Best Seafood Dinner

The monger keeps the eyes in so they'll see you through the week...har!

After the Jade tour, Memphis took us out to a local seafood restaurant. Because Kaohsiung is seated right on the Taiwan Strait it has very fresh seafood and the quality of ingredients showed in the meal. This meal was the best meal I have had on the trip. I love seafood and I’ve always wanted to visit the East Coast in the U.S. to get a taste of really fresh seafood but I had to travel to Taiwan to get the experience. Those Maryland crab cakes will have to wait their turn.

The monger keeps the eyes in so they’ll see you through the week. Har.

Crabs

A proverb on the back-room fridge

Sea cucumber. Imagine the looks on my fellow diners when I told them it wasn’t a vegetable. Of course I waited mid-mastication to reveal this to them.

Cold BBQ pork

Some tasty fish. Don’t know what it was but I know it was dynamite

Pork stir-fry. Some of the best stir-fry I have ever had…period.-

From top right: Fried squid (I had fourths), fried small fish, and fried scallops (also fourths)

Gingered greens

Memphis and a foreman. The foreman poured me a shot of 120 proof alcohol that smelled like window cleaner and went down like it too

Some of my classmates (From left): Ed, Pat, Arieanna, and Gannon

Beef Stew

Small, sweet crabs. No one else wanted any so I had two

Shrimp rolls and fried mussels

Professor Peng and Memphis Han

Our after dinner dessert we had down the street. That served five of us. Instead of Ice Cream, Taiwanese people prefer shaved milk ice with fruit and sugary syrup. Not too shabby.

Sushi Sushi!

If there was one reason I was excited to visit Asia it would be for the Sushi: perfectly cooked, vinegar-ed rice rolled up like a fine Cuban around a dried seaweed wrap and topped with seafood or vegetables. Like the dumpling, Sushi is a simple concept but a difficult one to master.

Fresh, raw filets of Tuna, Salmon, and Cuttlefish. This Sushi is known as "Sashimi."

Sushi is edible art that requires concentration and impeccably fresh fish. Some people even devote their entire lives to this delightful bite-full. If you have never experienced Sushi, you really need to do so and quickly. Just please do not eat any of the gas station Sushi. I don’t care if it comes free with the fill-up.

A conveyor belt is the best waitress. Fast, efficient, and doesn't turn me down when I ask for a phone number.

The Sushi restaurant I went to was in an underground portion of Taipei Main Train Station. This underground station is a bustle of activity with restaurants and shops everywhere you look. People are constantly coming and going and in need of a quick bite to eat before going home, to work, or to play. The Station certainly has its everyday food courts with quick stir-fry restaurants and even a Burger King but it also has candy stores, coffee shops (including Starbucks), shoe stores, and nicer sit- down restaurants. Whatever your pleasure is you can find it there. Now about that Sushi restaurant…

Fried shrimp Sushi. Finger lickin' good

Miso Soup: Fermented soybean paste just like mom used to make.

I sat at the “bar” area where I was able to watch the Sushi chef skillfully use her knife to carve the fish and vegetables and I even watched her pull out a propane torch in order to caramelize the tops of some of the Sushi. She then placed the Sushi on various colored plates depending on price ($45 for a purple plate, $55 for a yellow plate, etc… $1 U.S. = $29 New Taiwan Dollars). She then layed the plates on a conveyor belt that encircled the bar / kitchen area and diners selected the Sushi they would like to eat as it passed by. In this situation, much like gambling, your losses add up quickly. At first you think, “It’s only a couple of bucks” and then the plates start stacking up and you’ve eating your fair share of $20 worth of Sushi! Don’t get me wrong, it is still a bargain and I totally intend on doing it again but I could have easily spent another $10 in there.

I spent how much?!

Our 12 Course Meal

Taishan is a suburb outside of Taipei and was a manufacturing town for Mattel’s Barbie for 20 years from the 1960s-1980s. Mattel left Taishan because of cost concerns but Taishan is still a Barbie town. I will post more about our visit to the Mei-Ning workshop which is a Barbie clothing designer. This was the meal we had with several members of the Mei-Ning workshop.

As far as meal experiences go, this was definitely one of the best I’ve had. In Taiwan, as Professor Peng said, meals are served in courses and boy do they keep coming.

This menu wasn't for choosing, it was a gameplan.

There were some things we liked and some things we didn’t like as much. But overall, it was still a great meal.

Our gifts from the host…with beer

Seafood platter with Tuna and Salmon Sashimi and mussles. Our host is mixing the wasabe and soy sauce to create a paste to dip the fish in.

Awesome Tuna and Salmon Sashimi with sweet black beans.

Chicken, Pork, and thick soysauce

Sliced scallops with sweet mayonaise (I guess Hellman’s wasn’t available). The can is there to show where the seafood came from.

Shrimp Stir-fry

Fried Eel with glaze. For me, this was one of better dishes.

Serving the Eel

Beef Stew and Ox Intestines

Serving the Taiwanese beer

Ox intestines. There was white pepper that we dipped it in before we ate it. Everyone at my table was a good sport and ate one.

Cod with vegetables and sauce

Oyster mushrooms in my soup

Deep fried scallops in a sweet sauce served on a wrap. It was good!

Close-up of my deep-fried, sweet scallop wrap.

The number of empty beer bottles is proportionate to the chaos at that table.

Dumplings

Dumplings are a culinary mainstay in Taiwan and Asia. They belong to a basic group of food that also includes wontons, ravioli, and pierogi. A dumpling is simply a thin, elastic piece of dough that envelopes a savory or sweet filling and then the dumpling can be boiled, fried, or sauteed. It is a simple process but that does not mean it is easily perfected. These dumplings burst in one’s mouth and when done right they leave a void that very little else can fill. I have experienced two dumpling restaurants thus far: Din Tai Fung and a tiny, two floor dumpling restaurant in the heart of Taipei.

First is Din Tai Fun. Let me start off by saying that this was a great restaurant! Professor Peng considers this his “comfort food” whenever he visits Taiwan. It is a chain restaurant that started in Taipei and now has gone global. It has two branches in the United States; One is is Los Angeles and the other is in Seattle. It is known best for its steamed dumplings. The dumplings were little, fragile bitefulls of pork and sauce. We dipped them in a mixture of 1 part vinegar, 3 parts soy, and shredded ginger.

Making the Dumplings

Our Famous Taipei Din Tai Fung Dumplings!

The poor quality of the picture belies the tastiness of the dumplings

The second dumpling restaurant we visited I do not have a name for. I saw the name of it but I can’t for the life of me pronounce it. Can you?

Some of the best restaurants are off the main road

It seemed to be a mom and pop place. The kind of place you take a girl to on a first date in order to test the waters and see if she’s an adventurer like yourself. Everyone goes through a litany process when dating. My requirements are just a little different. Anyways…dumplings. At the restaurant, we met up with other students who took courses at UM Flint in the past or will be taking classes in the future. UM Flint has a sister university in Taipei that we will be visiting on Monday and the students we met tonight attended that sister college at one point or another.

The students who sat at our table! Left to right: Sandra, Jackie, DeeDee, and Pearl

At the restaurant we took our seats on the second floor. The food came up a dumbwaiter and was served onto our Lazy Susan. Why America hasn’t taken to these little wonders is beyond me. You’d never hear “Could you pass the beans, please?” again. Among the food was several types of dumplings which I thought were better than Din Tai Fung’s. Half of the dumplings were steamed and the other half were fried. The bread was wonderful (it resembled Indian Naan but with lots of green onions), the soup was good (hot and sour), and the iced tea was some of the best I ever had (it was a green tea base with Jasmine tea mixed in. It was not too sweet and not too bitter). Overall, it was great to talk to the Taiwanese college students and share some food with them.

The spread

No words can describe these dumplings

Food Court Pt. 1

Today we ate at an authentic Asian food court. Odd thing is, these food court restaurants don’t try to force samples down your throat like they do in the States. You know those Japanese restaurants I’m talking about? The ones right next to Sbarros? Yeah. Those ones. I don’t want your chicken, sir.

7 oclock-General Tso's Chicken; 11oclock-Green beans; High noon-Something dealing with flour? It was good; 2 oclock- Crispy Pickled Cucumber (not quite a pickle); 4 oclock-fried egg. The meal came with Rice with diced sweet potato, and oyster soup.

And all of this for under $5!

Oyster Soup. And so close to an 'R'-less month.

Food! Spicy Food!

We woke up this morning with sand in our eyes and a grumble in our stomachs so we headed down to the mess hall. It was a sleek operation complete with juice, toast, chaffing dishes, and spicy chicken. That’s right, chicken stir fry for breakfast. There was an array of condiments, none of which I could give you a proper name for. There was a black, pickle-like condiment I could only describe as a black olive / cornichon hybrid. Not quite my favorite but I was willing to give it a try. There was also a stringy substance that tasted of cherries and ginger and had the consistency of gummy worms. They also had your usual breakfast foods: scrambled eggs, muffins, fruit, and some of the blackest coffee I’ve ever tasted. Also, a European influence made it’s way onto the table: bologna!

Clockwise from the top (I'll give you my attempt at descriptions): Cherry-ginger, gummy stuff; Spicy, braised root veggie; Chicken stirfry; Buttery broccoli; Pineapple; Ginger something; and in the middle is plain ol' b*o*l*o*g*n*a. This is the type of meal that makes you grow hair in places it shouldn't be growing.

After Breakfast Snack: Fruit, sponge cake, and coffee strong enough to propel a small rocket.