Food, Part One of Many

When people told me I'd be eating like it's my full-time job, I didn't quite believe them. Every culture has its culinary draws, right? Every new place has its own scrumptious concoctions, and every conscientious tourist assumes as a personal goal the responsibility of trying, evaluating, and probably photographing those dishes. I did it in England; I did it in Hungary. I did it in New York and St Louis. I'll do it in Boston.

But, oh, the food here. Even people who live here year-round--perhaps especially people who live here year-round--eat as if they might lose the ability any day now. Recently, we went out for a lovely meal at a Japanese place, and the food just kept coming. They started us off with a rather spectacular display of various sushi-quality fish, served on ice. After that, we had endless rounds of soup and noodles and fried things that I couldn't name in English, much less Chinese.

The crowning glory of our experience that night was the main course, served hot-pot style. In this style of dining, the waiter brings a massive ceramic pot of thinly-sliced (and uncooked!) meat and veggies to the table, along with a hot-plate. At the table, we put some water in the pot and cover it, letting it heat up with the hot-plate. Sooner than you'd think, the juices start to boil, cooking the food. Hot-pot (called shabu-shabu, like in Japan, where the sound mimics the swish-swish of the food as one stirs it) isn't an exact science, and it's done whenever we say it's done.

At that point, we dump in some noodles--give them a couple of minutes to cook--and then go at it. Hot-pot eating can be vicious: you've gotta get your chopsticks in there! For awhile, all I can hear is the clicking of chopsticks and the slurping of noodles as people grab meat, tofu, and veggies. To the left, you can see Linnea, David, and Jenny (and Kelly's arm) duking it out for some dinner. In Taiwan (and not so much Japan or the mainland, as best I can devise), the dipping sauce is a raw egg. I cracked my egg into my soy-sauce dish and swirled it around with my chopsticks, beating it to an even consistency. Dipping meat and veggies into it gives them a slippery-sweet coating, and the raw egg was much better than I expected it to be.

You can't go far here without noticing a couple of unique-to-Taiwan things everywhere. The first you'll notice because of its smell: stinky tofu stands are everywhere, marked by the smell of rotten food, summer garbage, or day-old manure. All three, actually. Tourists and locals alike flock to the stinky tofu stalls in night-markets; the only difference is that the tourists probably don't come back for seconds. I had my first stinky tofu experience last night: the fried tofu chunks were soft with crispy outsides, and were expertly prepared. The pickled veggies on top helped counteract some of the greasiness (and took away a little of the oh-my-god-this-is-fermented-and-weird impulse). Stinky tofu tastes better than it smells, though that doesn't say much. Ultimately, it's not bad. In eating it, I felt implicitly that something about it was just wrong. Like milk that's only a day or two past its expiration date or macaroni that you accidentally left boiling for twenty minutes instead of the six that it wanted, nothing about it is dangerous: it's just wrong, a little.

Fortunately, the other Taiwan night-market specialty is far more palatable in both taste and smell. The vendor piles very finely-shaved ice into a bowl and tops it with sweetened/condensed milk and something sweet. The result is better than the best shaved ice you've ever had. Last night, as a reward from our stinky-tofu adventurousness, we hit up an ice place. The one at the back has rice-mochi balls and red beans, and the one in the foreground has strawberries and mangoes. Despite the variety of these dishes, I have to admit that my favorite shaved-ice topping is just mango: mango and lots of it.

Anyway, that's a little taste of some of my best (and, well, stinkiest) culinary experiences while here. There's so much left to cover; given that I eat pretty much constantly, I have a lot more food stories to tell. Stay tuned!