Taiwan

Fun in Taiwan!

I was lucky enough to go to a conference in Taiwan at the start of March.  The best thing about it was that I only had to do a talk at a workshop before the conference started proper.  It’s one of the most relaxed conference I’ve ever been to!  Taiwan is known for their food – they tend to have small dishes but with many varieties.  The night markets are famous, and of course, I ventured into many of them :)

The above picture was taken at the Lantern Festival in Taipei.  There were wishing lanterns, where you write your wish on little cards, and then are strung up to the bottom of the lanterns.  They looked so pretty – I just had to take a picture of it.  One of the organisers saw that I was a little lost, so she took me to the festival and a nightmarket.  Thanks Angelina for the great hospitality!  I hope to repay you if you ever come to Australia :)  She didn’t mind me taking a million photos with my camera either ;)  It’s kinda embarrasing :P

Anyhow.  On towards the food.  I got taken to a smallish night market pretty close to the conference venue.  There were so many stalls lined up on both sides of the street – the picture below shows what they typically look like:

Almost all of the cooking part of each stall is of temporary construct.  It remindes me a little of hawker stalls in HK – but have literally moved the cart indoors.

The first thing I ate was…. Stinky Tofu~~!

I have not had this for SOOOO LOOOONNNNNGGGG.  We used to get these off the street in HK, but everytime I’ve been back, I somehow managed to get some ST.   The ST here is different from the ones in HK.  While they’re both deep fried, the Taiwanese version is topped with some pickled cabbage + carrots.  It’s a rather refreshing take on ST and loved it.  I must be said though, the stink factor was a little low for my liking…

Next up, some kind of hm… bread scroll.  The texture of these scrolls is like the outside pastry of “wife biscuits”.

It’s a flaky pastry – but has a different type of crumbly texture to puff pastry.  Possible because most Chinese pastry is made with lard rather than butter?  We had one with sesame and one with green tea.  We couldn’t eat it all, so I got saved it for breakfast the next day :)

With so much small eats, I managed to fit two more dishes in my fat belly: beef roll and pig’s blood cake.

The beef is probably something like a slow cooked beef shin (very tasty), which was cooled then thinly sliced.  It’s then wrapped in a flat bread like thing with cucumber and some sauce.  It was slightly sweet (I must admit, the Taiwanese food, while tasty, errs on the sweet side of things, even for savory dishes!).  I shared that with Angelin and her bf :)

The last bit was the pig’s blood cake.  Angelina reeeeeeeaally wanted me to give this a try.  Pig’s blood is something I’ve had eaten as a kid (pig red), that usually served with rice congee.  This cake was completely different beast.  It’s mixed with rice and steamed.  A serving was in a triangular shape.  It can be either as “plain” or with chili.  I got them to cut it in half.  The chilification was simply done by dunking the piece of cake inside some chili sauce.  Then, regardless of chilines, it’s diped in coriander, followed by some ground peanut. This was really quite heavy because of the rice.  I must say, I prefer the non-chili version, as you can taste the cake better.  And even though I don’t like coriander, it tasted good!  Oh my god, I might actually be liking this herb.  No way~!

After my serving of blood cake, I was ready to wave the white flag.  I also had to give a presentation the next day, so had to do some quick prep before bed!  So with that, we headed back home.  But I had so much fun :)

I’ve spent another week in Taiwan – so more food and glorious Taiwan pictures to come :)