Aaron and I decided two years ago (I think) to take a trip to Taiwan where he served his mission from 2000-2002. That's 25 years ago, people! So we planned and saved and made it happen. And it was one of the highlights of our existence as a family so far. I'm going to report on it but not chronologically. I'm going to report by topic. This post's topic is Taiwan's amazing food.
Food is everywhere in Taiwan because people are everywhere in Taiwan and people tend to get hungry at regular intervals.
Food was honestly one of the main reasons Aaron wanted to go back. He would regale us with descriptions of the potstickers and the thick, sweet sauce from Si Hai You Long, his favorite restaurant as a missionary. For the last eighteen years of our marriage, we have been on a search for the sauce. No Asian market or restaurant quite knew what he was referring to, even a restaurant here in Austin run by a Taiwanese family.
So our first meal in Taiwan, once we reached our homebase apartment in Xin Dian, was potstickers with sweet, garlicky, thick Taiwanese soy sauce.
Scotty and Aaron repeated this meal at least weekly during our trip. Annie and I branched out a little more often or just didn't always have the stomach space for it. Ah, stomach space. An unfortunate constraint.
We arrived in Taiwan right around a holiday, Zhong Qiu Jie, Mid-Autumn Festival. The tradition for this holiday is to eat mooncakes and pomelos, to barbecue outside with family and friends, and to gaze at the moon. Oh, and you're supposed to wear the peel of the pomelo on your head. We're not quite sure if we were doing it right. But we were doing it enthusiastically.
But this trip began a lifelong love affair with pomelos! Why don't I see pomelos at HEB or whatever? They are the best! They are like a non-wet, non-sour, white-fleshed grapefruit. Same texture, but they don't get juice all over your hands. You peel them like a grapefruit--have to remove all of the peel and all of the pulp and skin. But they are so light and refreshing with just the right amount of sweetness. They were in season, and therefore cheap and plentiful, and we ate our weight in them multiple times over. I had never had one before in my life before this. Have you? Thankfully, they are available at the Asian stores, so we can still get our fix.
We changed up our technique from the little half-pomelo hat to the half-pomelo toupee/sea creature. This was based on glimpsing a local. Are you we doing it right??
As for the Mid-Autumn Festival Mooncakes...we bought a sampling:
Don't eat black things--this is one of my life philosophies, and I'm sticking to it. Only one of these would I want to eat again. It was the square one which had a creamy, liquidy center. The other two non-black ones were okay but filled with beans. Why are beans considered a dessert? I still don't know. The black one was from 7 Eleven, and it tasted the way it looked. Except the inside was purple. The outside was black sesame--also not a dessert, imho. So...mooncakes weren't our favorite. But it was fun to give them a try. And I bet we could learn to enjoy them.
We also saw several other people barbecuing but did not barbecue ourselves. Nobody busted out huge, American style grills. They just had a little metal bucket of charcoal with a grate stuck over the top. Our favorite was a group of loud and friendly folks camped on the doorstep of a 7-Eleven. More about 7-Eleven later.
More about 7-Eleven now!
You might wonder if Taiwan is an independent country. Do they run themselves, or are they part of China, you may have asked yourself. It's a question that has been asked by many over the years--who is in charge of Taiwan? I have the answer for you. It's 7-Eleven!
7-Eleven runs Taiwan!
You can't go a hundred feet without seeing a 7-Eleven. You might feel lost but you won't be lost because there's a 7-Eleven. You can do anything from a 7-Eleven. We accidentally took our room key from a homestay in Yuli. The owner told us not to mail it back but to take it to 7-Eleven. Because they have a system for getting packages from one 7-Eleven to another basically anywhere on the island. And when all the restaurants close at 7:00 pm in Yuli, you can get a meal at 7-Eleven. And it's not gross and doesn't taste or smell like cigarettes. When it's hot outside, just step into a refreshing 7-Eleven. You can top up your EZ card (what you use to ride the MRT/subway) at 7-Eleven. You can print off train tickets at 7-Eleven. You can use an ATM at 7-Eleven. You can find a toilet at 7-Eleven. You can get underwear and rain gear and tampons there. And the male cashier might try to tell you about a BOGO deal on the tampons, but you don't understand because your Chinese isn't so good, so he
goes to the shelf himself and gets you that second box of free tampons. Is that amazing or what? You could probably vote there! And give birth there! And depose a dictator there! 7-Eleven is where it's at!
A 7-Eleven Poncho (especially made for use while riding a scooter)
7-Eleven is very useful and very delicious. Pineapple Bread and Bread with "Milky Filling" were items we pretty much couldn't enter a 7-Eleven without buying. We loved their yogurt, yogurt drinks, and pre-packaged pastries. And don't even get us started on the chocolate sandwiches. We raided every 7-Eleven in a mile radius to fill up our suitcase (and bike helmets) with these bad boys.
These drinks were actually from 7-Eleven's competitor, Family Mart. The mango/pomelo one was obviously the best. But I also kinda liked the Strawberry and Fungus. And they proudly put the word "fungus" on there like it wasn't a bad thing. I think it means mushroom. Anyway, wouldn't be a winner combination on the American market, but it was tasty.
There were interesting things we saw but didn't buy, too, like the 800 flavors of Lays chips. And every 7-Eleven I saw had a little crockpot-ish thing filled with peeled, hard-boiled eggs swimming in some sort of broth or tea. I never tried them because Word of Wisdom, but they were everywhere!
Did I mention that 7-Eleven is also open 24 hours a day? 很方便! (hen fang bian=so convenient!)
Next up: breakfast shops
As a missionary, Aaron didn't get to go out of the apartment for breakfast very often because they were doing personal study and showering and planning and such. He would often eat crushed up oatmeal cookies in milk. I'm surprised he bought the milk because it's kind of expensive in Taiwan, about 6 bucks for half a gallon. And if something has milk in it, they will proudly advertise that fact. Americans kind of take milk for a given.
Anyway, there's no need to eat oatmeal cookies for breakfast in Taiwan (but we still did because they were pretty good) because there are 8,000 breakfast shops steps away from your apartment building's front door.
Breakfast from a Taiwanese breakfast shop includes but is not limited to:
- Dan bing: If a crepe and an omelet had a baby, they'd name it Dan Bing. But there's usually no cheese and there are always green onions. Roll it up and slice it and put some Taiwanese sauce on it. So yummy!
- Mantou: Steamed, not baked--nothing is baked, yeast bun that is soft and pale and delicious. The brown and white swirly ones have brown sugar.
- Man tou jia dan: Man tou with an egg added to it. The egg almost always has a ton of green onions. You add yummy Taiwanese soy sauce to this sandwich and devour.
- Other types of bread that you can always add an egg to: a sesame flatbread, a sweetened sesame flatbread, a yeasted bread with, you guessed it, green onions.
- Han bao: A hamburger for breakfast! Only the meat is a very thin layer of pork, and there's not ketchup but instead this other delicious sauce. I have no idea what it is, but it's magical. And there are shredded cucumbers or zucchini and an egg. We had this one in HuaLian, and it sort of changed my life. Not all han baos are created equal.
- Dou jiang: Soy milk is the beverage of choice. It has a distinct flavor which I learned to like more and more. Annie loved it right away. Scotty thought he was allergic to it. You could get it cold or warm, sweetened or not. Also served at the potsticker restaurant. So, not just a breakfast thing.
- There were also three bakeries within a 3 minute walk from our house. We loved buying croissants and salt butter buns and all sorts of yummy things there. So I take it back that there were no baked things. They just weren't at the more traditional Taiwanese breakfast shops.
Do not judge the yumminess of this food from my bad photography skills and the terrible lighting over our dining table.
For the last two weeks of our trip, the kids ate breakfast every morning at seminary. The amazing Yang family hosted and fed 5-10 teenagers every weekday morning. The kids ate a wide variety of things and loved it all. Baozi (steamed bun filled with pork and veggies), pasta with pesto, broccoli, congee/porridge, tuna on toast, lettuce, han bao, fruit, and more.
I really like the variety of things available for breakfast. And I really liked that I didn't have to cook it!
We had the opportunity to eat with a few different Taiwanese families, which was so cool and quite different, of course, from eating in a restaurant. On our very first Sunday, Judy and Arthur invited our family for dinner. Judy also taught seminary--so she's the one who was feeding my kids every day for two weeks. I'll talk more about them in another post, but the food was so yummy and so plentiful. They probably had twenty different dishes on the table. Rice and noodles and chicken and beef with green peppers and broccoli and dragon fruit and tofu and bean sprouts and thousand-year egg, which looked really scary but tasted like a salty hard-boiled egg. There was also a passion fruit, lemonade, and Sprite, or something like that, and it was incredible. I only got one photo and it was mostly of the people, not the food, but there the food is behind us. Near the end of the meal, a huge bowl of curry appeared which had been forgotten in the kitchen. Oh, and we had cake with chocolate and cake with taro for dessert--bought from the store and very tasty but not too sweet.
This family also had their son's baptism on a Sunday while we were there. Everybody brought food to share afterward, except us weird Americans. They had all sorts of dishes here as well. Eating at Judy and Arthur's house felt like a potluck, only they had made all the food. So many different dishes!
We also had dinner with the Wang family, a family Aaron knew on his mission. I'll tell the whole story about that in a later post. But here is a photo of the food. We wrapped dumplings with them, and they boiled the dumplings. And then we had all these dishes and sauces and drinks and yummy things. One unique little dish I remember was slivered almonds with little tiny dried fish mixed in--not sure if it was sardines or something else.
And then we ate dinner at Nancy's house. She invited two sets of the missionaries and a sister about to leave on her mission and us. She gave us all sorts of fruit (guava, dragon fruit, wax apple) and fried chicken and the same beef and green pepper dish the Yangs had served us and fan qie chao dan and some ham/sausage stuff and fried cabbage and the absolute best curry (not in the photo) that I have ever eaten in my life. So yummy!
In Yuli, the more rural area we visited that Aaron served in as a missionary, we stayed at a Min Su/homestay. Turns out AirBnB isn't exactly legal in Taiwan. But we stayed at an AirBnB in Taipei. The legal version is a min su--basically a bed and breakfast where the hosts live on the property and pay all the appropriate taxes. The hosts for this place in Yuli were an older couple and their daughter Vicky. The mom, Mei, would make food for us every morning. And I think it took her about 3 hours. Once, again there were multiple dishes and so much yumminess and variety and fruit and vegetables. I don't know why vegetables are sort of banned for breakfast in the US unless it's in an omelet or a potato...which is a fake vegetable. It was here in Yuli that I first had water spinach (Kong Xin Cai) and dragon mustache greens (Long Xu Cai). Oh my goodness, I loved both SO much. I think by this point my body was starved for green things, but they were also prepared beautifully. Once I discovered vegetables in Taiwan, I was so happy. Aaron never talked about the amazing vegetables from his mission days!
To be continued...
