Duck Everything from Shilin Night Market – $~0.60/stick

Taipei, Taiwan

More from the night market. This will be a short one. On the way out I had some deep fried sweet potato wedges.  It was a bit dry for my taste, which is surprising considering she dunked it in hot oil for well over 2 minutes to heat it up…

We walked farther down the street and found this guy selling all things duck. Another thing I noticed about Taiwan, they love their duck there. More than they do chicken. In fact most of the time the only chicken you find are the deep fried kind.

So when I say all things duck I mean it. Here you see an overview of the cart with your choices. Oh and another thing I noticed about Taiwan, they sell a LOT of their food on sticks/skewers. A lot. Taiwan must go thru forests worth of bamboo each year. Anyways, on the cart you have, from top-down left-right order, duck head & neck, duck neck, duck head, duck blood in squares of glutinous rice, tofu, duck feet. Next row: I dunno, duck blood in coagulated form, duck drumstick and gizzard, duck wing, duck tongue (pic), dunno what the black stuff is, then tofu. Final row: duck meat ball?, quail eggs, duck intestines I think, more balls of some sort, duck heart (pic), duck butt(pic) and finally 2 varieties of duck skin.

3rd thing about Taiwan – everrryythinggg is deep fried. So naturally anything you pick off this cart will most probably be dipped into  a pot of boiling oil. If not then it’ll be grilled. Last pic is Uncle taking out some duck tongue that he just deep fried for us. Duck tongue was amazing. It looked amazing. Like something out of Aliens. There isn’t much to eat as there isn’t much meat, but it was just fun to chew on it. There were boney bits that were quite hard to chew thru, it almost felt like the plasticky backbone you find in squid, but it’s not.

Actually all we had was the duck tongue. I’m not much of an ass person, you could say I don’t have the heart for it, so I just settled for some tongue action… geddit geddit? 3 weeks later we went back to look for Uncle but his stall was closed. Pity.

Beef Noodle Soup from Shilin Night Market - $~1.40

Shilin, Taipei, Taiwan

Happy 2010 everyone, just back from a 3 week long trip around Taiwan. Well, 3 weeks ago, but I only have time to post now.

I’ve taken over 100 shots of the stuff I ate there, so I’ll probably be posting for weeks to come. I also probably won’t be as descriptive as before, and instead go ahead with mostly photos and accompanying captions. Since I don’t speak a word of Mandarin I should say now that I’ll be making up the names for most of the dishes. Also, I never took note of how much each and every dish were so guesstimates are all you’re gonna get. You’re welcome. Also, all the shots were taken using only a point and shoot. It may be a spectacular camera my S90, but with little to no photographic forethought before each shot, it can only do so much, so excuse the quality and lack of artistic flare.

We start off at Shilin Night Market, one of the more famous night markets in Taiwan. We went there on our very first night in Taiwan, but ended up there on our final night in Taiwan as well so expect to see more from this place much later on.

Here we have Beef Noodle Soup, from one of the many noodle stalls within the night market. More specifically, it’s beef chunks, tripe and stomach. You get to pick what type of noodle you want, for example egg noodles, rice noodles, vermicelli, etc. Nothing incredibly special about this. The price is between $1-1.40.

This is what my friend ate, rice with beef stew. Pretty unappetizing IMO. The beef stew was not all meat, half of it was fat. It’s not much of a complete meal, probably more of a snack or space filler or a deal closer and as such only costs about $0.60 maybe? I noticed it was really glistening with oil so I went to look for where this was prepared, and found the source. This is what the “stew” looks like. Ugh.. however I discover later that it’s sold all over Taiwan, so it must be a well known Taiwanese dish, and now I kinda regret not trying it.

Since I took a few more shots that night, I’ll include them in this post. It’s the only time you’ll see SLR shots of food, as it was the first day and I was excited enough to want to shoot everything  with the SLR.

The drink was a letdown, I think it’s supposed to be primarily kumquat juice with a bit of herbal tea and jelly. Well I only tasted the kumquat which is fine, but the jelly had no taste at all, yet it is served in pretty big bite-sized chunks. So when I was done with the drink I had about over a quarter cup of jelly with absolutely no taste. Probably cost me around $0.30 - $0.60.

The next you see someone frying vegetables and Ho Chien, or omelette with oysters which I believe is Hokkien. I never sampled it in Taiwan, cos from the many times I’ve seen   it cooked, I wasn’t really in the mood to. One thing I noticed about Taiwanese cooking, it’s oily as hell. I mean ridiculously oily. Like 7 layers of paper towel under this dish and it’d still soak right thru oily. But anyways we get this dish here in Malaysia so I’ll do a follow up one day.

Finally the last pic shows someone grilling Taiwanese pork sausages. These are available EVERYWHERE but I only ate this later on in the trip and not here where I took the pic, so I’ll post about it later.

The night isn’t even over yet, after this we walked on and found some more stuff to eat, but I’ll talk about that in another post.

See, told you I’d keep it short didn’t I?

Dolsot Bibim Bap from So Gong Dong Tofu House - $9.00??

3307 West Bryn Mawr Avenue, Chicago, IL - (773)539-8377

I think Dolsot Bibim Bap loosely translates to something like "hot stone bowl of mixed rice." You can also order a plain Bibim Bap which is the same thing but doesn't come in the heated stone bowl.

If you look at the picture closely, you can see steam coming off the rice. The stone bowl is piping hot when it arrives and you can hear the rice cackling from the heat. Eventually, this will sort of burn the rice slightly and add a slightly crispy texture to the dish.

The little dish on the left is chili paste and is usually added into the rice bowl and you mix around all the contents within the bowl which included a raw egg (that cooks from the heat of the bowl), lettuce, beef, bean sprouts and some other vegetables I can't seem to recall right now.

The other little plates are what is called banchan. Banchan is basically a collection of side dishes that come with your meal. This is standard for most Korean entrees, I believe. In our case, we received what looks like four varieties of kimchi, a fish, and some sesame oil concoction. Suffice it to say, this was a pretty crappy banchan relative to other Korean places I've been to (I'm used to more variety than just different kinds of kimchi).

As for the dish itself, it was good, but not great. I liked the touch of crispiness from the rice burning against the stone bowl but the flavor wasn't doing anything for me. Maybe I was expecting too much because my sister prepared me by saying it's her favorite Korean dish, but even she wasn't awed by its taste. Either way, I wasn't impressed enough to make a return trip to this restaurant.