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Taiwan Trip Recap… Day 0 and 1 (Flight from SFO/Taipei)

I probably had one of the most miserable flights I’ve ever taken. And if anyone knew me back in high school, the flight I had to take with my family to Orlando on our way to DisneyWorld used to be the worst. That one had a screaming baby on it with an indifferent set of parents. Oh yeah… and they had a misbehaving 8 year old who would throw things. Definitely pre-911 days. Oh did I mention we flew through a thunderstorm and lightening hit our plane?

This trip was miserable… more so than being trapped with a screaming baby for 3 hours and getting random things chucked at our heads. Our flight out to Taiwan was miserable. And long. I think Sam dealt with it better than I did. He took his Advil PM and knocked out. I was stuck in a seat where the recline wouldn’t stay reclined and about 4 hours into the flight, we hit turbulence. Not the occasional bump and drop, but constant shaking. Up and down. Side to side. I curled up and whimpered. An hour later I started turning pale. An hour after that I was scrambling to find an airsick bag. An hour after THAT and 4 airsick bags later I wanted this trip to be over. I think Sam blissfully slept through all of it. He woke up a few times to check on me but I was a mess. We had 4 straight ours of side to side, up and down turbulence. Apparently I wasn’t the only person to get sick on the plane. The whole plane was getting sick. Worst part was that I’d look at the time and I’d see that we still had 7 hours left of the flight. Everytime the plane took a deep drop and my stomach fluttered, I could only think about the 35000 feet below us. I didn’t think I’d survive to gorge myself at the night markets.

Since I generally blog about food, I took a quick snapshot of the food EVA served us. Not too shabby!

Dinner consisted of a beef and tomato dish with potatoes (potatoes were subpar) along with Oreos cookies and a fabulous roll!

Post turbulence, I ordered the congee breakfast. I’ve never been so happy to eat airplane congee.

When we landed, I had never been so happy to be on the ground. We grabbed our stuff and disembarked, made it through customs, got our luggage and found my Uncle Steve who woke up at 4AM in Taipei to pick us up. Thank you Uncle Steve. :) He took us back to the Sam’s grandparent’s place in the Tianmu neighborhood of Taipei and we got breakfast across the street. This place is famous for their fried Taiwanese donuts (you-tiao) and their shian-bing. Its super flakey and crisp.

They’re open 24 hours. *drool*

Warm sweet soy milk and a sweet rice ball (they make them into rolls in TW)

And Uncle Steve spoiled us by ordering XLB for breakfast!! XLB!! FOR BREAKFAST!!!! @ 7AM!!! *in love with TW*

Afterwards, Sam went back to his grandparents and I proceeded to head out with Uncle Steve to start my Taipei errands. We had booked our wedding portraits out here in the states and I needed to go pick out the wedding dresses to wear. Since we heard that my cousin Audrey (on my Uncle Daphne’s side of the family) and her mom was also in TW, we met up with them and my first cousin Alice, along with Mom for lunch. And my gluttony trip started:

Shrimp Fried Rice

I don’t know the name of this dish but it was braised silky tofu with a luscious sauce… texture was very similar to agedashi tofu but it was ten times better.

River shrimp sauteed w/ lotus bulb. I would hate to be the assistant who had to sit there and shell/devein all of these shrimp. They were nothing like bay shrimp, even though they were similar in size but the texture was crisper, firmer, and they were sweeter. And they didn’t have a murky ocean-y taste to them. Freshest tasting shrimp I’ve ever had!

Steamed clam broth:

Braised Rock Cod w/ a fabulous sauce

Some sort of chicken stew dish

Sorry for the crappy images, as I got more and more into the meal, I had to be reminded to take pictures… and I ended up snapping one quick one so I could shovel more food into my face instead of taking 10 and hoping for one good picture!

Uncle Steve drove mom, Alice and I to Montmartre Wedding Photography where I proceeded to get shoved into about 15 different dresses. I was so over it by the 3rd hour. Quick drive back up to Tianmu and a dinner with Sam’s grandfather were we had knife cut beef noodle soup (no picture) and I passed out into blissful sleep.

Girl’s Weekend…

Work has been stressful lately… same with our Taiwan trip. I’ve been so exhausted that my dSLR is still sitting in my camera bag. I haven’t touched it since we were in Taiwan, which basically means that I haven’t uploaded/looked at pictures. My blogging is at a minimum and my mind constantly feels exhausted from battling jetlag. I love traveling but jetlag always brings me down. Even with a good bottle of Advil PM, it took me a week and a half to finally get over it. Last night was my first night where I fell asleep naturally at a decent hour (1:30AM) and slept through the night. I feel like some absurd new mother monitering a baby’s sleep.

I feel like I’ve been spiraling downwards the last few weeks and just need a breather to get back on track. I feel like I need a vacation from taking a vacation since Taiwan was filled with seeing relatives and getting our studio wedding photos done. My close friend Jenn and I just finished planning out a quick weekend girl’s getaway up to the Emerald City to get away and recharge our emotional batteries before tackling the stuff going on at work and home.

Not a paid spiel, but I just have to shout the glories of Priceline. I managed to snag us the Seattle Westin, blocks away from the Pike Place Market and next to the heart of the shopping district for only 70 bucks a nice. BOOYAH! Whatever money we save on lodging just gives us more spending money on food. Our adventures of gluttony shall commence soon…

Since I realized that I have my point and shoot camera, I shall make a quick comment on Costco and Taiwan. On our second day in TW, we went to Taichung to visit my dad’s side of the family and prior to hitting the road to go to Chiayi, we stopped by the Taichung Costco. I love Costco. Especially in Taiwan. You can get all sorts of goodies that you can’t get here and besides, there’s something about seeing that guava and passion fruit comes in bulk just trips me out. Also this is where I stock up on my silicon baking paper. 😀

The food court here is equally awesome. Since I was moping over the lack of mangoes, when I saw that the food court offered mango shaved ice/ice cream with frozen mango, I was all over it. Especially when it was less than $3 US.

MMMmmm… Mango Ice Cream. I was a happy camper all the way down to Chiayi… :) Nothing like a bowl of ice cream, mangoes, shaved ice, mango puree to make the hour long drive feel fast.

spring is in the air.

It surprises me how quickly time goes by now. It felt like it was just yesterday that I was ringing in 2010 with the Hsu Family in Houston and now in a blink of an eye, it is already a few months into 2011. We have goals to travel a lot more this year and I feel like I have more time on my hands now that the wedding is behind us. We’ll see what holds for us for the rest of the year!

Standby…

We just finished up our 10 day trip through Taiwan… Pictures need to be sorted and I need to recover from jetlag. Traveling is exhausting; thankfully I was fairly good and unpacked and cleaned up as soon as we got home so I don’t have my luggage to deal with. Unfortunately I’m only halfway through with all the laundry I need to do. Posts and pictures coming soon!

Stalking P-Dub

So my friend Char  introduced me to my latest obsession. Stalking P-Dub. Well, sorta. When I wake up in the morning, instead of jumping out of bed bright eyed and busy tailed, I reach over for my laptop and glasses. Crusty, bleary-eyed I click on my Pioneer Woman bookmark and eagerly see if somehow magically overnight while I was sleeping (and drooling in my sleep dreaming about her recipes) she had updated her blog.

During the day, when I have downtime, I check up on her blog again… waiting for the next update. When I first started reading through, it was sheer torture… staring at her pictures of food and reading her recipes at 10AM, stomach growling waiting for lunchtime. So like I had mentioned before, I roped my friend Jenn into this obsession. Two days into this stalking behavior, she went and bought us the PW Cookbook. (I heart you Jenn! :D) Jenn took it one step further when she texted me one night that PW was going to do a signing in SF. Oh be still my fluttering food obsessed heart! We immediately made plans on our calendar to go see her. And yesterday, we did. And in the spirit of PW, AMEN!

There was a huge crowd to see her; almost like an estrogen festival. I almost expected all of us to hug and swap details and talk about cooking. men. and the divacup.

YAY! After waiting for an hour sitting on our asses, PW showed up! (sorry for icky picture… we were in the Tenderloin neighborhood and there was no way I was hauling my Nikon out there!)


OMG… PW!! I heart your blog!! Can you see the tops of the other PW Groupies? 😀

After standing in line for about 2 hours, we got our books signed. Can I make a note that the organization and the staff that was handling this event was HORRIBLE!? We were given tickets that split us into different groups alphabetically. When Group A was waiting, they already had Group D lined up… We were in Group E and seriously… the line didn’t move… we didn’t move… the line crawled… When we were nearly up to the front, there were people sitting around and poor souls were Group M. If it took 2 hours to go through A-E… I wonder what time Group M fell into bed…


Stalking… successful! 😀

Toro…@ Sushi Tomi again… :D

We still visit Sushi Tomi on a regular basis… which is a good thing since its a healthy meal… but a bad thing on the wallets. Last time we were there, we indulged ourselves and ordered toro. MMMMmmm. It was perfectly buttery… and delicious. Oh yeah… and the obligatory amaebi and uni! 😀

I really wish Sam would tell me when he was going to spoil me so I would remember to lug my geeky camera out with me. Instead, I had to resort to using my ghetto point and shoot. :(

MMMMmmmmmm… Oishi!

Sesame Oil Chicken w/ Somen

Growing up in a really Taiwanese family, we ate a lot of black sesame oil dishes. Mom would saute ginger in sesame oil to infuse it before cooking all sorts of goodies with it… such as chicken, pork, gizzards, liver… just kidding about the liver part. I do however love a good plate full of chicken gizzards fried in sesame oil and ginger.

The weather was cold earlier in the week and I was still under the weather and craving a bowl of hot chicken cooked in sesame oil over somen noodles. I stopped by the local market and picked up two thighs and go to work. Mom’s version was to dice up the chicken and cook the heck out of it. I decided to do it with a twist; pan searing the chicken on my All-Clad so that I’d crisp up the chicken skin before deglazing the pan and making the soup base for the dish. I’m sure my great-grandmother is turning over in her grave right now since when she was making this dish 100 years ago there wasn’t any All-Clad; nor did convection ovens exist. Sorry Great Granny… I updated your dish…

I deboned the chicken thighs and pounded them thin. Since we don’t have a meat tenderizer, I used the back of Sam’s precious special ice cream scoop (who knew that ice cream scoops were good for so many uses!), heated up the sesame oil in my trusty pan and fried my ginger slices until they were crisp. Tossed in the chicken skin side down and let it sizzle and flipped it. I pulled the chicken off and then deglazed the pan with some rice wine and added in the chicken stock and let the whole thing simmer. Simple easy dish… When I sent a picture of the finished product to Mom, she squawked and told me how “un-Traditional” it was… and how I made a simple dish into a complicated thing… oh yeah and I didn’t take the chicken skin off – which was probably going to increase my pant size by 2. Thanks Mom. In the meantime, I’m going to try to figure out how to make this dish in the future with butter. 😀

2011 7×7 List

Time to find my fat pants again!!!

7×7 just released their 100 things to eat before dying. I guess I should keep track of it.

What Vicky Has Eaten

Bounty of Food…

One of my favorite Farmer’s Markets to shop at is the one held on Saturdays at the Ferry Building. Mushrooms galore, freshly shucked oysters, fresh vegetables and random fruits. I love it all!

Oink Oink Oyster Farm…

We had a lovely summery spell last weekend and Sam had a bad case of cabin fever so we drove up to Hog Island Oyster Farm on Saturday. Maybe he was treating me to a nice day trip since I’ve been cooking all these dinners lately. 😉

We drove through SF and had the windows down/sunroof open, music blasting. We stopped by Mel’s Diner for lunch and sadly to say, my diner experience consists of Denny’s and Ihop. Mel’s was pretty decent.

They have cool little music jukebox controls at the booths:

And their milkshakes were awesome. So awesome that it has inspired me to buy ice cream and make milkshakes at home. Needless to say, we’re increasing our pantsizes quite quickly.

I might add.. Mmmm. wedding band. 😉

I ordered two sliders, some breakfast egg one that was scrambled with pastrami topped with jack cheese and a turkey slider. I think it was obvious which one was better:

We went on our merry way up the coast after indulging in some good ol’ American diner food. My only complaint: their service was ridiculously slow. Like. slow. like. molasses.

Hog Island has changed quite a bit from the first time Sam brought me up here. They used to be a super industrial-y oyster farm, no nonsense, no frills shuck it yourself and bbq joint. This time we got there, there was valet parking and a oyster bar! Needless to say, the prices did go up, but the quality and experience was still there. I think we’d still make our annual trek up there to slurp down a few of these suckers.

6 oyters for $15!? Screw that! I’ve always had a blast shucking my own oysters here so I stuck my hand down in their smelly glove (rings and all!) since shucking your own was $8 per person to use the picnic area + cost of oysters. I shucked 50 kumamotos in a row and Sam and I were happy as a clam.

It was gratifying getting these suckers out… I could almost hear them cry. Almost.

I bought two dozen of the small Sweetwater oysters and shucked those to take home… Why?

Cause I had lovely ideas of making an oyster chowder… MMMMMMmmmm…. I saved all the oyster liqueur too… *drool*