life, where I've written a series called Penang: A Food Story. 

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 :)

Making Cheese

I was going through some of my old pictures this morning and found a few good ones I never got around to posting before we left America.  It made me really nostalgic to look at my own food, which sounds kind of funny I guess, but it's the truth.  I really have missed cooking.  It's been over a month.  Which is grievous.

On a happier note, our shipment of things from home arrived yesterday.  It was mostly stuff that doesn't fit in our apartment or that we would never use here, but I did get some kitchen stuff I was immensely happy about.  Coffee maker, pot, real knives.  I can't wait to start cooking again.  I think I'll go to the store tomorrow and get as much food as I can fit in my dorm-sized refrigerator and get to cooking!

So anyways, on to the old pictures and the cheese making!

I've been wanting to make cheese for years.  My husband is terrified of it.  I think he thinks I'm going to poison him somehow.  So I made this cheese when he was away on a business trip right before we left home.  It was really amazingly easy, and didn't even involve any bacteria, so nothing to be wary of.  I found the recipe here and was totally drawn it.  It looked so easy!

So I boiled the milk and the buttermilk and some fresh thyme from my garden (oh how I miss my garden!) and salt and pepper.

After it reached the right temperature and started separating in strange ways I strained it through cheese cloth.

I wrapped it up and let it drain for a little while.

After it drained I just unwrapped it and ate it with crackers.  Almost as easy as boiling water.  I would definitely recommend this recipe to anyone who has the slightest desire to make his or her own cheese.  It's so simple and delicious.  And it's always fun to tell people you've made cheese!

The taste is kind of tangy, texture is something like a cross between cream cheese and mozzarella.  I love this recipe because you can add all kinds of things to it to make it different flavors - nuts or dried fruit, spices and herbs.  The website where I got the recipe has some good ideas on what to add.  I hope you'll try it!

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 Roulette

The other night my husband Dan and I played Russian Roulette.  Not with our lives of course, but with our stomachs.  We were feeling a little adventurous and wanted to try out one of the restaurants we passed on the street.  It was a little scary but exciting too.  We decided that we'd just go into the first place that looked good and busy (on the assumption that any place that's busy around here has to be good - Taiwanese really know good food!)

So we found this little restaurant on the corner of a street down an alley.  It had red lanterns hanging outside, which Dan is convinced always means food (I'm not so sure about this).  I wish I would have been able to get a picture of the place, but my camera died half-way through our meal.  What a tragedy!

Anyways, we sat down at this big round wooden table.  There was a stand in the middle with soup spoons, chopsticks, soy sauce, some chilies, and little napkins (pretty standard for restaurants around here).  We got this menu that was all Chinese characters.  No pictures.  No one spoke English.  So we decided to play Russian Roulette and just point to a few things.  Very nerve-wracking!

Our first dish came out, and we felt pretty lucky.  It was a fried rice with little dried shrimp.  It was actually quite delicious!  The shrimp was strange at first, it kind of has a texture like potato chips but with an unmistakable seafood taste to it.  These little guys pack a lot of flavor!

The next dish we got was a definite winner!  It was a crispy fried pork (probably pork chop or something around that area).  It was in this amazing stir-fry of vegetables and a lot of garlic and cilantro.  Extremely flavorful.  I can still taste the garlic in my mouth :)  The pork did have bones in it though.  This is hard for us to get used to.  It's so unusual in the US to meat with bones still attached.  We don't have the right skills so it's awkward for us to chew around bones and spit them back out.  I wonder if we'll ever get used to this.

Our final dish was not such a hit.  Unfortunately my camera died right after taking the above picture so I didn't get anything from our last dish.  It came out in a big steaming metal cauldron, and looked like a really weird tofu dish.  It was kind of gelatenous sauce with pieces of tofu and little rubbery mussels, with some crushed peanuts on top.  Not that appetizing.

Overall I think we were really lucky with this dinner.  A few nights later we were eating with a Taiwanese friend and I showed her the picture of the menu and she started laughing at us.  Apparently there were some pretty crazy things on the menu (frog, pig liver, tripe, etc) so we got pretty lucky.  I don't know if we'll be trying this game again any time soon.  It was a great experience though!

My Travel Blog

For those of you who are interested (and haven't already seen it), I also have a travel blog focused on living in Taipei - A Day in the Life  I do talk about food some but it's mostly about my travels.  Hope you enjoy!

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!