mmmmmmalaysian

I loved the food when I was in Malaysian. Terrific stuff. We’ve driven by a restaurant close to our old apartment that wasn’t there when we were years back. They have really good set meals and we don’t go there enough. Good selection, some interesting choices, friendly staff – why don’t we go back?

This particular meal was both huge and delicious. I ordered chicken rendang with the set meal (soup, drink, fruit dessert). I’m a huge fan of beef rendang – we learned how to cook it in Indonesia and it nearly kills me from pleasure every time I eat it – so this was a natural order. This isn’t quite as good as the homemade one that populates some of my food dreams, but it was still quite good. A touch of spicy hot with the depth of flavour that makes rendang so delicious. It was interesting making it chicken as well, I’d only seen this dish with beef in the past. I liked it. As you can see, it has a number of side dishes – fresh cucumbers, fried onions and egg, rice, shrimp crackers – which all contribute to fill you up quite well.

Christine ordered the seafood laksa – a sort of curry soup with lots of tofu and veggies and noodles and seafood – clams, shrimp, fish balls, squid. HUGE – she couldn’t even finish it and had to take it home. She didn’t enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the rendang, but that would be hard to do. It was still quite tasty and enjoyable the next day. Same full meal deal, but no side dishes like mine. That was made up with by the sheer amount of soup.

I would (and have) recommended this place to others and I think we’ll be visiting it again sometime very soon.

Note: I don’t remember the name or address and will post it as soon as I go by and get the details.

sushi express

I love eating sushi. Especially here, as I know I will never be able to eat sushi this good for this cheap ever again in my life. Really, it’s almost better to get it here than Japan – it may be higher quality and more authentic there, but it’s also more expensive.

We do have a terrific sushi restaurant that does great set platters for cheap. I love it and we go as often as possible, leaving full and happy. This is not that place. However, Sushi Express has sushi on a conveyor belt. MOVING SUSHI! And it’s good as well, lots of different flavours. You can also order off the menu. Each plate here costs about $1US and the selection is almost anything you want (within reason). It’s fun to see the stack of plates after a family or a very hungry couple get up to leave.

We don’t visit the express all the time, but it’s a fun alternative and there’s one close by. Sometimes you just can’t beat a conveyor.

contrast: candy

Alright, this may not be exactly fair, but since I have a very Taiwanese candy picture and some different Western candy pictures, I figured that a comparison might be in order.

We start with fish candy. Yes, fish candy. Taiwan is an island and it catches a lot of fish and it has to do everything it can with it. Kids like it. I do not. Blech.

Flip over to M&Ms. I don’t know if it’s an Asian thing or just a special Transformers thing, but I recently had the opportunity to try coconut M&Ms and strawberry peanut butter M&Ms. I’m a huge fan of coconut in general, so coconut chocolate was pretty awesome. I also like peanut butter, though the addition of strawberry, while not overly disturbing, was a little strange.

Winner? Not fish.

hot pot

Hot pot (huo guo in Chinese, literally fire pot. AKA Shabu shabu in Japanese) may be Chinese in general, but it is about as Taiwanese as you can get. If you come to Taiwan and want to eat what the locals eat, you have to take in a hot pot at least once. You always get a big plate of vegetables (lots of cabbage. Always lots of roughage) and tofu. Each place has its own differences – the picture has needle mushrooms, a few different tofu bobs, mushrooms, cabbage, lettuce, a hunk of corn, a piece of pumpkin, a chunk of taro, seaweed, some fake crab meat, sometimes a piece of tomato. This place also gives one shrimp. Another place we go to doesn’t really have much in terms of tofu, but gives you unlimited vegetables (sprouts, cabbage, carrots).

The big part of this is the meat. You choose your meat – pork, mutton, beef, chicken, seafood, fish – pretty much, you name it, they’ve got it. For meat, it’s sliced wafer thin for quick cooking. (You can actually buy meat just like this at the grocery store, many people do hot pot at home. I have a friend who was absolutely in love with hot pot and did this often.) Of course, there’s usually a vegetarian option, but not many choose it. I think it defies hotpot logic. I tried ordering it once and it was not all that palatable. At least, not satisfying for that night.

Everything is tossed into the broth (which is refilled as it gets low) at your discretion and cooked how long you want. This is what some people really dislike: “I have to cook my own food?!” I love it. And it’s so much food that we usually order to and goggle at people ordering many platefuls of food and dunking them all in. Tiny little grandmas and kids devouring entire platefuls! It’s amazing! You also get a kind of barbecue sauce – nothing like North American BBQ sauce, it’s thicker and a completely different taste that I’m not good enough to describe. You can add oil, soy sauce, garlic, green onions, hot peppers, and few other things that I don’t know. This is fairly standard, though I have encountered other things in other places.

At the end, you’re left with a delicious soup that is really quite tasty – after all, there’s been a lot stewing in it! Most places give you a raw egg that some people (Christine included) crack into the broth and cook and eat.

Many places offer tea, as most restaurants do, and some offer juice or slushes and ice cream afterward. And those kids that packed away all that soup still have room for ice cream. Not me. I’m full of delicious soup.

shrimp, taiwan-style

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet. Shrimp in Taiwan is the whole kit ‘n’ kaboodle. You want shrimp, you get every last bit of shrimp. It is definitely not a clean, cut, and tied affair – you get messy when you eat this particular brand of seafood here. A lot of foreigners dislike getting dirty this way or seeing the shrimp looking back at you, but I like digging into it and getting that extra meat. Mmmm.

peking duck

I tried Peking duck in Beijing many years ago when visiting a friend. They took me to a little hole-in-the-wall that the guidebooks recommended for good reason – it was authentic and well-done. I relished every bite – the sweet sauce, the crunchy green onions, the duck and its juices perfectly roasted, the tortilla-like wrapper keeping it all in. It ended too quickly. You can imagine my delight and chagrin when I drove by a corner stand and realized that I’ve been driving by this treasure for years without realizing what it was. I’d always wondered what those orange birds had been hanging there for. Now I had the knowledge but not the duck. This situation had to be resolved and resolved quickly.

We’ve gotten it from a couple of places in the meantime and both have been more than satisfactory. A half-duck (enough for two) costs just 200NT ($6US) and that includes sauce, green onions, wrappers, breast meat, and stewed other parts in a separate bag. Those parts are pretty tasty and some actually prefer them over the breast meat!

Once you get it home (no dining in), you sit down and make yourself up some delicious duck. Grab a wrapper, spread some sauce on or dunk some duck in it, add some green onion and you have a delicious treat in your hands. We worked through the breast meat without a problem, though the stewed duck had to wait until lunch the next day – there’s just so much meat! Everything was just as good as I remembered it. This is definitely a pick-up order we will be bringing home more often in the future!

(expensive) indonesian in kaohsiung

Indonesian is hard to find here in Kaohsiung. I’ve heard of a couple of places but have been unable to find them. We found one home-kitchen-style place in a mosque that wasn’t bad, but it was a bit of a drive out. When one place opened up on our way to work, we were understandably excited – Indonesia had had some of our favourite food in our travels of SE Asia.

It was very obvious that someone had transformed their front room into a restaurant as soon as we walked in – there was a lot of house within sight of our table. We placed our order and waited.

Satay came out first. It was a tasty, though simple, sauce and very good meat. Half a dozen skewers made for a solid appetizer.

Gado gado was by far my favourite individual dish from SE Asia. A huge plate of vegetables with a boiled egg, tofu, and lots of complex peanut sauce. This one was a little lacking – not so many veggies, no boiled egg, and the peanut sauce was the same as the satay (that was not the case in our previous experiences). It was still OK, but only OK.

The coconut chicken that came last tasted like a chicken cooked in a strong coconut curry sauce. Good meat and the sauce was OK – I like coconut a lot, so that saved this one. Maybe the problem was our expectations.

All of these made a decent meal together, but when we got the bill, it was almost twice what we had been expecting. One cannot expect international food to be cheaper than local food, but this one meal cost us more than we had spent on lunch for the entire week! I wouldn’t have even minded if the food had been something worth coming for, but it was merely mediocre. To pay the amount that we did (over $30US for the two of us, which may not sound like a lot back home, but that’s more than you’d spend for one at the entire-floor-sized buffet in the most expensive hotel in town) for a middling meal like this ticked me off a bit, especially with things like the peanut sauce being one big batch. I’m picky about details sometimes.

I would definitely not recommend this place to anyone and almost wanted to warn people coming in as we went out. I don’t have an exact address, but I will definitely tell you how to avoid it if you contact me.

The search for good Indonesian continues!

deep-fried life

If there’s one thing the Taiwanese love, it’s fried things. Not quite like the way Americans fry things (curious breading of things that have no business being fried, frying just to prove it can be done), but most kinds of meat can be found deep-fried. In fact, there are frying buffet stands – select what you like (meat, fish balls, veggies, potato and yam fries) from the front, they drop it into oil and the back, and ta-da! Fried fun.

Two entries here. Fried cheese in one market – supposedly from around the world. Pumpkin cheese, cheddar cheese, mozzarella and tomato, some other European cheeses…. this was good, but I’d rather eat the cheese by itself.

On the other hand, I’ll eat deep-fried squid any time. This is good stuff. Squid is a popular snack at markets, especially close to the water like we are, so finding deep-fried squid isn’t a big surprise at all. It’s rather like calamari on a stick, except it isn’t in rings. Good eatin’.

Stay tuned for more deep-fried adventures!

zhongze

Rice triangles. Most prominent around Dragon Boat Festival (heh heh, oops, definitely a little behind), they are consumed year round, as they are the most dense and filling thing you may ever eat.

Legend has it that townspeople dropped these in the river (lake?) to stop the fish from eating a famous poet and advisor to an emperor that had committed suicide after his good name had been slandered. They searched for him using Dragon Boats. I think that’s it. Now they eat it and watch dragon boats.

Glutinous rice surrounds almost everything, and there are a variety of innards that can be found – peanuts, hairy pork, meat of various types. I don’t know what that black thing is, though. Not meat. The zhongze served at room temperature in a banana leaf (needed to keep your fingers from getting sticky). A friend was told once by a Taiwanese woman that you should eat it with ketchup and by gum I love it that way. Taiwanese he’s talked to since are about half and half, but it’s definitely a love-hate thing.

thai food – the original spicy

Some of my favourite Thai food that I’ve ever had – and that includes some of the stuff I’ve had in Thailand – is right here in Kaohsiung. A large part of that is because the restaurant I love here is run by a wonderful Thai woman who is dedicated to her food – she grows her own kaffir lime tree at her house, to give just one indication. Going to this restaurant is always a love, never a labour, as the food is just so. damn. good.

There is a giant menu of delicious food to enjoy at this place, but today I’m going to list three of our favourites. So much our favourites, in fact, that we order them almost exclusively. Every time we visit it’s just enough time to miss these beloved dishes, so we renew our contracts with them until our next visit.

We start with the shrimp cakes. Nice big fat ones (they also have thin little ones which provide more for a big group, but less satisfaction for a small twosome) with the sweet and spicy thai sauce. These disappear quickly. Always.

Next up: the pad thai. This isn’t the best pad thai I’ve ever had – that was from a couple at a cart on the side of the road in Bangkok, I can still remember it – but it satisfies nonetheless. They give the lemon, the peanuts, and the spicy mix on the sides just like in Thailand, though I miss the sugar a bit.

Lastly, the red chicken coconut curry. An absolute masterpiece down to the last drop of sauce lovingly licked off the plate. The perfect amount of spiciness every time, and I’m sure that if we ever wanted more (or less) it would not be a problem. Wonderful consistency, bits of basil and kafir lime dotting the brown and red landscape, and the coconut jumps through it all. I definitely haven’t had a better curry in Taiwan and I can only recall one as good in Thailand. Yeah, that good.

You’d be wronging yourself if you were in Kaohsiung and you didn’t visit this place. There’s more on the menu and I hope to explore it more if I ever manage to break the contract of this triad of dishes. Enjoy!

The Original Spicy
47 Fushing 2nd Rd.
Kaohsiung, Taiwan