Thousand-year old egg, anyone?

I have one mission in life: to convince everyone I know that Chinese food does NOT consist of sweet and sour pork, orange chicken, or a medley of meat and veggies immersed in a sea of corn-starch thickened goop. I guess I can sort of understand the appeal of Americanized Chinese food, sort of like how you sometimes crave MickeyD's egg mcmuffins even though you know its not so good. Of course bringing thousand year-old egg into the picture doesn't help.

We had a proper Chinese/Taiwanese meal, legitimized by three Taiwanese guests fresh off the plane plus too-legit-to-quit pork belly A-chen and my half-claim-to-Taiwanese self. That makes for 4.5 of us right? We started off with pickled radishes, thousand year old egg and tofu, and green onion pancakes. I don't think many people are aware of Chinese cold dishes but they are a norm in any Chinese household. A made her famed hong shau rou, a recipe she snatched from her pops. The pork tender, the sauce addictingly sweet and all in all "salty as fuck" (as Allison likes to put it)-- it is delicious on top of rice. The rice, should be noted, is incredibly important--short grain and a tad sticky-- as the sauce should cling to the rice (like white on rice). I say this because I messed up the rice and bad rice is not acceptable nor salvageable!

Also on the menu included a vegetarian dish of bean curd, shiitake mushrooms, bamboo shoots, and green peas; sauteed Taiwanese spinach with garlic and ginger; shrimp sauteed in a shitload of olive oil and butter; a cold noodle dressed in sesame oil, black vinegar, soy sauce and hot chili garlic sauce topped with canned tuna/salmon/sardines (really, we had a choice of all three and it was surprisingly good); and lastly, E contributed a Korean-Chinese dish, Kimchi fried rice. I'm missing some pictures but I was too eager to eat...sorry!

Pickled Radishes

Pi dan dou fu (thousand year old egg and tofu topped with scallions, soy sauce paste, rice vinegar and sesame oil)

Cong You Bing (scallion pancake)

Hong Shau Rou pork belly (the cut normally used for bacon) braised in soy sauce, shaoxing wine, and spiced with whole star anise

Sauteed Taiwanese Spinach

Kimchi Fried Rice (with tofu) Sorry for the myspace-like picture

Cheap-Ass Lunches in Taiwan

One of the best things about Asia is the abundance of restaurants and vendors serving tasty, cheap-ass food. These places are especially good to hit up for lunch because they serve the food quickly and earnestly, wasting no time on social pleasantries or the rattling-off of daily specials. Usually, each vendor specializes in dishes focusing around a main ingredient (i.e. beef noodle soup, roasted duck, etc). If only more restaurants with the same business plan existed for us here in the US.

From the wet market:

Ba wan: kind of like a savory mochi filled with ground pork, ginger, mushrooms, and topped with gravy

From a noodle soup place:
Beef noodle soup with tendon. The noodles were handmade and thus had marvelous toothfeel, the Taiwanese word for which is "kiu."


From a pork restaurant:


Top to bottom: homemade Chinese sausage (xiang chang); stewed ground pork (kou rou); pork chop and rice with pickled greens (pai gu fan)


From a duck vendor:

Top to bottom: duck soup with Chinese herbs; sauteed duck intestines with bean sprouts and scallion

Taiwanese Breakfast

We should never ignore the breakfasts of great food cultures. Breakfast usually consists of simple, starchy, easy to digest items and can be an excellent look into what a culture considers "comfort foods," things best eaten when suffering from heartbreak, rejection, fever, hangover (all part of a consistent state of being in your early 20s).

Breakfast is kind of a big deal in Taiwan. From my childhood visits to Taipei, I have wonderful memories of mornings walking down to the breakfast shop next to my grandmother's apartment to fill up a tin can with sweet, steaming hot soymilk and carrying it back with a plastic bag full of greasy delights to be enjoyed at the kitchen table. So, during my recent return to the motherland after more than 10 years, I was insistent on eating authentic Taiwanese breakfast every goddamned day.

The most popular breakfast items in Taiwan are dou jiang (soymilk), and a number of savory starchy items: you tiao (fried dough sticks: light, crispy, and savory, can be dipped into the soymilk), shao bing you tiao (you tiao wrapped in thin, flaky sesame bread), fan tuan (glutinous rice stuffed with you tiao, pork sung, and minced pickles), dan bing (egg pancake), luo buo gao (savory daikon cake, usually includes some ground pork for additional flavor), and man tou/ hua juan (steamed buns in various shapes and sizes).

Top left, clockwise: dan bing, shao bing you tiao, fan tuan

The most important item is the soymilk, which can be sweet or savory. The sweet version is smooth and creamy, and can be enjoyed hot (served in a bowl with a spoon), or cold (out of a cup with a straw). The savory version is always served hot, curdled with vinegar, and includes minced pickles and chopped you tiao.

Savory soymilk

I'm not sure if this stuff is so irresistable to me because of my partial Taiwanese roots, but I'm pretty sure it's just because it's damn good.

More Taiwan posts to come...

Korean Chinese Cuisine

These days I have been nostalgic for Korean Chinese cuisine. Whassat', you ask? The origins of Korean Chinese food trace back to the port city of Incheon, South Korea, where the country's ethnic Chinese lived. They used local Korean ingredients in the tried-and-true recipes of their motherland. This stuff is so good. Growing up near L.A., I used to eat it all the time and get belly-burstingly full. My sister and I would touch the tops of our torsos and exclaim, "I'm full up to here!" There are a few elements of Korean Chinese cuisine that bring it all together in a special and delicious way, and I find restaurants like this missing in Sucker Free City.


1. Side dishes

• (A.) Raw onions served in bite-size pieces. It's an acquired taste. Cover with vinegar and dip in:
  
• (B.) Black bean sauce
  
• (C.) Dakwong aka danmuji aka pickled daikon radish


• (D.) Kimchi. I'm not sure if it's a different type of kimchi, but it's different -- not as fermented as the variety usually served in Korean restaurants, milder and saltier

2. Tangsuyuk (a "Koreanized" version of sweet and sour pork, or beef, or chicken). This ain't like the sweet and sour pork you order at House of Hunan, buddy. The crispy, battered meat strips are really crispy, and the meat is excessively chewy. It's served with vegetables in a thick, sweet, vinegary sauce.

When I was little, servers would often bring out steamed buns at this point. We'd grab those steaming hot, sweet rolls and tear it apart to dip pieces of it into the tangsuyuk sauce, and any other sauce. Maybe it's a kid thing. Or maybe it's an adult thing, suppressing the urge to lick up every single drop of the sweet, sour, spicy tangsuyuk sauce.

3. Ggampoong seh-oo (sweet and sour shrimp, but sweeter and spicier). I can't even find a picture of this but it's good. Also served in an irresistable sauce.

4. Jjampong - ohmygod! Wheat flour noodles in a spicy, chili oil soup, swimming in a bowl with seafood. This stuff is so good. It will make you sweat and cry. It will clear out your sinus problems, swimmers ear, allergies, and cancer.




5. Jjajangmyun (aka zjja-jjiang-mIEN! in Mandarin) - noodles in a sweet black bean paste, sliced cucumber on top mandatory. I don't know why we'd order this toward the end of the meal.



6. Obligatory dessert served gratis. 'Cause free stuff (aka suh-bis-uh aka "service" aka the exchange of favors, gifts, and commodities in a fluid, communal understanding) is the Korean way. Usually it would be glazed sweet potato or glazed banana slices. And fortune cookies.





There's something very down-to-earth and even working class about this food. Can't you just imagine the Chinese and Korean workers sitting cross-legged with one leg folded upwards, hovering around steaming bowls of jjampong while the ship bells rang in the Incheon harbor?

Damn, I'm hungry.