House of Chicken - Taipei

OMG, finally, I'm almost done with Taipei.  Trust me, I ate a lot more than these posts.  But we need to move on!  Malaysia and Singapore were yummy and need some ChubberBlub love too.  So to wrap up Taipei, I present to you - House of Chicken.

House of Chicken

House of Chicken is a restaurant specializing in Taiwanese food and chicken.  Yep, bet you couldn't figure the second part out.  But we veered off from a chicken heavy meal into one that was oyster heavy after I briefly mentioned my love for oyster pancakes to my uncle.  Oysters, he made sure I got them.   I had oysters floating in my blood and eyeballs by the end.  First up, oysters rolls.  They are basically spring rolls stuffed with oysters.  I heart these.  The oysters were fresh and plump, stuffed in a light and crispy fried shell.  Unlike American-Chinese spring rolls, the roll part of these were thin and didn't overwhelm the stuffing.  They just lovingly held the innards together and provided crunch.  Yum

Oyster rolls

Next up, oyster pancakes.  I've never had this kind of oyster pancakes before.  Unlike regular Taiwanese oyster pancakes, House of Chicken made theirs with eggs and not potato starch goo.  It also didn't have the sauce drenched on top.  I prefer their version for sure.  I love fried eggs and I love oysters.  Together, their got exponential delicious culinary power!  What what!

Oyster pancake

And yes, more oyster dishes coming up - braised tofu with oysters and stir fried oysters.  Both were yummy, very homey, like something your grandma would make at home.  That is, if your grandma is Taiwanese.  If not, the the last statement doesn't apply to you.  They saucy nature of the two dishes made them rice's best friend.  Rice likes to be coated in sauces.  So I complied.

Braised tofu with oysters

Stir-fried oysters

On to non-oyster dishes!  Napa cabbage is one of my favorite veggies.  I can eat that stuff forever, raw, stewed, baked, kimchi'ed.  HoC braised theirs.  And I ate it.  Napa cabbage is slightly sweet and the sweetness was brought out by the braising.  Dried shrimp and shitake mushrooms add umami to the dish.  

Braised cabbage

Our other veggie dish was stewed loofah with bamboo innards.  Loofah is a gourd that's usually cooked down with shitake mushroom and other umami inducing stuff into a yummy rice complement.  Bamboo innards are harder to explain...  umm..  they are these fibrous things in between the hollow part and the outside part of the bamboo.  I love these things.  They are kind of crunchy and have a very slight bamboo flavor.  Another win.

Stewed loofah with bamboo innards

And here are the rest of our dishes - fresh shrimps.

Shrimps!

3 color chicken - which was basically regular chicken prepared 2 ways and a black skin chicken.  Did you know that black skin chickens actually have white feathers?  Yep, true story.  

3 color chicken

And finally, fresh bamboo shoot soup.  Fresh bamboo shoot tastes 100% different from the stuff you get from a can (the kind they put in everything at Chinese restaurants).  Fresh is amazing and has a flavor that I dream about.  I can't even explain it.  It tastes fresh, clean, spring-like, and sweet.  Sorry, that sucks.  JUST GO EAT IT! They are available in the states now!  Go go go!!!  

Fresh bamboo shoot soup

I think we might have eaten other stuff, but I forgot to take pics and so have conveniently forgotten everything else.   But shoot, that should be enough for you to run to House of Chicken when you go to Taipei.

Taiwanese Breakfast

Oh man, at the rate I'm blogging about my trip to Asia, by the time I'm done, it will be time for another vacation.   

It's very hard to find Taiwanese style breakfast in NYC, so I was super excited to eat it everyday in Taipei.  There are two main types of Taiwanese breakfast, the first  is soy milk or rice milk with different types of pancakes.  My favorite type of pancake is a flat sesame pancake stuffed with scramble eggs.  So simple, but dang is it good.  I loved the chili sauce the random breakfast place we went to (every morning for 3 days straight.  Yep, I'm that loyal, or lazy/boring, whatever).  It was all garlicky and stuff.  Don't thank me for my awesome descriptions!  Trust me, they will only get awesomer.  Yes, AWESOMER.

Back!

Front + sesames!

Then there was this super crispy tube cracker thing lightly coated with molasses on the inside.  I have no idea what it was when I ordered it.  But how could it be bad coated in sesame.  Plus it was tube shaped!  All good things comes in tube shapes!  Hot dogs!  Straws!  I rest my case.  The cracker thing was yummy.  Even yummier when dipped into soy bean milk.

Tube thing

Oh soy bean milk, I heart thee.  You can get sweet soy milk or salty soy milk.  Salty soy milk?  What?!  That's what I'm imagining you're saying right now.  Then you slam your hand down and say, "preposterous!".  But seriously, I swear, hot salty soy milk exists!  and it's delicious!  You gotta eat it with fried crullers.  Rip up the long fried crullers (not too much flavor on its own) and dunk that stuff in the soy milk.  Risk 3rd degree burns and eat up!

Salty soy milk

The other kind of Taiwanese breakfast is porridge plus random stuff.  This was what I ate growing up.  Lucky me!  Our hotel had it as a part of their continental breakfast buffet!  I topped my porridge with spicy pickled daikons (the yellow stuff), pickled cukes (the black stuff), and stewed ground pork (the ground pork stuff.  There is nothing amazing or bad about this.  It was just warm and comforting.  Reminds me of home.  

Porridge

Shihlin Night Market, Taipei

I showed my coworker my Asia trip food pics on Flickr.  She said, didn't you go for two weeks?  I said, yeah, why?  She then said, it seems you ate enough for 2 months.  Yeah, that's me.  A eater, of massive quantity.  Anyways, my consumption equals more food pics for you!  Yes, I'm always willing to take one for the team!  Our team!  

One night during our stay in Taipei, J-me and I visited Shihlin Night Market, the largest night market in Taipei.  And boy oh boy, is it big.  And crowded.  Shihlin is a maze of little streets lined with a million stalls, selling everything - food, clothes, toys, whatever.  Crazy.  Crazy delicious that is.

Shihlin Night Market

I smelled something so familiarly stinky as soon as we stepped into the heart of the market.  omg, OMG, O-M-G, the unmistakeably garlicky, ferment-y smell could only belong to stinky tofu!  My heart did a little dance and my mouth did a little salivation.  

Stinky Tofu!

There are two main type of stinky tofu preparation - fried or in broth.  For the faint-hearted, acquaint yourself with the fried kind before venturing into the broth kind.  Anything fried is pretty much guaranteed to be good, so you can't go wrong there.  We got an order of fried stinky tofu and topped it off with spicy pickled cabbage, or Taiwanese kimchi, as I like to call it.  

Fried and Broth

 

The tofu was fresh out of the deep fryer.  We got a spicy sauce to eat with it and to add on to the garlicky-ness.  Even though the tofu was deep fried, it did not taste at all heavy or greasy.  Dang was it good.  The tangy and spicy cabbage cut thru the fried tofu.  I love that combo.  I could have eaten it all night, but I knew there was more food to cover.

My prize

Next up, I spotted a tiny restaurant with 4 seats advertising oyster pancakes.  Yeah, so I pretty much had oyster pancake in one form or another everyday during the first 9 days of our vacation until I finally decided that I will not die from oyster pancake deprivation if I don't eat it everyday.  But whatever, I like oysters okay?  I like them in pancake form okay?  We order the oyster pancake and water spinach sauteed with lamb and satay.  Both were good, but not amazing.  The pancake could have used more oysters.  I thought the potato starch pancake part was a little too heavy handed, so the end result was more tough than softly chewy.  

Tiny restaurant

Oyster pancake

The water spinach and lamb dish had a good flavor, but it was too watery/saucy for my preference.  Some lamb pieces were kind of tough while others were tender.  So it was a hit or miss.  But the water spinach was yummy sauteed in satay.   We also felt slightly healthy for getting some veggies in our system.

Water spinach and lamb in satay sauce

We also each had our own bubble tea along the way to wash down a couple of other snacks before we spotted our final and most tasty stand of them all.  One of the other snack we got was a popiah - a fresh spring roll (as in, soft skin, unfried) stuffed with pork, bean sprouts, jicama, cilantro, and chopped peanuts.  A sweet and spicy sauce was drizzled in it before the whole thing was wrapped into a humongous burrito like structure and consumed.  I totally forgot to take a pic before I inhaled the thing.  Boo me.  The other snack was called "big sausage wrap around little sausage".  That was literally what it was.  Think of a hot dog.  Now replace the bun with a blood sausage and the hot dog with a Taiwanese sausage.  Yep, cholesterol is clearly low on my priority list.  That was yum but no pic was taken.  Boo me again.

And finally, we encountered the most delicious thing of our night.  J-me and I walked by a stall with a ridiculous line.  It piqued our interest.  Long line = delicious food, right?  Right.  Unless you're Magnolia.  In that case, long line = lame.  We gambled that this stall's long line would equate to happy epicurean experience.  Plus they sold black pepper pancakes, not cupcakes.  So we got in line with the rest of the world and waited patiently for the most delicious pancake ever.

Black pepper pancake

We got one fresh from a tandoori-like oven.  No joke, that thing was friggin hot.  We bit thru the sesame encrusted crust, burned our mouth, and was rewarded with the most tender patty ever.  The black pepper flavor was strong but is mellowed out by the slight sweetness of the crust.  There was so much meat juice trapped in the pancake.  Oh man, meat juice.  We slurped that sucker up.  Screw you, inferno-like temperature.  I ain't afraid.  I wish I can eat those pancakes everyday.  Even better, I wish I can alternate between oyster pancakes and black pepper pancakes.  mmm...

I Eat Din Tai Fong

Asia trip is over.  Sad.  So many foods consumed.  But still, so many more foods left behind.  I wish I could have packed extra stomachs with my extra socks.  Even without supernatural packing capabilities, I think I made my parents proud by consuming 3x the recommended nutrition.  I'm going to talk about some of the stuff I ate over the next few weeks, but not in any particular order, just whatever my fancy strikes.  I follow my fancy and you shall too.

Our last day in Taipei, we ate at the famous Din Tai Fong in SOGO - an awesome department store with awesome food courts.  Food courts in Asia rock!  Why can't we have them here?!  You can get real food, as in non-fast food, for super cheap and fast.  They are also ginormous so everyone can find something to eat.  But anyway, I digress.  

Making dumplings

Din Tai Fong's specialties are their dumplings and other dough based food products.  So of course, we had to over-order.  We started with a couple of apps - chilled spicy cukes and pickled cabbage with pork.  

I love any types of cucumber salad and this one was good in my tummy too.  It was fresh, crunchy, refreshing, and garlicky.  Garlicky = yay!

Cukes

We ordered the pickled cabbage because 1. it's dope, 2. we got a noodle soup which I'll get into later that goes with pickled cabbage like whipped cream and strawberries.  The pickled cabbage is tangy which is mellowed out by the pork.  I love Taiwanese food.  Just. Love.

Pickled cabbage and pork

To nourish our bodies, we also got greens, stir fried.  I love these veggies (we, the Taiwanese, call them A-tsai or A-veggies).  I have no clue what they're called in English, but if you know, do share your knowledge!  These veggies are awesomely tender with a tiny hint of bitter.  I love.

A-tsai

Din Tai Fong is known for their soup dumplings (shiao long bao), they are stuff of legend.  My dad once told me that each dumpling has exactly 18 folds (or something like that) on top.  Yes, legendary, I tell you.  We got the crab and pork soup dumplings.  OMG, were they juicy, or soupy, whatever.  They were delicious.  The crab flavor was strong but in that fresh oceany briny way.  The skin was thin but still got a chewy bite.  I can bathe in the soup forever.

Soup dumplings

Soupy!

We also got the steamed veggie dumplings.  When a veggie dumpling is made right, it can be better than meat dumplings.  I mean it, and I'm a carnivore.  These dumplings were made right.  The skin was chewy, just the reason why I love a good steamed dumpling.  The insides were a combo of different veggies, shitake, and rice stick noodles.  Oh sooo good...

Veggie dumplings

Insides!

I shall stop here to let you know that there were just 2 of us at lunch, as in, just 2 stomachs.  I warn you now, please do not be frightened by the amount of food we consumed.  Okay, with that disclaimer, let's move on.

Next up, fried pork chop!  Taiwanese pork chop is the best.  If you've never had it, run to the nearest Taiwanese restaurant and pick one up.  The pork chop is cut thin and i think pounded to tenderize.  Then they coated it in a yummy spice mixture, heavy on the pepper.  Then the whole thing is fried.  Fried pork chop = genius.

Fried pork chop

Finally, we consumed a beef noodle soup.  Can't come to Taipei without indulging in the national pastime - slurping beef noodle soup.  Din Tai Fong's version includes hand pulled noodles (nice and chewy, I approved) and a fragrant broth.  I love the anise-y broth.  Anise has almost a sweet flavor which melds well with the tender beef pieces.  I'm no expert in beef noods, which inspires passionate arguments among the Taiwanese, but I liked Din Tai Fong's version.  Liked it enough to leave no slurp behind.

Beef noodle soup

Oh wait, I lied.  There was one more "finally".  Finally, we consumed an eight treasure rice.  ETR is a common Chinese/Taiwanese dessert.  It's sticky rice steamed with a bunch of stuff, including red bean paste, lotus seeds, and whatever other stuff that adds up to 8 treasures.  It was good, tastes like all other ETR I've had.

8 treasure rice

Din Tai Fongs are a huge chain now.  There is one in LA that I went to a long time ago.  But for some reason, the meal I had in Taipei was much more memorable and delicious.  I wish I can get those dumplings shipped here so I can guzzle the meaty soup by the gallon.  Ahhh... Taiwan.  I shall be back.