I’m In Taiwan Stuffing Myself Again

^^^ Fantastica, FACT.

I’ve been on the island for around abouts 3 days now and already have ate 4234 times my body weight in various foods.

First night my girlfriend (GF) brought back some of these things on a stick:

Chicken hearts, fairly tasteless and chewy “usually they’re better than this” she tells me.

And then this rice cake ‘ting:

As I was chewing it saying to myself “this is really chewy”, GF be all like “it’s been soaked in pigs blood”. A rice black pudding then! Rice cake black pudding was totally decent, although I’m not sure you could stick it in a full Scottish breakfast without someone saying “c’moan man, that’s nae a pure black puddin; it’s a fucken rice crispy hingby fae fucken Tai-fucken-wan ye fucken chancer!”

Speaking of breakfast, we had bamboo and mayonnaise for desert:

Which was OK but maybe would have worked better with some maple syrup or yoghurt.

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In Taiwan you’ll get invited out for meals and they’re always ALWAYS totally excessive. On the second night me and GF went to a very busy ‘choose your own big fish from a tank and we’ll cook it X different ways for you’ restaurant near Shimen reservoir.

And for our first course we had the rare Taiwanese delicacy of Martell Cordon Bleu cognac. Erm…

And then I started trying to document dishes as they came to the table, one by one:

Deep fried fish tail with spring onions, chilli and teriyaki sauce. A bit boney but tasty.

Melon with oyster (right), sea cucumber with pork and vegetables. Former was kinda a slimy and tasted a bit like the ocean (cliche!); and the latter I dunno, but never, ever, would have guessed pesky sea cucumber.

I soon realised trying to take individual shots of everything was utterly pointless as food kept piling up, so in the end I just took a group photo, thusly:

Bottom, deep fried fish tail, then *clockwise:

• Fried noodles
• Hotpot with tofu: a bit gloopy because they put some kind of thickener in there which I didn’t like so much but it tasted OK
• Fish head casserole
• Silver wire roll
• Steamed fish with sweet sauce: fish was tender but – again – a wee bit bony in places. Sauce was teriyaki like but a bit sweeter than the fish tail dish.
• Peanuts!
• Middle: seafood hotpot with tofu, vegetables and fish. Was light and subtle.

*excludes some dishes previously mentioned and others that just didn’t fit on the table or because I was shit faced and forgot to take pictures ‘natch.

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Three days into my trip to Taiwan and I’ll be updating the blog as I encounter new and interesting things. But one thing I’d like to point out: jet lag is a bitch and here I am at 4:30 AM tapping away on my Mac eating a breakfast pancake of fried pork, spring onion and egg with some seriously hot chilli sauce:

This was totally awesome and kinda made up for the insomnia.

I’m on twitter FYI.