I’ve been wanting to write about Taiwan, but traveling from a deliciously hot location back to a rainy, chilly, rather dreary one has left me utterly uninspired.
Suffice it to say that I LOVED Taiwan – the weather, the people, and the history. It’s had a rather strange trajectory, and it’s interesting to consider what would have happened if the other side had won. On the surface, it reminded me a lot of Seoul. Every block was crammed with private English schools, and traffic signals were respected by cars and pedestrians alike. I found myself telling the hubs that he should get a job at Taiwan University. “You can read traditional characters! We could live here!” (I could drink iced tea and nobody would think I was insane!) I would certainly have no trouble finding a job as an English teacher. Also, Taipei has a subway, so I got to be a subway nerd again.
If we lived there, I’d have to re-learn how to eat. Spicy doesn’t mean the same thing there, unfortunately, and I managed to eat some fries that had been breaded. The wedding banquet featured 10 gluten-free courses, 7 of which were seafood from the sea. Not carp. Heck yes I ate it. Other edibles included a egg-tapioca-shrimp pancake covered in pinkish sauce at the night market, a daily breakfast consisting of sticky rice wrapped around various fillings, and multiple servings of “egg pudding” (it was flan) purchased from 7-11. I passed on the stinky tofu. It was already stinking up my airspace, so why let it stink up my stomach?
I have pictures of tropical oddities and video to post, but that would require effort that I don’t have the energy for right now. Weather plus new (temporary) neighbors with a weird schedule have rendered this broad rather blah.
After saying for months that I want a bike, not knowing where to buy one used, and trying to rent a bike from a friend who owns a travel company (it was too big…surprise!), I was told that basic bikes are only 350 yuan new. Today, I went and bought one. With a basket on the front and a lock for the back wheel, it came to 370. I briefly considered the folding bike since I could take that back to the states with me, but it was over 500 and not really a feature that I need. It has but one gear (freewheel, not fixie) and is a pleasing shade of lime green. It won’t go home to the U.S. with me, but it gives me more incentive to build that 3-speed I’ve been thinking about.
I got some taters in mah basket!
My first task with the bike was picking up the ingredients for the potato salad I’m making for the 4th of July at the wet market, where I was reminded of the #1 rule for market shopping: don’t wear sandals. I waver between wanting to know what made my foot wet and being glad that I don’t know. I was successful, and am now the proud owner of a huge jar of miracle whip, a small jar of yellow mustard, and all the veggies I wanted except for little red radishes. Gigantic bludgeon-a-whale sized daikon are the only available radishes.
The biggest shock, bigger than mystery water on my foot, was that I didn’t have to buy creepy Asian mayo that is shelf-stable for a decade or so. I had the choice between Hellman’s and Miracle Whip, and I chose the Miracle Whip so I could be faithful to my grandma’s recipe. It wasn’t until I made it home that I started to vaguely remember that the gluten content of Miracle Whip is unknown to me. I thought I remembered something about the fat-free variety being okay, but the original being off-limits. Luckily, multiple fora and the Kraft website informed me that I was wrong, and I can eat their HFCS-laden (you can’t win ‘em all…) goo to my heart’s content. The mustard also turned out to be ok. This is the downside of usually making all my food from scratch — on the rare occasion I need to buy something processed, I haven’t memorized the list of safe products.
My next task with the bike is to pick up the cake I ordered for a friend’s going-away party. She’s been an incredible co-teacher, and starts at Berkeley in the fall.
I have a surprisingly easy time most days avoiding gluten, but the past couple have been rough. Something bothered my stomach, and I don’t know what it could have been.
Two nights ago I stayed up until about 2am. I had finally gotten the new update for my Kindle which allows books to be placed into collections, so I labeled all my books then stayed up even later reading. Without a small lamp to read by, I have to have the big bright room light on so it’s easy to stay up. The result was that I slept through breakfast, which was probably going to be butter tea and roasted barley flour (tzampa) anyway. So I pulled out my bag of emergency gluten-free oats given to me by my brother-in-law prior to the trip, boiled some water, and readied the honey. It was to be my first oatmeal since Kunming.
Yesterday morning I learned that rolled oats can go rancid, and no amount of honey hides this flavor.
I was later gifted with fresh yak yogurt, but without a clean spoon to dunk back into the honey, it was too sour to eat plain. If you think plain cow-milk yogurt is too sour (I don’t) then this would be unbearable. I suck on lemons, and I couldn’t eat this. It explains why I can’t find unsweetened yogurt in the store though.
Today, I woke at a reasonable time because I cut my reading off around 11:30, but breakfast was (wait for it) butter tea and tzampa. It looked like the cook had fried up some rice, possibly for me, but all that remained was a dirty pan.
The bean cake fryer.
I filled up my mug with butter tea, (the electricity just went out as I was typing this) grabbed a metal food tin, and headed to the square for some street food. My favorite guy was there, and still setting up for the day. Luckily for me, he got his fires going and his food cooking before bothering with the tent and benches. Today my breakfast was liang fen, which is starting to become a delicious habit for me.
Liang fen is a cake made of bean starch. It wobbles a bit like jello and is usually white or sometimes yellow. In Kunming, I had it sliced into sticks and served cold with cucumbers and various seasonings. In Shangri-la is is a repulsive, delicious grey, served fried, mushed up a bit, and covered with hot peppers, green onions, cilantro, vinegar, some oil with what looks like crushed peanuts, and some hua jao (Sichuan numby peppercorn). It still requires a bit of attention though, since they have a big jar of soy sauce sitting there, and they want to use the ladle for every liquid on offer.
Half in my stomach, half in my bowl-thing.
Despite knowing that it gets dipped in everything for the other customers, I tell myself that if I don’t see them do it, it’s ok. Today I had a spoon with me so she used it for the liquids. One of these times, I’ll have to take a friend to explain to these nice people why I panic when they mix the spoons. I know enough Chinese now to keep them from adding the soy sauce, but not enough to explain that it’s more than a preference.
To wrap up, delicious breakfast for about $0.40, and it didn’t poison me. Now I wait for the electricity and/or the water to come back on. 
*I had to use that title since I was banned from making any Seoul Man jokes while we were there.
Oh, Korea. You and your respected traffic laws, delicious kimchi, active temples, and old and new friends. Why must you perplex me with your not-really-cheese-sticks, official lack of homosexuals, and actual lack of trashcans?
We’ve actually been back in China for a week now, but had 2 nights in Beijing (that made me think I might be able to really like Beijing), a day and a half on a train to Kunming, then the night train/bus combo that got me back to Shangri-la…where I immediately contracted yet another cold and lost my voice for about a day and a half.
One of the things that stood out about our trip is that I’m a total dork for subways. In Seoul, we used them to get to where our hosts wanted to take us, but in Beijing I purposely planned my free days around places near the subway lines. It was easy, cheap, and I got to zoom around in underground tunnels like a mole on speed. What could be better?
Our arrival in Seoul was on a Friday around lunchtime, when our friends were both at work. They had given us directions on how to get from the airport to Insidong so we could entertain ourselves easily. We found lunch (kimchi stew!) and wandered down the street to the old palace and nearby folk museum. It was easy to see that building wooden palaces made it too easy for the Japanese to burn them down; this was also the case at the old summer palace in Beijing. In a wide open space that used to be occupied by houses for concubines, we met a lot of magpies. They’re huge, funny birds that like to hop around, and I’ve heard that they are rather mischievous. It seemed fitting that they had taken the place of the concubines. The folk museum was our next stop, and I really wish we had had more time there. The displays were well kept-up, and the English on the signs was both correct and informative. In China you tend to see a lot of physical descriptions of an object on display, but no information on how said object was used or why it’s in the museum at all.
As we waited to meet up with an old HS friend of the hubs, I wandered into a little convenience store to check out some Korean snack food. I emerged triumphant with a little bottle of plum juice and what looked like a cheese stick. The hubs eyed it warily and thought it might actually be some sort of bizarre white sausage. After running back to the store to get it snipped open by the clerk, I walked back towards the hubs with a big grin, peeling the wrapper off the top. As I took a bite, he watched my face take on an expression of absolute horror and he laughed as I ran around looking for a trashcan. I had to settle for a large sack of trash sitting in a corner. It wasn’t cheese, it wasn’t sausage, and it shouldn’t have been called edible. I briefly recalled the clerk’s smirk as I was paying for it, and tucked away the rest of it so I could ask our friends about it. I pulled it out shortly after meeting them, and before I could even ask, their expressions simultaneously turned to panic and they shouted “Don’t eat that!”
In all, the trip was great. It was great to meet an old friend of the hubs’ (G) and his fiancée (M), and absorb teaching tips from them. I got to visit a very large yarn market, and was finally able to pick up buttons for the coat I’m making. It was also interesting to discover how much I had in common (including internet friends) with M, and we enjoyed taunting the men about how they were essentially partnered with the same person. She even brushed up on her glutenny vocab to help me figure out what was safe to eat and found a bottle of safe soy sauce for me to bring back. Lastly, their apartment had one of the most amazing features I’ve ever encountered in a house—sub-floor heating. It eliminates the nasty problem of walking around with cold feet, and radiates up to warm the whole place. The only downside was that we were sleeping on a guest mattress on this floor, so it actually got TOO hot at night.
In the middle of all this, I got to have 2 lunches and visit a temple with a Korean friend from my TESOL course. As she took us around, she kept mentioning how she had never been to certain places even though she was from Seoul. We were tour guides for her in her own city! The temple was really interesting too. I’m so used to temples in other Asian countries being tourist attractions. The one we went to in Seoul obviously had a large congregation, as they had a few thousand lanterns hung for the Buddha’s birthday celebration, and were doing some sort of ceremony for children when we were there. The place was packed.
As mentioned above, we left Korea and spent 2 nights in Beijing. Since the hubs was meeting with folks, I had the city to myself. I spent my first day wandering around the old summer palace, which has extensive grounds and both smashed and burned ruins. On day 2, I ventured out to find a store called Jenny Lou’s. It’s a well-known store stocking all sorts of imported goods from around the world, and I read online that gluten-free products were available there. The location I chose to try was in the section of town that held all the embassies, so I got to walk past a lot of well-guarded, identical buildings. I paused to squint in front of each one just to see whose it was, and noticed after a while that the guard in front of each one was picking up his radio when I stopped. I imagine there was something said about a nosy girl with a green bag, and I decided that taking pictures was out of the question. I never saw the US embassy, but did eventually find Jenny Lou’s. My purchases there were limited to tortilla chips, a grody avocado dip from Australia, fake nutella, and two of those Happy Cow 8-piece cheese wheels. Out of the 16 pieces, only 2 made it back to Shangri-la with me.
Me and cheese. We are friends. Unless you’re Korean “cheese”. We are not friends.
Dealing with this gluten-intolerance thing has made me a less adventurous eater while traveling. Without the language skills needed to make sure food is safe, I get scared when I’m fending for myself.
This was the situation I found myself in yesterday — the hubs was off making vital connections, and I was hoping some people would meet me at one of the cafes for a little yarn play. Lunchtime rolled around (nobody showed) and I decided to walk to one of the foreign megastores to look for a couple of imported necessities. I left the cafe (which offered the safe option of a cheese omelette) with the full intention of stopping at a noodle joint or something along the way. The further I got from the area where foreigners tend to congregate, the less sure I was of finding safe food. Eventually, I recognized where I was, looked to the right, and saw Wal-mart. I cringed, since this was not the foreign megastore I was intending to visit, but where there is Wal-mart, there is surely KFC. Where there is KFC, there are…french fries.
So my very first meal without my lovely husband’s help was a large order of fries and a strawberry sundae. It was also 3x the cost of a far more filling meal at any of the restaurants I passed on my way there.
I continued my walk toward the central square where I was told a Carrefour loomed large. It’s a beautiful area with lots of landscaping and some welcome shade, mostly provided by the triangular New Era hotel. I got my shoes shined for 5 kuai, but passed up the blind masseurs since I can never remember how to ask “how much?” and my usual gesturing wouldn’t have worked. I don’t know why, but I never found the Carrefour. While speaking to the hubs on the phone, I told him where I was and he told me to turn around. Perhaps I should start giving massages in the square…
That night, we ventured to a restaurant near the apartment and ordered a dish called Grandma’s potatoes. It’s been said that there are as many varieties of this dish as there are grandmothers, but we were thrilled with the version we got: fried, half-mashed potatoes with ample spice. Add steamed eggs and a cold rice noodle dish (yes, I know…pictures. Sorry) and we were both stuffed. The hubs declared it the best meal he had had so far this trip, and the restaurant delivers!
Note to my mum-in-law: They had a waving cat.
I have eleven days before I actually become The Broad Abroad, and tonight my husband and I are hosting a going-away party for all of our Madison friends. Yesterday was my last day of work, and it was nice that it coincided with our Family Fun night. I got permission from a few of the parents to take pictures with their children to show to my students in China, but I won’t be posting those online. Suffice it to say that last night was a lot of fun, and I have pretty high expectations for tonight! The white elephant gifts are always a hoot.
My lovely husband is making Chinese dumplings, of course, and is getting some rice paper to make egg rolls for me. I love it when my dumpling makes dumplings.
I am making a Greek dish called Revithia that I learned from a professor whose name ended in -opolous. The recipe went something like this:
Him: “You start with a lot of onions.”
Me: “How many onions?”
Him: “I don’t know…five?”
The amazing stuff he served us didn’t really seem to have onions in it at all. It was the most amazing grey slop I’ve ever tasted in my life. It’s apparently traditionally baked in a pot that has been sealed with bread dough and stays in the oven for half a day. To me, this screams “CROCK POT!” And so this morning I began chopping 3 gigantic onions. They filled my (very large) crock pot halfway, but I ended up having space for everything else I needed – chickpeas, some herbs, tomatoes. Massaging the chickpeas to remove as many skins as possible makes the chickpeas practically melt after few hours. Failing this, use an immersion blender
It’s such a simple recipe, but you have to have the resolve to just leave it alone. This makes it the perfect thing to prepare while you pack everything you own and stick it in storage.
You can find my recipe for it here on Tasty Kitchen. Since we ate it all before I got a chance to take a picture last time, I’ll be snapping a few tonight to add to the recipe.
Oh kids, let me tell you something. You’ve never really had biscotti until you’ve picked up the crumbs from your own countertop while in the middle of making a batch. And I don’t even like biscotti on a normal day.
Inspired by a travel-tips post from the Gluten-Free blog, Book of Yum, I set out to make my own biscotti for munching on the plane to China. I’m still torn between requesting a vegetarian meal or a gluten-free meal, knowing that neither one is likely to be both. Whatever I choose, I’ll be supplementing with some of my own food.
I started with this recipe, and promptly modified it, then screwed it up. I found it odd that it didn’t call for xanthan gum, so I added a pinch anyway. I don’t think it mattered. I also added some dried cranberries and used 2 medium eggs instead of 1 large (you’ll see why this is ok in a sec). As for almonds, I bought about 3 cups since my eyes don’t measure very well (and who minds extra almonds?). I ground up 2 cups before realizing that I was only supposed to grind one. Oops. The extra egg will help bind that extra cup of dry ingredients together.
Start preheating the oven to 350 now if you have a slow oven.
My approximate measurements are as follows:
Dry Ingredients:
2 cups raw almonds, ground
1 cup raw almonds, roughly chopped or pulsed a few times in the food processor with the…
3/4 cup-ish dried cranberries
Put the above in a bowl with:
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup cornstarch
1 pinch (or slightly more) xanthan gum if ya got it
3/4 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
Set aside. Start preheating the oven to 350 if you have a fast oven.
Wet Stuff:
Start with 2 medium eggs beaten until frothy. Using 2 large is not a problem, and may be a better idea.
Add 1/2 cup sugar and beat into eggs
Add 1/4 cup honey and beat into eggs
Add 3 tablespoons of oil or melted butter and beat into eggs
Add a teaspoon of vanilla extract and beat into eggs.
The recipe I used said to stir the dry into the wet, but my dry ingredients were in a mixing bowl and my wet ingredients were in a cereal bowl. Add it however you please, just make sure you mix that stuff well with a wooden spoon. It will be a huge, unwieldy clump, and it will not be whiskable.
Lacking the 9×9 pan called for in the original recipe (and having used more ingredients than was likely to fit into one), I used an 8×12 pan lined with parchment. I’ve never used parchment before, and it’s a bit of a pain trying to keep it from sliding around in the pan while you attempt to smash the huge, unwieldy clump into said pan. Try oiling your hands, and forget about using the spatula. You’ll be glad you did.
The cut biscotti ready for its second baking.
Bake it for about 35 minutes. I took mine out at 30 and it wasn’t done, but it gets baked twice so Iwasn’t concerned. Now, once you take it out and let it cool for a few in the pan, flip it out onto a cutting board to cool the rest of the way. There will be crumbs. Eat them, then go distract yourself by writing a blog post or something, because it’s a bad
idea to cut it while warm, though it does create a few more crumbs for your nibbling pleasure.
Once cool, cut it once lengthwise, then every 1/2 to 3/4 inch crosswise. Use the sharpest knife you have – note the tofu cleaver in the picture. Lay these out on a couple of parchment-covered cookie sheets and bake again at 350, this time for about 20 minutes. Spy on them at 15 – if they’re starting to brown they’re done. I took out a few too soon, and they remained soft when they cooled. You want these puppies crunchy.
They’re good on their own. Really good. But I dipped them in chocolate anyway, because I’ve seen coffee shops do it. And I’m going to make coffee in the morning just so I can dunk one of these. All the bowls with which I could have fashioned a double boiler were in use, so I used a tiny teflon-coated saucepan on the lowest heat possible. I just melted semi-sweet chips and dunked them. I hope you don’t need more detailed instructions for that
The only thing that could make this better is if I could know for certain that I could have access to an oven in China so I can make these again in 2010. Enjoy!
While I don’t really intend to enter the realm of “food blogger,” I do love food, and I am going to post about it. Eventually I’ll be posting pictures of the delicious gluten-free goodies I find in China, but for now, you’re going to have to put up with the things I make here in the US.
Because of my strange work schedule (2-6) and my co-op house’s requirement to cook twice a month, I find myself using the crock pot a lot lately. In addition, I have plenty of time in the morning to cut and mix things that just need to be tossed in the oven when I finally get home.
Today’s menu starts with a jar of yellow lentils found in the pantry last night. I wanted to make lentil soup like one finds in a Middle Eastern restaurant, but none of the web recipes looked quite right. I found one anyway, and quickly ignored it. Here’s what I did, keeping in mind that I have 9 people to feed:
Turn the crockpot on High, and add some olive oil. Let it heat while you chop.
Chop onion – I used 3 small ones – and add to the warm oil.
Mince 3ish cloves of garlic and add in.
Add 1 can of chopped tomatoes. I screwed up and used the kind with Italian herbs already added, but as it turned out that was all we had in the house anyway.
Let this cook while you rinse the lentils and heat extra water.
A note about water: If I had started this at 9am, I would have put the water in at whatever temp in came out of the tap. Because it was already noon, I boiled water in the electric kettle so the soup would start cooking faster.
I used 3 cups of lentils, and 9 cups of water. I added 1tbsp each of turmeric, cumin, and vegetarian chicken broth powder. As an afterthought, I added in 2 chopped up celery stalks when I stirred it. Lemon and/or yogurt can be added when you serve it.
Because my crockpot is “smart” it will only run on High for a maximum of 6 hours. This means that I will unplug it before I go to work so it will reset, and turn it back on for 6 more hours.
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Roasted root veggies are the easiest thing in the world. Our winter CSA share is loaded with potatoes, rutabaga, carrots, celeriac, beets, etc. A rutabaga started to sprout in the drawer where we keep these, so in it went. It was HUGE, so that didn’t leave room for much else.
In addition to the rutabaga, I used 2 small beets, 2 carrots, 1 largish potato, and 2 small celeriac. Cube everything, toss with about a third of a cup of olive oil, and top with coarse sea salt and fresh ground black pepper. Toss together in a roasting dish, cover, and leave on countertop with a note begging your housemates to put it in the oven at 6pm at 350.
This post will be updated with pictures when I return from work. Happy biking!
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