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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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