WHAT’S THE SCOOP ON THE FOOD?!

These are some of the fruits we have tried:

Cherimoya (Chirimoya, in Spanish) or custard apple: love it!

Yellow watermelon: the red one is sweeter.

Dragon fruit: interesting, but I can live with it.

Dumplings (steamed): loved them the first week, now not so much...

Well, we think we haven’t found the real treasures yet. There is lots of food to buy in the street. We are one block from the back gate of the university (there is a real gate that closes at night, blocking cars and motorcycles from coming in).

The Back Gate.

At that corner you have restaurant after restaurant, besides a good number of convenience stores (7-Eleven, Hi-Life, etc.).

The restaurants are all small, poorly planned, unattractive little places. Most of them have the kitchen at the front, so they are cooking in the open air, some of them have a door, so you can buy your food, go in and sit down with AC to eat it. The ones that are more like real restaurants are more expensive. There is one so called Italian restaurant (“Sidewalk”) that we like because it’s new, very clean and vegetarian. The food it’s far from being Italian, but we give some of their dishes a “B” (we, as teachers, give everything a grade). They supposedly have “gelatto” (Italian ice-cream)…I don’t know what’s wrong, if the recipe or the temperature they keep it at (probably both), but it’s all crystallized, I mean icy. Anyway, you don’t come to Taiwan to eat gelatto, so back to the local food. Most of what we have tried is greasy, like Chinese food from a regular restaurant in the US. We try, therefore, to eat at home. I cook most nights. I cook very simple meals, with one protein (mainly beans, chicken, fish or tofu), a couple of vegetables and a carbohydrate (brown rice, potatoes or noodles). It’s refreshing to know what’s on your plate and to have no greasy sauce/dressing. Everybody keeps saying “it’s very cheap to eat out, nobody cooks”. We think that it’s true that it’s cheap, but you also get what you pay for. As I said, we hope there are some great meals waiting for us somewhere in Taiwan…And again, Taipei looks much better in this regard as well.

Native things to eat: dragon fruit, mangos, cherimoyas (= custard apple), little rain forest bananas (delicious), papayas, watermelon (red and yellow!) cabbage of all kinds, squash (delicious), little cucumbers, sweet potatoes (too fibrous), fishes that we don’t recognize and therefore don’t buy, eggs, lots and lots of eggs, white fluffy bread (“Japanese” style they call it), tea (that we don’t drink), polluted undrinkable water (we have to drink bottled water).

No native (and for the most part expensive):Milk, butter and cheese, peanut butter (even if it’s Skippy with sugar –the only one available), apples (from Chile), grapes (from California, delicious and affordable, I don’t understand how is cheaper to buy them in Taiwan than it was to buy them in Kansas…some business tricks are quite puzzling). Coffee is yucky (reported by Mike, as I don’t drink it) but there is Starbucks in downtown Jhongli (and Taipei, of course), so Mike bought their grind coffee beans and makes coffee (French press style) at home.

Our breakfast

I have been making our own granola (fun to make and delicious), and oatmeal, as it’s hard for us to try the local breakfast (soup, rice or white fluffy bread). We also eat fruit, usually mango for us, banana and apple for Iggy.

Our lunch:

Left over dinner, or greasy street food.

Our dinner:

Explained above!