tea

Tea. Possibly one of the things I’ll miss the most about Taiwan. There are about six hundred tea stands per person on the island, or so it seems at time, and they all have a large selection of teas for you: milk tea, green tea, red tea, oolong tea, flower tea, fruit tea, barley tea, and many combinations of each. My favourite is green tea with lemon juice and a bit of sugar. You can also get it with different kinds of jelly or the now-famous bubbles (called black pearls in Chinese) of tapioca. The black pearl tea is a great way to fill up if you’re hungry midday; it’s like a snack in a cup. Tea is generally availablein 700mL cups, though in the last six months, most stands have made a one litre option available. It’s a lot of tea, but nice to have on a hot day. Pictured is a cup of chocolate milk tea.

Here’s something that sounds like an abomination: beer & green tea. However, it depends on how you do it. The wrong way is to go to 7-11 and pick up a can of beer flavour green tea. It tastes worse than it sounds. Absolutely horrible. If you go to the night market, there is hope. You can get a beer and a green tea combination in a cup – no flavouring, but the real stuff. It’s not as terrible as you might think, though if you’re a beer purist or not an experimental drinker, I’d probably warn you away from this. Either way, I think I’ll continue to keep them separate.

heart attack platter

One of our quick and dirty meals is a little place (we only went to one, though they can be found all over, even at night markets) that we call Heart Attack. All you do is specify what kind of meat you want – Chris liked the chicken, while I always ordered the beef (nio pai mien) because it was what I was first introduced to here – and whether you want black pepper gravy, and they go. First they throw the meat on a grill to cook, then they put some noodles and mushroom gravy in a wok and stir it around in high heat, cooking them both nicely. Noodles go on a flame-heated metal plate, topped with the cooked beef, and an egg is cracked on the side. Add more mushroom gravy and some black pepper gravy if you desire it, and you’re set for a heart attack.

betel nut

Ah, betel nut, my blood-red nemesis, the mouth-cancer breeder of SE Asia. Betel nut is a stimulant that has been around for ages, chewed with a bit of lime to give the brain a high and turn the mouth a vibrant crimson colour. The huge numbers in this industry are what gave birth to the enormous number of betel palms on the island, part of which caused such terrible devastation in last year’s typhoon. It’s hard for the government to control as well, as a lot of people grow it on their own land and sell the nuts to others under the table. To control this would take massive amounts of people that the government just doesn’t have.

The taste is quite strong at first (see Christine’s father’s expression as he has his first taste as evidence), as is the stimulating effect, which is why you’re supposed to spit the first mouthful out. I swallowed it once and it made my head spin for an hour afterward. You keep chewing and spitting or swallowing, enjoying the lightheadedness, until the whole thing breaks up or you’re sick of the taste, whichever comes first. Truck drivers use it a lot to keep going on the roads, which is why women on highways in betel nut booths often dress skimpily – they want the most business. It’s usually a job requirement.

Blech.

night market goodies

Two of our meals in our last few weeks in Taiwan were consumed completely at the night market, including our last dinner. There’s something fun about food you can carry with you. It’s like a buffet with hundreds of other people that you pay for every dish! OK, maybe that didn’t sound as awesome as it really is, but I still love it. Here is a list of the dishes we consumed in those night-time dining experiences.

The fry anything booth is both a constant joke, like Moe’s short-term restaurant in the Simpsons (I’m sure there’s a stand that can flash-fry a buffalo in 42 seconds), and a source of deep-fried pleasure. My favourites are the green beans and the yams, but you can get almost any kind of meat, organ meat, a few vegetables (for the health-conscious), french fries, yams, and more than I can think of right now. These are very popular and just may be the most plentiful type of food stand in Taiwan, and not only in markets.

Deep fried soft-shelled crab was something I had heard about and had been looking forward to trying for some time. It’s entirely edible, including the shell. It’s quite tasty and the shell’s not really off-putting, at least in my opinion. I’d give the legs a pass, though, and stick to the body.

Deep fried mushrooms are next. Mmm, healthy, right? These were really, really good, and they’re sold with basil leaves, making them extra tasty.

Shrimp cakes round out our deep fried category. Normally found in Thai restaurants, I’ve seen a couple of stands now where they just slap some shrimp punk in between some dough and drop it in the deep fryer. As this is basically what a shrimp cake in a Thai restaurant is, they’re pretty awesome, especially with the Thai sweet-spicy sauce served with them. No picture, however, due to the fact that the stand was really busy and the cakes really good.

The boil anything stand is similar to the fry anything booth, except that your selections are boiled in broth rather than fried in oil. The choices are a little different – still lots of meat and organ meat, but there are also necks, heads, and feet, in addition to blood cake and seaweed.

Octopus balls were introduced to me by my first manager here and are one of my favourite snacks, though I never seem to be around them when I want them. They’re actually a tiny bit of octopus in a big ball of dough, fried up and garnished with mayo, wasabi, and dried fish flakes. Trust me, they’re awesome, though the fish flakes can be smelled ten paces away – they’re really strong.

Everything balls are like octopus balls, except that they have everything in them. So it seems, anyway. Corn niblets, ham, octopus, squid, and some kind of fish or scallop are what I remember, and I’m sure there’s more, plus the dough that’s used to cement them all together. They’re so big that you only get two per order (as opposed to six octopus balls), topped with your choice of toppings: there were two types of brown sauce (not sure what they were), wasabi, mayo, and fish flakes. Filling, to say the least.

Fried quail egg balls were pretty tasty, especially if you love eggs. I like watching the vendor crack the wee eggs into the frying contraption – they’re pretty fast, though I suppose you have to be to stop anything from burning. And they’re served on a stick – lovely.

Dumplings are a necessary part of any night market, and these small ones were freshly made, cute, and delicious with a splash of soy sauce.

Green onion pancakes are my oldest favourite in Taiwan, so naturally I was elated when Christine learned how to make them. Fried up on a large round grill and served with a spicy sauce and a sweet sauce, they’re an awesome late afternoon snack when you’re in a hurry and hungry.

Stinky tofu is the subject of much derision in Taiwan, often even by the Taiwanese. The reason? Just look at the name. It smells, some say, like an open sewer. Some compare it to a stable, while others…I think you get the drift. It’s not the most pleasant thing you could smell (though there is a saying that says it smells like hell and tastes like heaven), and most foreigners avoid it like the plague. We tried it the first time we were in Taiwan, right before we left, and while it wasn’t heaven in my mouth, I found it much better than I thought I would, especially with the delicious pickled veggies served with it. This time around, I enjoyed it even more – it’s still not my favourite kind of tofu in the world, but I’d eat it again.

Barbequed anything. Well, pretty much anything. This was one of my favourites at the market. You take a basket, choose whatever meat (or vegetables) on a stick you want, and hand it to the guy behind the counter for cooking over coals. Along with the usual selection of organs and bits of meat, squid, and green beans, there were skewers of bacon with green onion and green pepper. This was amazingly good, especially with the sauce that is brushed on it after it’s finished cooking. This stand was visited on both visits to the night market.

I’m seriously going to miss night markets and their wide selection of deliciousness. In addition to what I’ve talked about here, there are sit down places serving hot pot, noodles, even the gravy-beef-egg combo we know so lovingly as Heart Attack Platter. This variety of deliciousness endears Taiwan to me, and always will.

papoosas

Christine’s old Spanish teacher invited us out for a Salvadorean homemade dinner – papoosas! They’re made with a special white corn flour mix from El Salvador – you just add water – and then stuffed with whatever you want: chicken, pork, shrimp, cheese, beans, anything (oh, another stuffed food item!) Fry them up and then serve them with a tomato sauce and a salad of veggies in vinegar and you’ve got a snack/meal that can be found anywhere in El Salvador. Mmmm, makes me want to visit there and try all of these. We tried making them ourselves: forming the cup, stuffing it, then sealing it. Chris fared much better than I did; everyone could tell which ones were mine.

dragon beard candy, mountain tea, and noooooodles

This was something new that we discovered right at the end of our time in Taiwan. We visited Meinong to pick up some paper umbrellas. The white sugar is made in a machine like the one used to make cotton candy. It’s spun around a centre of either peanut or black sesame and is actually a little stringy – it’s hard to take a single bite and not have the whole thing kind of pull apart. They’re really, really good and it’s too bad they’re only available in this tiny little town.

After we bought our umbrellas and ate our candy, we went to a tea house that specialized in a certain kind of tea made here. They even gave you the chance to make it yourself. You start with a mortar containing peanuts, sesame seeds, puffed rice, and other grains, and you try to grind it into dust with a pestle. This takes a long time, though there is a technique to help make it seem like less.

When you’re about 2/3 of the way there, they come over and add pulverized green tea and some sweet, tart berries, which I’ve seen before but don’t know the name of, and you continue crushing and mixing until everything’s all together. Then you can take some mix in your cup and add some hot water and ta-da! Delicious mountain green tea. It really is tasty, and I should know – I had about 15 cups of the stuff, soldiering on to finish it after the women were done. It was awesome.

Lastly, we enjoyed some local handmade noodles. Much better than store-bought, but I never found out what made these special. Either way, they were a great way to top off a gourmet, aesthecially-pleasing day in the mountains.

i have to go to the toilet (restaurant)

Only in Taiwan! This was one of our favourite “look at this!” restaurants in Kaohsiung. We had visited this on our first time here in Taiwan and revisited it this time around again. The food is OK, but the real fun is the fact that everything is bathroom related. Ice cream that looks like poo, main courses served in small toilets, and drinks brought to you in a take-home urinal container. It’s a spillover from Japanese culture – I’m told that the word in Japansese for poo sounds like the word for good luck. ???

Anyway, this treasure is kinda gross, but it’s very Taiwanese. Even the decor reflects the theme: the seats are toilets, the tables are bathtubs with acrylic glass on them, and there used to be a stick-your-head-in-the-head-place photo of a boy taking a poo. They also sell poo-themed candies, keychains, utensils – all sorts of fun stuff to send to your friends or enjoy in your own home.

taiwanese fruit unite!

Alright, it’s the last fruit update from Taiwan. *Sigh* I’m going to miss the fruit here, both the familiar and the strange, as well as the easy access to fruit. Fruit stands on the corner are fantastic, I have to say, not to mention convenient. Well, on to the fruit.

First up, the custard apple ‘family’. Custard apples look like a big green pinecone, at least to me. They are full of delicious custard-like flesh and inedible black seeds that you get at by peeling the green sections off one by one. Eventually you can just scoop the delicious innards out. It’s a slow eat, due to the seeds, but the taste of custard is delicious. It has the consistency of a ripe to overripe banana, or maybe a really squishy, beat-up apple – soft, but with underlying firmness.

There’s also the pineapple-custard apple, a crossbreed which we only saw right before we left Taiwan. I think a friend called them Buddha fruit once. They’re a cross-breed and are close to custard apples (obviously), but with fewer seeds, firmer flesh, and a sweeter taste. I quite enjoyed them and was sad that this was probably a once-in-a-lifetime taste. Oh well, once is better than never!

Staying on a green streak, next up are jujubes. I don’t know the Chinese, or even if this is the ‘proper’ name for this fruit, but that’s what I’ve heard it called in English the whole time I’ve been here, so I’ll stick with it. This fruit is like a small, tart apple – very crisp and juicy, with a pit in the middle. They’re great for traveling around with – no worries about bruising, tasty, and cheap.

Changing over to red, but staying with fruit that was new to me in Taiwan, here we have wax apples. While jujubes might have the consistency of an apple, wax apples, surprisingly, do not. I think the name comes more from their shape and colour, but that’s where the similarities end. Wax apples have the consistency of watermelon – rather porous, but not as juicy. They’re crunchy, but more crunchy like that fresh-cut watermelon, rather than crunchy like an apple. They’re terrific, just as long as you get that idea of apples out of your head. There’s a little twist to the taste, but it’s hard for me to describe. I guess you’ll just have to try it yourself, sorry!

We’ve discovered a couple of different types of melon while here – the red cantaloupe, as it’s called in Chinese, and the meinong gua (meinong melon), which as far as I know has no English name other than the one I just gave it (Meinong is a town outside of Kaohsiung, but I have no idea if the two are connected). The red cantaloupe was quite tasty, definitely looking more reddish than a normal cantaloupe, but tasting pretty much the same.

The meinong melon is yellow on the outside and white on the inside and has a taste closer to a honeydew, but with much firmer flesh – it’s almost crunchy. I quite enjoyed both, but the meinong melon wins out in my estimation here (Chris isn’t a big melon fan in the first place).

Chinese New Year has come and gone. Oranges are a huge symbol for the holiday, representing wealth, I believe. This year, we saw giant oranges for sale and just had to pick one up. They were almost as big as your head and looked especially huge sitting next to the regular oranges and the kumquats. When we peeled it, however, we found that it was mostly peel and the fruit wasn’t terribly great. Go figure. Ah well, it was worth the experience.

Lastly, I have to give a shout-out to candied fruit. You see it all over, anyplace there is a gathering of people. Usually you find candied strawberries and cherry tomatoes, but there’s also a dark fruit (not pictured here) that I haven’t figured out yet. Figs? Sometimes they stuff it in the tomatoes as well. It’s all covered with a delicious red candied topping – no candied apples here, but candied strawberries more than make up for that fact for me!

And that’s it for fruit in Taiwan. Goodbye, my tropical sweets!

blech

I didn’t try it, sorry. Instead, I sent it as a present to someone who may (or may not) appreciate it more. Still, ew.

longyen & durian

I haven’t talked about fruit for a while, so here’s an update on that front. First, we’ll talk about the more pleasant of the fruits today, longyen. These grow on trees and come into season in the late summer and fall. There are orchards of longyen out in the country with trees as far as you can see – a friend told me about going out to a student’s grandparents’ farm and being given a bag and told to pick as much as they wanted to take home. When they’re in season, they’re not only found in stores, but people have truckfuls of them – they just park on the side of the road somewhere, open up their truck, put up a sign, and start selling longyen.

The ‘shell’ is peeled off in little bits, as it’s usually a little hard, but the flesh inside is sweet and delicate and light. It doesn’t have a strong flavour, but it’s very refreshing in the late summer heat. There’s a pit in the middle which is tossed afterwards, making for a fair amount of effort for a little fruit. It’s worth it, though.

Durian is one of the most polemic fruits ever. Most people end up on the ‘hate it’ side of this debate. The durian, unlike the longyen, has a very strong taste and smell. Many people compare the smell to that of rotting flesh. It certainly is strong and has that same tang, but I wouldn’t say it smells like something dead. In fact, once I got used to it, it smelled to me like the spices used in turkey stuffing – rosemary, sage, marjoram, those kinds of smells. Like a spicy-sweet smell. It does expand to fill the space, however – when I bought some to try it out, we had to keep it in a bag in a plastic container so the smell didn’t fill the fridge and smack us in the face when we opened it. Even so, when I opened the container in the kitchen, Christine complained about it from the living room.

Biting into a durian is usually the limit for those who overcome the smell. It’s what turned me off the first time I tried it years ago in Thailand – I said then that if it had just been the smell or the texture, I could take it, but both at the same time was too much. The first bite was close, but after that it was almost a perverse kind of pleasure. It has a custard-like feeling to it, like pudding that has been sitting out and developed a skin on the top. It’s a bit like a mushy banana, but not quite the same. The taste is also kind of custard-like, though it’s hard to pull a taste out independently, with that smell wafting up the entire time. I felt both an enjoyable feeling and a repulsed feeling eating this – pleasure and putrid. It’s difficult to describe the feeling of both at the same time, having something in your mouth that is both sublime and that makes you feel like you might be sick. I ate most of one piece and that was about my limit.

I think I’d try durian again, but I don’t think I could make it a regular thing. First, I’d be kicked out of the house (there’s a reason that there’s a fine in Singapore for even bringing one on the bus), and second, it seems too much of everything for me to comfortably enjoy – too much smell, too much texture, too much taste. Still, I’m glad I gave it a second chance.