Hualien Fare

Hualien City, Taiwan 

So the train after lunch at Mr. Brown’s coffee shop in Taipei, brought us to Hualien. Nice city / township, very small and quiet unlike Taipei.

It was dinnertime when we arrived, so we had a walk around the night markets to look for dinner. Stopped by a little restaurant whose name I’ve forgotten, and had regular Taiwanese food. They were advertising that they make their own noodles so we tried that.

To start I got us some century eggs. I love this shit, as you can tell from here. Apparently they are good anywhere around the world.

I had the seafood soup noodle. Not much seafood here, just a few squid rings and I don’t remember what else. Only so-so.

 

My friend had stir-fried vegetables with kimchi sauce on rice, I don’t know how that went. 

 

Some home-made noodle slices here in kimchi sauce, stir-fried as well. They’re probably not what you’d call noodles, just dough that’s cut into trapezoid slices. But this was good.

Then some stir-fried beef and vegetables to share, these were very flavourful as you can tell from the thick sauce. A tad too salty to be had alone but we all had noodle/rice so that’s fine. Not bad, I was satisfied.

Continuing on we had some dessert but I only have this one pic of hot Tau Fu Fa with peanuts. My friend had the other one, a black herbal drink that I didn’t try, and since it’s just a cup of black liquid I decided not to take any photos either.

While they were buying dessert I went across the street to the convenience store, Family Mart if I’m not wrong, to buy me some of my kinda dessert, the local brews. This was the only one left by the time we got back to the dorm. Seen here posing in front of the Laphroaig which I picked up at the airport on my way into Taiwan.

I am too lazy to go thru all my old posts to check if I mentioned this, but if not, another thing about Taiwan, alcohol there is so effin cheap, so cheap I want to move there. I’m serious too. I was totally entertaining that thought each time I step out of the 711 or bottle shop with a new purchase. This can? It’s 500ml, that’s a pint, and only $1.30.

DAAAAAAAAAAyyyyyyyymmmnnnnnnnnnnnnn……

A Taipei Morning

Soya Bean King & Mr. Brown Coffee, Taipei, Taiwan

We walked around that morning and found "Soya Bean King”, so soya bean (or soy bean as it is known in the US) milk it was for breakfast, accompanied by vegetarian bun, glutinous rice and peanut paste soup and yau char kuey / yu tiao, which literally translates to “oil stick” and there couldn’t be a more accurate name for it. I’m guessing it to be about $1.50 per person, keyword is guess.

Soy bean was nice and smooth, not too sweet. Pretty good. But then we have that here in Malaysia so it’s nothing to write home about.

Amazingly enough the vegetarian bun was also oily as all hell.  So in Taiwan it’s deep fried everything including breakfast. It think they first stir fry the vegetables in a few cups of oil before they wrap it in dough and make it, yet the skin is so oily it feels like they dunked the bun in a bowl of oil before baking. Maybe that IS what they do…. /shrug.

The glutinous rice and peanut soup thingy is actually a dessert and the version we have in Malaysia is without glutinous rice. It’s normally very buttery, so making it taste almost like peanut butter, but warm and thick like cream based soup. The glutinous rice in this version made it much less sweeter, which would work for some other people but I kinda prefer the stronger tasting no-rice version.

Around lunchtime we were gonna take a train to Hualien and with a 20kg bag each we had limited choices as to where to walk to, so the first (and only) place we could eat along the way to the train station was Mr. Brown, a coffee chain in Taiwan, so Taiwanese Starbucks. I’ll firstly get this out of the way, the Americano was only average. As for the food…

It was average too. I don’t remember the price but I do remember it was not cheap by any standards. Coming in sets, I had cheese baked fried rice and my friends had a mini pizza and roast chicken with rice. It all came with tomato soup each, which was probably canned. My cheese baked fried rice was not the greatest, I think I’ve had better in Malaysia. It’s apparently a Hongkee invention, baking fried rice topped with cheese and tomato or cream pasta sauce, sometimes with a piece of chicken, beef or fish fillet in between. My friend said the mini pizza was rubbish, and considering that it looks like oven baked vomit topped with egg, I’ll say he’s being kind. The roast chicken guy had nothing to say about his meal so that’s that. Then it was off to Hualien for better food, more about that in the next post.

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?