EatingAsia

In Taipei, Knowing How Little I Know

We were recently in Taipei, working on a food story.

It wasn't our first time in the city; we spent almost 2 weeks there in 2010 and returned in 2011 for a much-too-short few days. After a decent chunk of time living, eating and cooking in and Hong Kong and China -- not to mention eight years now (!) in Malaysia, home to a sizeable Chinese population, you might think I'd have a pretty decent grounding in Chinese cuisine. I speak Mandarin, and read a fair bit of it (though Taiwan's complicated characters do, um, complicate things). So when it comes to charting a gastronomic path in Taipei I'm pretty much all set, right?

Wrong. For me, to be in Taiwan -- and in this most recent case, its capital city -- is to know how little I know about Taiwanese food and, in many respects, the wider world of "Chinese cuisine". Sure, I know niurou mian and dou hua and lu wei, Taiwan's iconic soy sauce-based braise of tofu, meats and offal. I have eaten many an oyster omelette. I am quite familiar with beancurd in all its myriad forms, including "stinky". (And I know for sure that Taiwan boasts the best bean curd in the region). I know how soy sauce is made, I know the difference between rice wine and sorghum and millet liquors (though in truth I enjoy  none of them). When I eat jiaozi (dumplings) and dao shao mian ("knife-cut" noodles) in Taipei I feel a deep connection to Sichuan, where I first ate these delights more than 25 (gulp) years ago. In Taipei's slippery rice noodles I taste elements of the Fujianese cuisine I've come to know through Malaysia's many Hokkien dishes. Taiwan's sweets -- its shaved ices, its flaky, flat round bing stuffed with ingredients sugary or savory or a combination of the two -- are comforting in their familiarity. So too, of course, is the country's very Chinese obsession with pork.

But I could no sooner define Taiwanese food -- that is, the food of Taiwan rather than the food of its indigenous peoples -- than I could east African or Chilean cuisine. The island has a long history; it has absorbed culinary influences from waves of occupation and migration. Taiwan has a large indigeneous population, the descendents of people who lived there long before the Dutch, Chinese or Japanese arrived. And it is still absorbing influences from abroad as far as I can tell, as island nations necessarily do. Taipei is a large, sprawling, mixed-up jumble of a city -- and an incredibly cosmopolitan one at that, especially when you consider that much of the world (and, ahem, the world's food editors) seems not to know, or chooses to ignore, that it exists.

So, though I eagerly accepted this assignment, I landed in Taipei with some trepidation. Eating for yourself is one thing; "defining" the culinary experience of a city for an audience (many of whom will be natives, many of whom will be eager to highlight what's been left out) is quite another. I knew that I knew too little (and I write that as if I could ever know enough about eating in Taipei, or about the food of Taiwan) to chart my own path. So I threw my hands up and relinquished control. Instead of planning a gastronomic itinerary around "must eat" dishes I simply queried locals about what they most liked to eat.

Surprise! I was not led to one single niurou mian stall (I already have my own favorite anyway). No Taipei-an took me out for stinky tofu, sat me down to a steamer full of xiao long bao (soup dumplings), introduced me to their favorite shaved ice or squired me to a night market.

Instead I was treated to many unknown-to-me yet quite common local specialties. All were fabulous; I write with all honesty that I did not consume a single mediocre bite in six days of fairly full-on eating in Taipei. Yet given my word limit, many of my most pleasurable nibbles did not make it into the article.

Here's one: youyu geng (yoh-yoo guhng), or thick soup with squid. Geng are a class of Hakka soups made somewhat viscous with the addition of starch -- tapioca, sweet potato, corn. They're a common street food, seen everywhere in Taipei. Most contain pork. At this third-generation stall near the Gongguan MTR stop opposite Taiwan University (or Taida, as it's known), the medium of protein is squid, and it appears three ways: dried and rehydrated, deep-fried, and ground to a paste that is then formed by hand into rough elongated ovals.

You might call this dish "squid noodles", for the vendors offer yellow noodles, mung bean vermicelli or ban tiao (flat rice noodles) to add to the thick soup. Most diners order their noodles "dry", soup on the side (something often done in Malaysia with Chinese noodle soups like wonton mee and koay teow th'ng).

Why they do so became evident as soon as I slipped my chopsticks into my bowl of yellow noodles and gently turned, releasing a plume of steam heavy with the scent of shallots browned long and slow in lard. The flavor of this sauce was incredible, richer and meatier than the juices leftover from a roast. Add in the freshness of chopped cilantro and the slow-burning heat of the housemade chili sauce, which I added from a jar on our table, and I was eating my most seductive bowl of noodles in recent memory.

As for the gloopy, viscous geng -- I loved it, especially when thinned and soured with white vinegar. The potato starch-thickened stock tasted intensely of seafood, the squid paste balls (more like dumplings, given their odd shape) were full of fresh fish flavor and texturally interesting, with small chunks of squid (as opposed to the silky smoothness of your average fish ball) and the coating on the rafts of fried cephalopod was neither greasy nor too thick. Bonus: the deep-fried squid pieces soaked up the delicious broth like a sponge. The garnish of holy basil leaves was a pleasant, tasty surprise (the herb is a common ingredient on Taiwan.)

I generally avoid soupy dishes in tropical climates, and in general I don't really recommend visiting Taipei during its hot, sticky mid-summer. I was sweating buckets as we ate our geng.

But I'd jump at the opportunity to hop on a plane tomorrow and happily, swelteringly slurp my way through another bowl at at Li Ji Hakka (the shop's name, from a barely visible sign to the left of the serving station).

Thanks to SL (oh, the wonders of Facebook) for taking us to this little gem near Taida.

Li Ji Hakka, 289 Dingzhou Lu Section 3, Taipei. MTR exit: Gongguan.

A Taiwan Epiphany: Salty Soy Milk

 

Every journey brings a culinary epiphany or two.

On our last trip to Taiwan I discovered doujiang (soy milk). Wait -- that's not exactly accurate. I always knew about doujiang, of course. It's always been there -- as the lactose intolerant's best friend, or the dieter's substitute for milk in a latte, or something boxed that vegans drink.

But two years ago in Taiwan, which by the way -- I'm going to go out on a limb here -- is an equal to Japan in the ethereal-soy-bean-products-making department, I found that soy milk -- real fresh soy milk made in small batches by caring, careful soy milk makers -- is one of the world's most delicious, most refreshing and at the same time most healthy feeling beverages.

It's also one of the world's best breakfasts, especially when consumed with a just-fried, lightly salty you tiao (savory cruller). I reaffirmed soy milk's wonderfulness in Chengdu, and then again a couple of weeks ago in Taipei. After we arrived in Kaohsiung, in southern Taiwan, I pushed my soy bean obsession a bit further and began substituting it for cream in my coffee.

So yeah, doujiang is fabulous, and I'm hooked.

Then I found xian doujiang, which absolutely blew me away; it easily takes doujiang's greatness up several dozen notches. "Xian" means salty. And it's also used to indicate savoriness as opposed to sweetness, as when you ask a guobing vendor what's inside her oven-baked flatbreads and she answers "You xiande, you tiande." (There's savory ones and sweet ones.)

Actually I didn't find the salty soy milk. Dave did, when he was wandering around Kaohsiung one morning early in our stay as I was back at the hotel getting ready for a day of interviews. "I just had the most amazing breakfast!" he said as he burst into our room right before I left.

(That made me hate him for a minute. And then hate him more as he went into great detail about it.)

I forgave Dave the next day when he took me to Guo Mao Lai Lai [g-woah maow lie-lie] Doujiang, a corner shop in downtown Kaohsiung. And not just because of the doujiang, but also because in Guo Mao Lai Lai's open kitchen they craft what are without doubt among the best steamed dumplings I've ever eaten. Anywhere (I've spent some time in China, people), ever. These steamed dumplings boast wrappers both light and substantial, toothsome and fluffy, of the perfect thickness, and with so much wheat flavor. They're dumpling wrappers to die for.

But let's get back to that xian doujiang. It's simply fresh soy milk with a coagulant -- vinegar, I believe -- added to induce curdling. It's served hot, and ladled over your choice of condiments, which atGuo Mao Lai Lai include chopped pickled vegetable, teeny tiny translucent dried shrimp (southern Taiwan produces some lovely dried shrimp), browned shallots and chopped scallion.

If you get to the front of Guo Mao Lai Lai's doujiang queue, which moves frighteningly fast, and blurt out "Everything!!" -- because you don't think you can vocalize your choices quickly enough to keep the customers in line behind you from grumbling -- the doujiang server squirts some sesame oil into the bottom of a deep bowl, follows with the condiments one after the other, sluices on the doujiang from a nice height, and then tops it all with a pretty circle of lajiao you (red chili oil). 

The doujiang gets appetizingly foamy -- though spooned up I suppose it looks something like baby food, as the soy milk curdles all around the condiments.

Don't judge a book as they say, because the shrimp and pickle and caramel-y shallot and crunchy scallions wrestle with the blandly bean-flavored doujiang in a way that is best described as, well, revelatory.

And what about those dumplings? Guo Mao Lai Lai does baked stuff too, and jian bing (griddled dough rolled around eggs), but I couldn't get past those steamed and steam-fried pale mounds of deliciousness.

They'are palm-sized, heavy in your hand, and filled with pork and cabbage or just pork or stuffed with garlicky Chinese chives and eaten, if you like, with a dip (or sauce) of more Chinese chives and chopped dried chilies soaked in soy sauce.

Guo Mao Lai Lai isn't especially new. Seven years ago this man, whose brother owns another xian doujiang and dumplings shop on the outskirts of Kaohsiung, opened it with his wife and family. It was obviously a good decision. The shop is crazy busy --- with only three picnic tables on the pavement out front seats can be hard to come by before 830 or 9am. They also sell doujiang bing (iced doujiang) and mijiang (rice milk).

But frankly you'd have to be an idiot to stop in at Guo Mao Lai Lai and skip the xian doujiang.

Guo Mao Lai Lai, at the corner of Liuhe 2nd and Zichiang Roads, Kaohsiung Taiwan. Mornings, closed on Sunday.

 

 

 

Who Wouldn't...

...a city that plants bunnies in front of City Hall?

And then of course there's this

Stay tuned for more from Taipei.

Sloppy Joes, Foochow Style

We're just back from a whirlwind jaunt to Kuching, in east Malaysia.

Dave was on assignment and had quite alot of ground to cover in not a lot of time. So food, other than dishes he was asked to shoot, did not figure large in this rushed trip. But between orangutangs, longhouses, boat rides and walking the city up, down, and around dozens of times, we did manage a few great bites.

These "Chinese hamburgers" (the vendor's monikor), served up by a Fuzhou-nese hawker in a coffee shop on Padungan Road, were among the best.

More Sloppy Joes than burger, they consist of roughly minced pork sauteed with sugar, maybe a smidge of soy sauce, and black pepper, stuffed into deep-fried sesame seed-coated buns. Bagel-like is how I would describe the buns; they're wheaty, dense and chewy. Or maybe I should say "pepper biscuit-like", because except for its crispy fried exterior their dough is quite reminiscent of that gracing these oven-baked peppery pork-stuffed treats we enjoyed on the street in Taipei.

The burgers/sloppy joes are served with saucers of super-hot minced fresh chilies bathed in dark (but not sweet) soy sauce. The spicy-saltiness of the dip perfectly complements the greasy sweetness of the burgers.

A definate do not miss taste for any pork-loving visitor headed to Sarawak's lovely laid-back capital.

"Chinese hamburgers", Foochow stall in coffee shop on Jalan Padungan, Kuching. Here's the rub -- I didn't get the shop's name. But it is on the north side of the street and if you're walking along Padungan from the Majestic Hotel the coffee shop is located on the first or second corner after Batik Boutique Hotel. This is a morning place, and it's very popular. The stall also served rice wine chicken beehoon and a few other Foochow noodle dishes.

 

In Southern Taiwan, the Sea in a Bowl

Fish noodles. That's noodles made of fish.

I (and you, hopefully) are already reaping rewards, of a sort, from EatingAsia's recently created Facebook page.

A comment, which I now seem unable to locate (there have been quite a few; we love that folks are joining the conversation -- thank you so much), included mention of Taiwanese fish noodles. Not noodles served with fish and fishballs in a piscene broth, but noodles that are actually made from fish.

It reminded me of one our tastiest finds last May-June on Taiwan, a dish we never got around to posting. We have soooo many of those --- stories from past trips that for some reason or other have never made it onto this blog. But it's never too late to publicize a find, don't you think?

 

We took a real liking to the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung, not least for its many holes-in-the-wall and proper restaurants serving impeccably fresh and simply prepared seafood. Every meal we ate in and around Kaohsiung revolved around something fishy. There were a few excellent porky items thrown in for good measure, but for the better part of five days we ate seafood for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I'm not complaining.

One morning we took a boat out to tiny Cijin Island, a popular seafood-loving daytripper destination just 5-10 minutes by boat from the city. After feasting on grilled squid and raw tomatoes with powdered sugar (both specialties of the island -- a perhaps odd-sounding combination that works) we followed a coastal path to the island's northwestern tip and ascended a small hill, where we explored an old lighthouse and battery remains that date back to the Qing dynasty.

 

All that activity stoked our appetite, of course, so once back down at sea level we nosed around for a snack or three to carry us through the 10-minute boat ride back to the mainland. We noticed, on an otherwise sleepy side street, that every table at a stall advertising hujiao shougong yu mian tang (literally: pepper handmade fish noodle soup) was filled and further, signage advising that the place had been in business for thirty years.

Making the decision to stop and sample was a no-brainer.

We ordered the zonghe yu mian tang ('composite', ie 'mixed' fish noodle soup) and ended up with bowls of light scallion, Chinese celery, and white pepper-enhanced broth packed with a variety of fish balls (and one pork ball) and noodles, dumplings, ribbons of seaweed, and a few leaves of lettuce.

 

Imagine our surprise when the noodles turned out to be made of fish. They were absolutely exquisite (have a look at the opening photo, above), almost translucent, nubby, lightly fish flavored and boasting a fantastic chewy-snappy texture. The fish dumplings or yu jiao consisted of more piscene pasta filled with chopped pork generously seasoned with toasted sesame oil. The oil was so fresh and fragrant that when I bit a dumpling in half it released a plume of sesame-scented steam.

The fish balls were excellent as well, springy but not bouncing-rubber-ballish, and as intensely flavored as the noodles.

(Interestingly, we also found noodles made from fish in Kota Kinabalu, the capital of the eastern Malaysian state of Sabah. When we returned to Kuala Lumpur after that trip more than four years ago I spied the same sort of round, thick fish noodles in a grocery store/ They were disappointing -- more binder than fish, with little piscene flavor.)

The proprietor off this stall on Cijin Island told us that fish noodles and fish pasta-wrapped dumplings were fairly common there -- and perhaps elsewhere? -- until about ten years ago. "It's a lot of work to make these kind of noodles," she said. "So we're one of the last stalls around."

Long may she and her lovely fish noodle stall thrive!

Hand-made fish noodles and fish dumplings stall, 44 Tongshan Lu (near corner of Miaocan Lu), Cijin Island, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. (07) 571-1711

Not A Substitute

In the United States soy milk is more often than not viewed as a substitute for 'real' milk, much in the same way that tofu, or bean curd, is subjected to all manner of indignities in the name of rendering it as desirable as a piece of meat. 

This can be attributed to one fact, I think: most Americans have never tasted quality soy milk, or eaten carefully prepared (ie. small-batch or homemade) bean curd -- that is, soy milk and tofu the way they make them  in Taiwan.

Japan's been praised for its way with the little white bean, and rightly so. But Taiwan does pretty well in that department too -- call it just one of many dots on the island's culinary landscape that's long been overlooked by Asian food fans.

One of the joys of time spent in Taiwan is partaking of the morning doujiang (soy milk) ritual. From the wee hours you can hardly walk a block in Taipei without stumbling upon a mobile doujiang vendor or a hole-in-the-wall with a few tables where you can sip in relative comfort.

Truly fresh, well-made soy milk is the perfect am beverage, rich enough to satisfy an empty belly, light enough not to weigh you down, refreshing if taken over ice, supremely comforting if drunk warm. It's not something to serve as a substitute for the 'real thing' in your latte but something to be savored in its own right ... accompanied, perhaps, by a you tiao, or deep-fried cruller, to dip (or not).

 

We drank liters of doujiang in Taipei last May and June, but in deference to our ballooning waistlines generally left the doughy accompaniments alone. Until our last morning.

We'd paid a visit to Fong Da -- the old coffee shop featured in our Taiwan coffee article -- to thank and bid farewell to its elderly owner and his wife and son, and were strolling somewhat aimlessly (and sadly -- it was our last morning, after all) in its surrounding district of Ximending.

Having foregone our usual doujiang in favor of a last siphon brew at Fong Da we kept our eyes out for possibilities, but without much hope. It was already around 9; most doujiang and youtiao sellers begin gearing down around then, as their last customers head off to work.

 

 

Then we caught a faint whiff of frying dough. And lo and behold there, kitty corner from where we stood, was a doujiang bolthole fronted by a cruller maker still assembling and frying his product.

As luck would have it, it was by far the best doujiang of the trip. Served in old-fashioned heavy ceramic bowls, the soy milk was only lightly sweetened, allowing its pleasantly mellow beaniness to come through.

The crullers were simply fantastic -- they couldn't have been any fresher, really, and their dough contained a hint of salt that accentuated its hearty wheatiness. Almost as good were the scallion rolls, chewy sesame-topped baked buns with a swirl of softened, slightly caramelized scallions inside.

 

We drank and ate at one of the shop's two tables, set up in front right by the curb. We watched as a big black Mercedes pulled up; its tank top-wearing, tough-guy driver popped out carrying a white poodle, then got back behind the steering wheel with a bag bulging crullers.

We didn't wish for a donut instead of our you tiao, or glasses of moo instead of bowls of doujiang. What we did wish -- mightily -- was that we didn't have to catch a plane back home in five hours.

Note: For more Taipei street food favorites pick up a copy of this month's Travel+Leisure Southeast Asia, which includes our article on five Taipei must-eat street treats.

Doujiang shop, no. 74 Neijiang Street, Ximending District (almost at the corner of Kunming Street). A bowl of doujiang and a you tiao will set you back all of 28 NTD (about 70 US cents).

Taipei Mystery Street Sweet

One thing we love about Taipei is that it's so obviously comfortable in its own skin.

Confident enough of its 21st century-ness that it's not driven to clear the streets of food sellers to prove its standing as a 'modern' city, Taipei is a metropolis in which skyscrapers and upscale eateries happily coexist with itinerant vendors, often on the same block.

In Wanhua District we bumped into a vendor peddling, from a hand-pushed two-wheeled cart, a mysterious sweet that we'd encountered nowhere else on the island -- chewy bite-sized squares chilled underneath blocks of ice,

 

and tossed in ground sesame seeds before bagging.

 

It was a warm day and the chilled marshmallow-ish pillows, lightly toasty and not too sweet, hit the spot.

The gent was decidedly nonplussed by Dave's camera and resisted my attempts to conduct an informal interview. He did, however, tell us how long he's been plying his trade on the streets of Wanhua: 50 years, give or take a few.

Update 12/11/09: Mystery solved -- this is a traditional Taiwanese treat made of sweet potato (sometimes green bean) and rolled in plain flour, toasted. Apparently the vendor, known to folks in the 'hood as Ah Bee, is a bit of a local celebrity. If you can read Chinese, further info awaits here.

Thanks much to K, a font of info on all things Taiwanese (especially food)!

Chewy sweets vendor, somewhere in the vicinity of the intersection of Guiyang and Xitang Roads -- maybe -- in Wanhua district, Taipei. He says he's there everyday, public holidays excepted.

Taiwan, Asian Coffee Mecca - Who Knew?

Not us, until research for a story on coffee in Asia led us to the island last June.

As we relate in an article in today's (Friday's) Wall Street Journal Asia 'Weekend Journal', Taiwanese are serious about their java, and that makes the island one of the easiest places in Asia to find a superior cup. I'm not sure where else in the world, other than Japan, you're more likely to find nothing-special neighborhood cafes serving siphon coffee brewed by the cup with fresh beans ground a la minute.

(The piece also includes my sidebars on coffee culture in Malaysia and Vietnam, and a writer in Japan contributed a piece on that country's java scene.)

And some photo out takes here.

***

The photo above wasn't taken on Taiwan, but in one of our favorite Malaysian kopitiam (coffee shops): Sin Yin Loong in Ipoh, an old tin mining town a couple of hours north of Kuala Lumpur. 

The beverage of choice at Sin Yin Loong is a local specialty - 'white' coffee.

While regular Malaysian-style kopi is made with beans roasted with butter (or margarine) and sugar (the latter 'burns' on the beans, making Malaysian kopi extra dark and not a little bit bitter), beans for white coffee are roasted with butter/margarine only. The result is a lighter but very rich, smooth, and almost caramel-y brew that really stands up to ice; it's always served sporting a thick head of whisk-induced froth.

When we were in Ipoh last March - for only a little over 24 hours - we spent a disproportionate amount of time drinking in white coffee, and Sin Yoon Loong's homely ambience. Whenever we stopped in for hot or iced (and a piece of the shop's justifiably famous cream-filled sponge roll) -- whether it noon, 2pm, 5pm, 7:30am, or mid-morning (the stuff really is that addictive) --  the place was consistently packed. 

In recent years white coffee has become a bit of a gimmick in Malaysia; it's served at regular and chain kopitiam (such as Old Town White Coffee, established by Sin Yoon Loong's across-the-street-competitor), and you can even buy it in instant powdered form. Just add water. 

But it was at Sin Yin Loong that we had our first taste of the real deal, no other version comes close. The locals seem to agree.

Sin Yoon Loong, 15A Jalan Bandar Timah, Ipoh Malaysia. 60-52/241-4601. 7am till evening.

 

Oyster Omelette, Redeemed

Oyster omelette, fresh oysters fried with beaten eggs and usually bound with some sort of starch solution, is an Asian street food staple.

I had my first taste in Hong Kong about 15 years ago -- the dish's flavorless bivalves and strangely gummy texture left me underwhelmed. Since then I've sampled -- usually at the goading of well-meaning local gourmands -- various versions, from Shanghai (mushy oysters) to Penang (nice char, but an awful lot of grease), and I remained unimpressed.

Until last June, when we ate our way around Tainan, Taiwan's unofficial xiao chi ('small eats', ie 'snack') capital.

On Guohe Jie, a narrow lane alongside Yun Le Market that's lined on both sides with food stalls, four or five oyster omelette vendors ply their trade side by side. Deciding which stall to order from was easy; the stools in front of this gentleman's counter were consistently occupied when others sat empty.

The quality of eh-ah jian, as oyster omelette is known in Taiwan, rests firmly on the quality of its main ingredient. More than three weeks of grazing along the island's west coast showed us that its seafood is among the best in the region. And Tainan proper sits near the coast, so the freshness of this vendor's oysters was never in question

 

To make his omelette, he heats oil on a well-seasoned griddle and adds about fifteen plump specimens. While the oysters sizzle he breaks a couple eggs (duck eggs are available on request) to their side, piercing the yolks with the corner of his spatula. After sprinkling bean sprouts, shredded lettuce, and bits of pork crackling over eggs and oysters, he drizzles a third of a spatula of starch solution (sweet potato starch mixed with water) over the lot.

A large lid placed over the griddle firms up the eggs and the binder,

 

and then he folds the four sides of the 'pancake',

to make a neat egg and oyster envelope.

The eh ah jian is served alongside a pool of sauces, one a bit sweet and salty like fermented bean paste, the other tasting like a cross between hoisin and oyster sauce.

I could do without the sauces, frankly, and the next time I dine at this stall I'll ask the vendor to leave them off my plate.

Otherwise, his forty years of oyster omelette-making experience manifest themselves in hands down the best oyster omelette we've ever eaten, a lightly charred egg pillow spilling briny, barely cooked oysters and crispy sprouts and lettuce and sporting barely a hint of grease that made me do a one-eighty on this street food specialty that I'd long scorned.

The key here is the omelette maker's light hand with the starch solution: there's enough of it to pull the other ingredients together, but not enough to create that gumminess that I find such a turn-off in other versions.

Oysters at 8am? If they take the form of this gent's oyster omelette, why not?

Oyster omelette, Guohe Jie (second stall from the corner, right next to a popiah vendor), Tainan, Taiwan. Early morning to 3pm-ish.

Twenty-Four Hours in Meinong

This woman is harvesting yelian, or 'wild' lotus. The vegetable is a product especially associated with Meinong, a township in southern Taiwan not far from Kaohsiung.

Yelian isn't technically 'wild', but cultivated in ponds that dot the township. Harvesting is a group effort. Men tend to do the deeper-water work, donning wetsuits and submerging themselves up to the neck to cut the stems of this aquatic plant from its underwater roots.

Once 'surfaced', the stems are shorn of their floating leaves, tied into bundles, and coiled.

The workers at this pond, locals all, were harvesting yelian that would be sent to Kaohsiung and Taichung (about an hour and a half away).

The vegetable is usually stir-fried with garlic and preserved soybeans. It's a textural cross between Chinese chives and the slimmest asparagus, sweet and green-tasting as the smallest spring peas.

We were in Meinong by happy accident, as the result of a last-minute decision made on the morning we were to leave Kaoshsiung. We'd planned to catch a train north to Taichung, but the weather was beautiful -- blue skies and sun after a day of spitting rain that pretty much washed out Kaohsiung's Dragon Boat Races -- and we were lured by the prospect of a day spent outside in the country.

So we called around for a guesthouse, headed to Kaohsiung's bus station,

and caught a ride on a teddy bear-blessed. Three hours later, bags stashed in a minshu (kind of a Taiwanese B&B) outside of town, we were on bicycles, looking for something to eat.

Meinong is Hakka territory, and formerly the tobacco production capital of Taiwan. Though the streets of its main (small) town are lined with their share of soulless concrete blocks, they still hide quite a few traditional U-shaped Hakka houses with interior courtyards and tiled roofs.

Coming from Taipei and Kaohsiung, the pace of life in Meinong seems almost glacial. The area isn't absolutely rural in the way that much of Southeast Asia still is, but it felt very 'Chinese countryside', in a not-much-happens-here-but-life kind of way. Meinong reminds us of rural areas outside of Shanghai that we used to escape to with our bikes when we lived there in the nineties (they're not rural anymore, we hear).

It's not hard to find local specialties; most of the town's eateries seem to serve pretty much the same thing.

Local (Taiwanese) tourists come to Meinong to eat thick rice noodles stir-fried with fatty pork, scallions, and bean sprouts,

 

or in soup; the aforementioned yelian; and a dish called donggua feng, stewed winter melon and cabbage.

What can we say about this dish? It doesn't photograph particularly well -- there's not much you can do to make a big hunk of pallid melon and its accompanying mound of equally colorless cabbage jump off the page.

But donggua feng is a wonderful thing, especially if it's eaten on a coolish evening under a sky thickening with threatening clouds. Drizzled with garlic oil, sprinkled with chopped scallion, and served in a pool of soy, sugar, and Chinese wine-flavored vegetable juices, it's pretty much the ultimate non-meat comfort food and embodies the humble heartiness of Hakka cuisine. Every table around us held two or three orders; the locals were just devouring it, and we did too.

Up early the next morning, we stuck to country lanes and biked past more Hakka houses,

several of which had jars of bean curd left out to ferment in the sun.

We ran into a couple of older Hakka women harvesting yutou (taro) and shallots, and stopped to chat.

This fiesty seventy-something year-old was a real kick, happy to take a bit of time from her work to tell us about the daily routine of Hakka women ('We've got to be up and out here early, working. Our men sure arent!'), the simple Hakka diet ('We don't eat anything too complicated. We take vegetables, we stir-fry them, we take meat, we stew it. That's it.'), and the virtues of hard work ('Look at me - I'm so healthy! It's because I work everyday. I don't want to sit at home and get old.'), and to help me with my Chinese.

Just as quickly as she dove into conversation with us she packed up her motorcycle and bid us farewell.
'OK, I'm going.My family is waiting for me to make breakfast.' It wasn't even 7:30am.

We hopped back on our bikes and headed away from town, past more wild lotus ponds and taro fields. Half an hour later we were in a one-street village where we followed our noses to a griddle packed with doughy pillows steaming away in a water bath.

As soon as were inside the shop, enveloped in a bear hug of wheaty, porky steam, we realized we were ravenous. The shuijian bao (similar to Shanghai's shengjian bao, but larger and doughier) still had 20 minutes to go, but we were sure the wait would be justified. And we were right.

Spilling scallions, Chinese chives, and chopped pork, they were crispy, chewy and -- yes -- a little greasy, but only in the best possible way.

As we were enjoying our bao the shop's proprietess fired up the griddle for another local specialty: migua jian,

rice flour and pumpkin 'pancakes'.

By the time we'd finished our bao we weren't hungry in the least, but we don't regret making room for these griddle cakes. 

Eaten with a la jiao of dried chilies, black beans, and Worcestershire sauce-like black vinegar, they were an intriguing combination of sweet and savory, salty and hot and sour -- something like dessert and main course rolled into one. 

These two treats were on our minds as, three hours later, we boarded a bus for Taichung, wishing we had another or day or three to spend in Meinong.

No street names, no details - but the noodles, wild lotus, and donggua feng can be had at the restaurant right across from the Meinong bus station.