My Caffeine Supplies In Taiwan

OK, OK, I’d been lazy in the past few days and hadn’t drawn a thing. Today I had enough; I took out my art supplies and drew my daily Taiwanese caffeine supplies.

Nothing can replace David’s handmade coffee, but since he didn’t come with me, Mr. Brown Blue Mountain Blended Coffee will have to do for now. The bottled Oolong tea is nowhere as good as my Taiwanese High Mountain Tea back home, but it’s cheap and cold and convenient. Actually I can’t brew Oolong at my parents’ place anyway; their water tastes so nasty that I pretty much give up their water and drink the bottled tea instead.

Tempura (甜不辣)

The strange food in the photo was our lunch that my dad bought from a famous local restaurant. The food in the paper cups is what Taiwanese call Tempura, different from the Tempura in Japanese restaurants in the States, a dish originally from Japan’s Guan Dong Zhu (not sure its Japanese name though). It contains various shapes of brownish fish paste (the so-called Tempura for Taiwanese), turnip, fish balls, Zhu Xie Gao or Pig Blood Cake (rice sinked in chicken blood; the black piece in the right cup), fired tofu, and possible other ingredients. All the above material can be easily purchased at various shops, but the sauce, shown in the left cup, is the secret weapon that the chef guard with extreme security. Normally the sauce is red, like ketchup, but this one is darkish brown with complex taste not seen in others. That’s why this restaurant always has a long waiting line.

The proper way of eating Tempura is placing the sauce on top to go with the food. Once you finish the food, you pour the soup (it’s the pot water that was used to boil the food; it’s full of the food flavor) into your empty cup (except the leftover sauce) and drink it. (The bottled tea on the right just to help me digest the food before I could drink the soup.)

Tempura is the typical Taiwanese road stand food, which means that it’s hard to find in the States. The brownish tempura pieces can be found at Korean grocery stores or Asian market, but this particular dish can only be found at Taiwanese restaurants (and usually they don’t taste right). There are many other traditional Taiwanese dishes (mostly road stand food) like this, and that’s why I have to come back to Taiwan from time to time to soothe my craving.