Food Intelligence

One of the specialty dishes along the Danshui boardwalk is Age, pronounced Ah-gay (not eye-gay, they may look at you funny, …or not!). Some signs will say Arcade. Because it is like an arcade in your mouth when you eat it. We stopped by this stall for lunch, and had to come back here for dinner because the kids and parents both loved it.

Let’s see, how to describe it. It’s a fried tofu with the insides taken out and substituted with vermicelli noodles and topped with a ground meat/poultry topping. It’s amazing. And cheap. Only thing is, if you get there right when a batch is ready, you’re lucky–especially if there are any left for you. Most likely you’ll need to wait, and it takes about 10-15 minutes for these to cook all the way through. But it’s well worth the wait. Plus you can walk around and order some of the other stuff around, like stinky tofu. Which I think is just a couple stalls down.

Right after you eat Age and before you go eat it again, you can stop by for some candy coated strawberries-and-tomato (Bev says the tomato is gross…not sure why there’s a tomato at the end). And the black dou-hua is nearby as well. Again, limitless possibilities, and if the second floor is open, sit up there because the view is beautiful. Just remember to bring bug spray or you’ll get bit on the face like poor Careese.

Sorry the posts are getting more and more brief. I KNOW if I don’t get through this Taiwan set of pictures that you may not see me post again until next year! Plus, I’m sure I’ll be frequenting these places again this year, so as I refresh myself with the food details, I will add more details to the posts!

Another Chinese specialty (I can’t really say it’s just Taiwan here, because Hong Kong and Singapore do just as good of a job in this department) is dessert. Some of you may be thinking, tofu and beans for dessert? Yes. When you know how to prepare tofu, it can be amazing.  Bean flower is the literal translation for this dessert (dou-hua/dao-hui).  I think I was introduced to this by Bev.  Her dad makes a mean dou-hua.  It’s just fresh tofu in a sweet syrup with some ginger, nothing else.  But it is heaven.  Previous to this experience, I think I only heard about dao-hui when we were on a family trip in Alishan and there was a guy on his loudspeaker touting his “heh-jia dao-hui”, or great tasting bean flower.  Never tried it then.  Now I crave it. 

This dessert dish on the right, you get to choose what to put in there.  I think I just asked for “ba-bao”, or eight treasures, a mix of peanuts, grass jelly, various other jellies and tapiocas, beans, etc.  You can put these treasures on top of ice too, which is what I traditionally do.  But I was indoors, at the Taipei Main Station, so I was cool enough.  I’ll have to look up the name of this place, although I think there’s only one place that sells this stuff AND has a large crowd.  There’s another place that’s better than this up in Dan-shui (Tamshui) – they have black tofu – sounds cool, but it’s black (brown) sugar tofu.  Not really black tofu.  I know, I was kinda bummed too when I found that out.

Forgot to mention, one downside to the Taipei Main Station’s food court – it closes “early” – 10pm.  Back in my college days, we didn’t go out to play until well after midnight, when the sun was down and it was relatively cooler, bowling was half price and karaoke was heavily discounted as well.  So we were eating at 1am, 3am, 5am, etc.  And there were many popular places that stayed open that late as well.  Which meant they didn’t open until like 5pm the next day!  So beware you night owls.

Update – so the food court is called Breeze and the place is called Xiao Nan Men or Little South Gate.  Found the info here.  I frequent this blog when I run out of places to go–she seems to have a good pulse on the types of food I like, and doesn’t even know me!

Update 2 – here’s another shot at some of their dessert selections. I took Bev there as well, stopped by there before hopping on/off the THSR. Pulled it off the DSLR. Other was from the iPhone.