DIY cooking

Sometimes you don't realize you miss something until you have it again.  Recent case in point: bbq.  A couple weekends ago a group of us tried a new grill-your-own restaurant - kind of like the buffet hot pot places but with a grill in the middle of the tables - called Water Frog.

 A whole lotta meat going on here

I ate all my veggies before I took the picture!

There were all sorts of meat and vegetables, sauces, and even desserts.  It was great and the best part is that we didn't have to clean up the mess!

Finding this restaurant was timely as I had just run across these pictures as I was cleaning off my old computer:

vegan bbqing!

fun times with ali, leslie and b!

Most important meal of the day

My breakfast of choice has always been dry cereal. I love cereal. Unfortunately, and fortunately, cereal is in short supply here. I say fortunately because it has forced us to try some new things (good for Jeremiah who isn't in love with plain dry cereal like I am).  We both love these new things. As a result breakfast has recently become one of my favorite meals.

This first one we have had at home, but it took awhile before we found some we knew were not filled with meat: the steamed bun. There is a corner shop that sells them a block away from us and is on our way to school. As a bonus they also have fresh warm soy milk (dòu jiāng). I'm not sure what that other thing on the plate is called, but it was deep fried, greasy and delicious. Add some cinnamon sugar it would have been a churro.

The other breakfast item I have fallen in love with is turnip cake, or lo bao gao. It is made out of shredded daikon, rice flour and water - no turnip as the name indicates. It is pan fried, with plenty of oil, to make it a little crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. Sometimes it has a sauce on it, sometimes it comes plain in a bag. This website shows it being made at home: http://hsustyle.travellerspoint.com/29/.

Picture from here

Here is what it looks like when you buy it at the store:

At home I've been making it thinner to cook it faster:

I have to try to limit my consumption of these good foods as they can't be very healthy for you, but at least they are super cheap.  Not sure I will be able to go back to dry cheerios.

Home sweet home?

First things first, Happy New Year all! We are back in Taiwan (home? seems I call both Taiwan and Oregon home now) and already looking forward to our next break - Chinese New Year. We had a wonderful trip back to Oregon, though there was not nearly enough time for all the people we wanted to see, the things we wanted to do, or the food we wanted to eat (we did get a chance try out this very cool new restaurant in portland called Slappy Cakes. With built-in griddles in the tables, you cook your pancakes yourself. Lots of fun - I recommend you try it if you are in the area). Highlights included lots of family time, snow, homemade cinnamon rolls and vegan cheesecake and of course the general perks of being on vacation - no work, sleeping in, no work, etc.

And on to other news: I wanted to share with you my recent Taiwan doctor experiences. In the last month I've gone to 2 different doctors; nothing serious, just check-ups. Going to the doctor always fills me with a general feeling of dread. Waiting, paying, dealing with insurance, more waiting, forms, trying to get an appointment after work... ug. Compounded with language, not knowing where to go and cultural differences suffice it to say I wasn't any more excited to go to the doctor here than I am in the states. But I sucked it up and went (with Jeremiah by my side as moral support), and am happy to report both experiences were fabulous. I walked in with no appointment, handed over my alien resident card (ARC), my national health card and $150NT (about $5 US) and not more than 5 minutes later I was talking to the doctor - in english no less. They put my health card into a scanner and recorded my information on the chip in the card. At the end, they handed me back my health card, gave me some medicine (no charge) and sent me on my way. Great system.

Curry anyone?

Been reading so much about food in India, it inspired us and we made curry last night. Is it making your mouth water? It should be, because it was delicious! The hardest part was the rice because we don't have a rice cooker yet and the gas stove doesn't do well on a low setting. It was boiling over, the flame kept going out, rice was everywhere. Anyway, despite the fight it turned out wonderful. We added broccoli, carrots, mushrooms and fake meat.
And now, the next day, I'm going to have leftovers. Yum!

Baby it's cold outside

Ok, so maybe it isn't "cold", but it has been getting cooler. We've also acclimated to the warm weather so what used to feel comfortable is now chilly. What better way to warm up and feel in the christmas spirit than enjoying a cup of hot chocolate?


Unfortunately we don't have chocolate soy milk at the store down the street to heat up. But when I remembered my mom used to make us hot chocolate on the stove sometimes with cocoa power I knew we could improvise. With soy milk, hershey's cocoa powder from the import section of our grocery store, left over sugar packets and a pot on the stove we made our own hot chocolate - vegan style.

With warm mugs and A Christmas Carol on the tv we are well on our way to feeling "christmasy" in our new home away from home, though counting down the days until we spend christmas with our family and friends!

more about food

confession - we eat out a lot here. and by a lot, i mean... maybe 5 nights a week. i'm pretty sure i'd eat out 7 nights a week if allison let me. not that we can defend going out that much, especially after cooking so much at home, but i'll try. as vegans, the food here is super cheap. actually, most food is cheap, but the vegetables are cheaper. currently, you can get about 33 new taiwanese dollars (NT$) for 1 US$, which helps (i think... not sure how that works). also, our kitchen is really small and narrow and we don't have an oven. ok, i know those were weak points, but the food is reallllly good.

we live really close to three or four restaurants. there is a thai place, with an english menu, near us called thai yun (first one on the page) that has great water spinach, spicy green beans (best ever), fried tofu with garlic piled on top, and some fried cabbage that allison loves. the only thing holding this back from being our "cheers" is that they can't speaking english, so they don't know our name. right next door to that, there is a japanese place (see: stanky tofu experience) with an english speaking waiter who helps us out. this place has silken tofu, which isn't allison's favorite, but quite a few vegetable options. i think the best part about this one is the atmosphere (pictures later). a couple restaurants down, there is a vegetarian dumpling place (that are boiled, not fried). we'll get to the fried goodness in a second) we had our friend's girlfriend (who speaks/reads chinese) translate the whole menu for us, so we're able to order anything we want. 10 dumplings = US$ 1.33, which is crazy. allison usually gets wonton soup with it and we usually end up spending around $5 for dinner and lunch the next day. my favorite thing about this place is the lady/owner/cook there pretends like i can understand chinese. if it isn't charades, then i don't want to play. she likes to speak chinese a million words a minute to me and then repeat a world 10 times, trying to get the point across. accidentally ordered sauteed and boiled water spinach at the same time. she really didn't want me to get it, but i did she was right. i should learn chinese. in addition to those three restaurants, there are about 10 small little street food carts that are along the side of the road within three or blocks both directions of us. i usually go to one owned by a brother and sister that is amazing. all of it is fried, so we try not to eat there too often (but it is so good, so i go too often). they have fried tofu, gelatin fries, sweet potatoes (sprinkled with strawberry-y sugar), rice brats, broccoli, green beans, corn on the cob... yes, fried, and a lot of other meaty items that scare me. i usually have them smother mine in their chili powder stuff and allison opts for a sweet kind of sprinkled stuff. lately, i've brought the brother, who is around my age, a beer and he has a big smile on his face and then gives me a bunch of stuff for free. i've been using google translator on my phone to tell them things and asking questions, but it is pretty funny because they can't reply back to me.

also... about ten minutes away from us, we've been hitting up indian food once a week. we're currently addicted to a place called little india moslem restaurant. they have five or six veg dishes and each one comes with naan and rice. everything tastes great and we usually get some to take for lunch the next day. another place, a little closer to us, is a place called loving hut which is a chain of restaurants throughout the world with pretty cheap set meals. other than that, we're looking forward to trying spring natural vegetarian restaurant in the next couple of weeks. anyone that is reading this in taiwan know if any other good places to go?

since there are no resources for vegan restaurants in taichung (that are in english) i'm going to start a review blog of the places we go to and try to go to a new one each week or month. i'll plan on posting a few pictures of the places i've mentioned here once i get it going. i'll probably get that going this week and will post the link.  hopefully it will kind of look like stumptown vegans food review site, but we all know it won't.

few random pictures.

sign shop in taichung (looks fun, right virgil?)

morning traffic

rest stop sighting on the way to taipei for volleyball

still love our car

(and spending $75 on gas per month instead of $375)

Carepackage love!

Today we got a fun package in the mail! Jeremiah's parents sent us some goodies and we are so excited! Thank you Lisa and Jerry!!

Part of this care package included a bunch of delicious vegan treats that we definitely have not been able to find here. Our good vegan and "generally vegan" friends selected some of our favorites from Food Fight. We've already opened the kale crisps, the chocolate "whizzers" and the marshmallows - so good! Thank you Drew and Steph!
We love these little bits of home. I might have, maybe, sort of, had a twinge of missing home when I saw these things. OK, I did. Mostly though I just miss the people that sent them and all the others in Oregon and throughout the US. So love to you all!

PS Is it the weekend yet??

Vegan

Being vegan in Taiwan hasn't been difficult - but it's a far cry from Portland where being vegan is easy peasy. We don't have food fight, or voodoo donuts (maybe that's a good thing?) or the ease of all-vegan restaurants, but we have found lots of good food we really enjoy. We have learned how to communicate that we don't eat meat and Jeremiah's pulled out the chicken dance a few times to help this process. Also, we really don't cook. Our kitchen is small and heats up incredibly fast, it's hard to figure out what ingredients are when it's all written in chinese, and eating out is cheap and easy. I've seen this survey around in the vegan blog world so thought I'd fill out for my vegan experience so far in Taichung.

1. Favorite non-dairy milk? Soymilk - haven't found anything else

2. What are the top 3 dishes/recipes you are planning to cook? hmmm.. rice, noodles and more rice.

3. Topping of choice for popcorn? At home I was a popcorn fiend with nooch being the topping of choice. Not here. Microwave popcorn at school is what I've got.

4. Most disastrous recipe/meal failure? this is n/a for me since I really haven't cooked here more than the obvious noodles and rice.

5. Favorite pickled item? bamboo shoots. Not sure if they are really pickled, but something's been done to them.

6. How do you organize your recipes? I don't cook here so there are no recipes. But the internet is where I would go.
7. Compost, trash, or garbage disposal? Trash, but when we take the trash out there is a specific spot just for food waste. I'm not sure what happens to it.

8. If you were stranded on an island and could only bring 3 foods…what would they be (don’t worry about how you’ll cook them)? Peanut butter, grapes, cereal
9. Fondest food memory from your childhood? Grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup and making homemade ice cream

10. Favorite vegan ice cream? I haven't had vegan ice cream here yet, but we did scope some out at Loving Hut restaurant. Excited to try it!

11. Most loved kitchen appliance? a rice cooker once we get one. Was sad to leave behind the kitchenaid food processor, mixer and immersion blender.

12. Spice/herb you would die without? Garlic!

13. Cookbook you have owned for the longest time? Vegan with a Vengeance

14. Favorite flavor of jam/jelly? raspberry jam or preserves. jelly freaks me out.

15. Favorite vegan recipe to serve to an omni friend? something somewhat normal - a pasta dish maybe.

16. Seitan, tofu, or tempeh? Tofu - luckily lots of restaurants have it and it's easy to find at the grocery stores!

17. Favorite meal to cook (or time of day to cook)? Dinner.
18. What is sitting on top of your refrigerator? Our dishes are drying on the dish rack (counter space is limited)

19. Name 3 items in your freezer without looking. Frozen bell peppers, gluten peanutbutter rice balls and vegetarian dumplings.

20. What’s on your grocery list? Fake meat, veggies, fruit
21. Favorite grocery store? matsusei because it's just down the road

22. Name a recipe you’d love to veganize, but haven’t yet. grandma's chicken and dumplings.
23. Food blog you read the most. Or maybe the top 3? Fatfree Vegan Kitchen

24. Favorite vegan candy/chocolate? anything chewy and fruity - hichews are good and come in grape flavor

25. Most extravagant food item purchased lately? ummm.... I can't think of anything right now.

26. Ingredients you are scared to work with? I'm nervous just buying any food since so few have english ingredient lists.

Before, after and another year wiser

Jeremiah's hair has been getting long, really long. When it dries the right way in the morning you can't really tell how long it is because of how curly it is, but when he gets home from school and messes it up, or wakes up on the weekend it looks like this:

Now granted, this is especially "froofed" for the camera and to demonstrate just how long it had gotten (and he would never go to work with it like this), but many times after school or on the weekends during the last few weeks he'd come out of another room looking like this. (These pictures scream "mug shot", don't they?)

Jeremiah goes back and forth with his hair often. He likes it long, then doesn't like it, likes it short, then he doesn't. I see why his dad was so quick to hand the job of Jeremiah's barber over to me. I don't mind cutting his hair though because we made a deal that I get a pair of shoes every time I cut his hair.

After some debate lately of whether to do it or not, he told me to cut it before he changed his mind again.
And now I get to go shopping for my next pair of shoes!


On another Jeremiah note: this week he turned 28! Luckily for me, Jeremiah is an easy going guy who appreciates thoughfulness and originality. I say luckily, because this birthday was a little different than our normal birthday festivities in the states. First, on my end shopping was much harder. We don't give each other big gifts for birthdays, but all my standbys were hard to get here (Wii games bought here don't work in our system, clothes fit differently so I can't pick them out for him, he doesn't really have a hobby here yet ). I also don't have a store I can go to and know I will find something. I ended up going to a pretty big mall and getting lost, which was embarrassing because when you are the only white person people notice when you go by the same store 5 times.

The cake was another obstacle. At home I would bake a vegan cake for him - but we don't have an oven or vegan baking supplies. Nor can you go out and buy vegan desserts (well, maybe you can but I don't know where to do that). So, I went on a mission to find whatever vegan treats I could find. I ended up building a "cake" out of cookies and some make-shift frosting to hold it together. In the end, with a big "Happy Birthday" sign, some Taiwan-fab gifts, a unique (to say the least) cake, and a surprise dinner with a bunch of our teacher friends, I think it was a successful birthday!