Food, Red Cliff, knitting, and Ooku picture!
Even more random things:
And now, giant pictures of my favorite spread from Ooku, food, knitting, food, some scenery, food, TAKESHI KANESHIRO, food, TONY LEUNG, and more food.
One of my favorite spreads in Yoshinaga Fumi's Ooku. The hand in the picture is the (female) shogun's ^____^.
Socks for my dad!
There's this Italian place here that mixes your risotto in a giant round of parmesan! I love it! Mine was chestnut and scallop risotto.
Sweet pizza! Cheese, raisins, and almonds, I think. It was actually really good, contrary to what I thought when I first saw it.
Giant lightly blanched cabbage leaves marinating.
Giant cabbage leaves, spread out in preparation for rolling! The insides include carrot, jellyfish, mushrooms, and celery.
The completed cabbage roll!
Fish soup with turnip.
Sesame sauce noodles with chicken shreds on top.
The nicely plated cabbage rolls! These were really good and I want to make them again. They're served cold, and they're wonderfully crunchy and almost have a sweet-sour taste to them (the marinade has sweet soy sauce and vinegar and other stuff), and very good for a summer meal.
Ground pork mixed with bits of water chestnut in soup.
This is what the aforementioned ground pork looked like before it was poured into a bowl. The soup is mixed in with the ground pork prior to cooking, and the steaming separates the soup from the meat.
Fried chicken thigh in a sweet-sour-spicy sauce on a bed of shredded cabbage. OMG. This sauce was also really good!
Waffles! Alas, they look better than they taste, although they were still pretty good. The batter was a little too heavy though.
I love random things about Taiwan, including the fact that little yogurt places or shaved ice places will often have a teeny sink in a random corner so people can wash their hands. So handy! (The places are usually small and almost like a road stand, so there are no bathrooms.)
More beef noodle soup! This one's from Yong Kang Beef Noodles, which is apparently famous. I plan on trying the place next to it (Old Chang's Beef Noodles), which is also apparently famous. The beef at this place was excellent and fell apart nicely with a lot of chewy tendon stuff, but I thought the noodles and the soup were only so-so.
My mom got a dish with pickled veggies and pork bits.
And I got to see Peking opera! Not really an entire opera; the show was called "Night of the Concubines" because it had a piece on Yang Guifei getting drunk because the emperor turned her down for another concubine, and one on "Farewell My Concubine" (the original, not the movie). I have discovered that, like so many things, Peking opera makes so much more sense with subtitles! The visual language was also very interesting, and I was actually more accustomed to it than I thought I would be. Of course, I had gone in thinking I would be completely lost and not understand anything. Also, the company we saw does more modern versions of Peking opera, so they may have also made the texts more accessible (they do Peking opera versions of King Lear and Macbeth that sound very awesome.)
Sadly, the guy lead was sick that day, so my mom said he didn't sing as well as he usually does. He also didn't come out after the show for pictures and autographs. But the female lead was cool (that's her in the picture).
Remember how I said brown sugar is popular right now? Brown sugar mochi! Nothing inside, just covered with a brown sugar powder.
My mom's squid-ink pasta with lobster inside. Very tasty.
My appetizer: asparagus salad.
My mom's friend treated us and some other people to a fancy steak dinner at a fairly new steak place in Taipei. We ended up splitting orders so everyone got small bites of three kinds of steak. This one is slow cooked something. I liked the French mustard and the mustard seed sauce in particular.
The place had four types of salt for your steak! I cannot quite remember what they were. I think the first from the left is French, the orange one is Spanish, the next one is rose-infused, and the last might be Hawaiian. To be honest, they mostly just tasted salty to me.
Another piece of steak! OMG. I think I had more beef that lunch than I usually eat in an entire month. It was good, but by the third small piece, I had nearly keeled over from too much beef. Clearly my eating habits have changed a lot, as in college, I would have had no problem with 8 oz. of steak.
The dessert looked so good that I, uh, took a bite before remembering to take a picture. But! Chocolate souffle! I feel justified in my excitement! Chocolate souffle that I did not make! With vanilla sauce (middle) and a strawberry souffle and two little meringue sticks. So good! I love chocolate souffle so much!
Someone carving duck! I was very amused by how the head was just poking out of the guy's grip.
For Yoon: Spork of Vegetative DOOM! (I think everyone else at the table stared at me even more than usual for taking a picture of the serving silverware.)
This is Li Jin, an old dou hua place in Hsinchu. Dou hua is some kind of bean curd product, very soft, and it's usually eaten in a sweet syrup with toppings. The syrup can be heated, chilled, or turned into shaved ice, which is how I like it. I like it best with peanut and tapioca pearls.
Alas, they ran out of pearls that day, so I had to settle for peanut. Still! Very tasty, and the first time I've had it in years!
Roosters outside of the Hakka restaurant we went to.
Interior of the Hakka restaurant. By the time we got inside, it was pouring, so I appreciated the roof even more than usual.
Betel nut flower buds, stir-fried (the white things). I really like them, although this place's wasn't quite as good as another place's up in Yangming Mt.
These interesting deep-fried tofu things. The sauce? I thought it was tonkatsu sauce, but nope! It's chocolate syrup! The inside was slightly sweet as well, though I have no idea what else was in it besides the tofu.
Deep-fried wee river fish in a sweet-sour sauce at the Hakka place. Really good! We ended up getting a second dish because someone else and I ended up liking it so much, but the second batch wasn't as good, as it wasn't as crunchy.
Mochi!
Salmon yaki onigiri (clearly, we have moved on from the Hakka place to a Japanese place).
Fried chicken! Or pork! Who cares! It is breaded and fried and therefore good.
Steamed salmon rice.
Giant broiled fish.
Beef for the sukiyaki!
Veggies for the sukiyaki! I am sad you can't see the four different kinds of mushroom there were.
Sukiyaki pot in progress.
Katsu curry that my mom got.
The Very Strange Vegetable that came with the katsu curry my mom got. We think it is broccoli, although my mom didn't eat the top because I freaked her out with my comments. I think other people couldn't figure out what it was either, as I saw several of them left on otherwise empty plates throughout the food court.
My croquette omu-rice curry! I had to get omu-rice after watching so much Sweet Relationship, since the characters keep making it. It is in that category of Asianized Western food that I so love (the rice is cooked with ketchup), which includes tuna waffles, tuna pizza, and "French" stewed beef with white rice that must be shaped like an upside-down bowl with a few black sesame seeds on top. Sometimes I am this enthusiastic about Westernized Asian food as well (I don't care, I like cream cheese and avocado and whatnot in sushi), though sometimes I mock it greatly (*cough*PandaExpress*cough*).
Bi Tan, which I think is in Yi Lan province. It's a little vacation place, and we were here for.... THE TAIWAN PREMIERE OF JOHN WOO'S RED CLIFF!!!! (If you can't tell, I was VERY EXCITED!!!!)
Bridge over the river at sunset. Alas, pretty much all my pictures from this night are going to be awful, as I have shaky hands that are singularly unsuited for night picture-taking.
Red carpet! Dude! I would have felt vaguely important except everyone was just hanging around to try and catch a glimpse of John Woo, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Tony Leung, Chang Chen, or Lin Zhi-Ling. (One of my dad's friends works at a company that sponsored the premiere and therefore got his hands on tickets.)
The hordes of people waiting outside, probably to see Takeshi Kaneshiro.
I mentioned the blurry photos, right?
Really blurry photos of a dancing troupe.
So blurry that I am going to pretend it's artistic photo of the view of the bridge at night.
Even worse photos! But! I forgot who the woman on the left is; she's some media person who often hosts star events. The woman in a pink dress is Lin Zhi-Ling, then Takeshi Kaneshiro, John Woo, Tony Leung, and Chang Chen.
I feel like I should have been more excited to see them, but you couldn't see anyone's faces (although we brought binoculars, so there), and it was this long boring ceremony of presenting things and whatnot. From what I could see in the binoculars, everyone on stage looked extremely bored as well, and I felt really bad for them, as they have probably already done a Hong Kong premiere. Also, even though it was cooler for Taiwan, it was still hot and muggy, and everyone was in formalwear.
In the end, I got more excited by the presence of the drummers! Takeshi Kaneshiro is very tall and skinny, and I think he was too skinny and his hair was too long, because he did not look that hot. Well, until he laughed at something, and then he was extremely cute! But mostly, he stood around looking bored. Tony Leung looked better, though also bored.
And then, fireworks, which scared everyone!
I didn't get to get signatures or take pictures with the actors, since they all went off to eat dinner instead of watching the movie (probably for the nth time). But John Woo was nice enough to come up and say a few words before the movie started.
I don't particularly remember what he said, only that it took a lot of money and time to get the film made, and that it sounded like a labor of love. And that the movie was in two parts, with the second part coming out during New Year. The movie itself I am extremely fond of, though a lot of that is probably just childhood fondness for Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Zhuge Liang stories.
Then we went to KFC to use the bathroom, ha. I got two Portuguese egg tarts there, one brown sugar mochi flavored, one Earl Grey tea flavored. I haven't had the Earl Grey one yet, but the brown sugar one was surprisingly good! You can sort of see the brown sugar mochi layer in the photo, and it was all melty and hot. I think I still like the plain ones best though.
And finally, memorabilia from the premiere! Everyone got a feather fan because of Zhuge Liang and because we sat outside (what were the planners thinking? It is Taiwan! In the summer!), a fancy schmancy invitation, and a little porcelain business card holder. I was going to say that twelve-year-old me would have wandered around waving my fan, pretending I was Zhuge Liang, but current me did that too.
- I forgot how noisy summers here are; the cicadas hum day and night, the buzz so constant that it becomes background noise after a few minutes. I remember how much I laughed when New Jersey was making a big deal over cicada season there, which apparently only happens once every seventeen years. They can have the cicadas! Well, I don't mind the noise, but occasionally one dies and falls out of a tree, and let me tell you, those are some ginormous, UGLY bugs!
- After fifteen years or so of being fed very good wine by my dad the wine freak oenophile, I have discovered that I seem to like Bordeaux. This makes me feel somewhat better, as the first wine I figured out I liked was German Rieslings, which are sweet and taste like grape juice and are apparently highly unsophisticated. Now I can say I also like fancy expensive wine as well! (On the other hand, I still cannot tell you anything about chocolate overtones or berry smells or notes of oak or whatnot.)
- I may, amazingly, be burning out on tdramas! At least, aside from Mars, which I am now obsessed with as in I flip through the manga once I watch a few eps and then read ahead a little then try to convince myself that going to bed at four in the morning to watch another episode is not worth it. On the other hand, most of the other tdramas I have tried sort of suck. Or, they don't suck completely, but they're also not excellent. For the record, I don't think it's anything intrinsic in the Taiwan-ness; much like the manhua here, I think it's because the industry is still very young and therefore doesn't have as much mature work. Plus, Sturgeon's Law applies even more when the quantity availble is small, IMO.
- It is still REALLY hot and muggy.
And now, giant pictures of my favorite spread from Ooku, food, knitting, food, some scenery, food, TAKESHI KANESHIRO, food, TONY LEUNG, and more food.
One of my favorite spreads in Yoshinaga Fumi's Ooku. The hand in the picture is the (female) shogun's ^____^.
Socks for my dad!
There's this Italian place here that mixes your risotto in a giant round of parmesan! I love it! Mine was chestnut and scallop risotto.
Sweet pizza! Cheese, raisins, and almonds, I think. It was actually really good, contrary to what I thought when I first saw it.
Giant lightly blanched cabbage leaves marinating.
Giant cabbage leaves, spread out in preparation for rolling! The insides include carrot, jellyfish, mushrooms, and celery.
The completed cabbage roll!
Fish soup with turnip.
Sesame sauce noodles with chicken shreds on top.
The nicely plated cabbage rolls! These were really good and I want to make them again. They're served cold, and they're wonderfully crunchy and almost have a sweet-sour taste to them (the marinade has sweet soy sauce and vinegar and other stuff), and very good for a summer meal.
Ground pork mixed with bits of water chestnut in soup.
This is what the aforementioned ground pork looked like before it was poured into a bowl. The soup is mixed in with the ground pork prior to cooking, and the steaming separates the soup from the meat.
Fried chicken thigh in a sweet-sour-spicy sauce on a bed of shredded cabbage. OMG. This sauce was also really good!
Waffles! Alas, they look better than they taste, although they were still pretty good. The batter was a little too heavy though.
I love random things about Taiwan, including the fact that little yogurt places or shaved ice places will often have a teeny sink in a random corner so people can wash their hands. So handy! (The places are usually small and almost like a road stand, so there are no bathrooms.)
More beef noodle soup! This one's from Yong Kang Beef Noodles, which is apparently famous. I plan on trying the place next to it (Old Chang's Beef Noodles), which is also apparently famous. The beef at this place was excellent and fell apart nicely with a lot of chewy tendon stuff, but I thought the noodles and the soup were only so-so.
My mom got a dish with pickled veggies and pork bits.
And I got to see Peking opera! Not really an entire opera; the show was called "Night of the Concubines" because it had a piece on Yang Guifei getting drunk because the emperor turned her down for another concubine, and one on "Farewell My Concubine" (the original, not the movie). I have discovered that, like so many things, Peking opera makes so much more sense with subtitles! The visual language was also very interesting, and I was actually more accustomed to it than I thought I would be. Of course, I had gone in thinking I would be completely lost and not understand anything. Also, the company we saw does more modern versions of Peking opera, so they may have also made the texts more accessible (they do Peking opera versions of King Lear and Macbeth that sound very awesome.)
Sadly, the guy lead was sick that day, so my mom said he didn't sing as well as he usually does. He also didn't come out after the show for pictures and autographs. But the female lead was cool (that's her in the picture).
Remember how I said brown sugar is popular right now? Brown sugar mochi! Nothing inside, just covered with a brown sugar powder.
My mom's squid-ink pasta with lobster inside. Very tasty.
My appetizer: asparagus salad.
My mom's friend treated us and some other people to a fancy steak dinner at a fairly new steak place in Taipei. We ended up splitting orders so everyone got small bites of three kinds of steak. This one is slow cooked something. I liked the French mustard and the mustard seed sauce in particular.
The place had four types of salt for your steak! I cannot quite remember what they were. I think the first from the left is French, the orange one is Spanish, the next one is rose-infused, and the last might be Hawaiian. To be honest, they mostly just tasted salty to me.
Another piece of steak! OMG. I think I had more beef that lunch than I usually eat in an entire month. It was good, but by the third small piece, I had nearly keeled over from too much beef. Clearly my eating habits have changed a lot, as in college, I would have had no problem with 8 oz. of steak.
The dessert looked so good that I, uh, took a bite before remembering to take a picture. But! Chocolate souffle! I feel justified in my excitement! Chocolate souffle that I did not make! With vanilla sauce (middle) and a strawberry souffle and two little meringue sticks. So good! I love chocolate souffle so much!
Someone carving duck! I was very amused by how the head was just poking out of the guy's grip.
For Yoon: Spork of Vegetative DOOM! (I think everyone else at the table stared at me even more than usual for taking a picture of the serving silverware.)
This is Li Jin, an old dou hua place in Hsinchu. Dou hua is some kind of bean curd product, very soft, and it's usually eaten in a sweet syrup with toppings. The syrup can be heated, chilled, or turned into shaved ice, which is how I like it. I like it best with peanut and tapioca pearls.
Alas, they ran out of pearls that day, so I had to settle for peanut. Still! Very tasty, and the first time I've had it in years!
Roosters outside of the Hakka restaurant we went to.
Interior of the Hakka restaurant. By the time we got inside, it was pouring, so I appreciated the roof even more than usual.
Betel nut flower buds, stir-fried (the white things). I really like them, although this place's wasn't quite as good as another place's up in Yangming Mt.
These interesting deep-fried tofu things. The sauce? I thought it was tonkatsu sauce, but nope! It's chocolate syrup! The inside was slightly sweet as well, though I have no idea what else was in it besides the tofu.
Deep-fried wee river fish in a sweet-sour sauce at the Hakka place. Really good! We ended up getting a second dish because someone else and I ended up liking it so much, but the second batch wasn't as good, as it wasn't as crunchy.
Mochi!
Salmon yaki onigiri (clearly, we have moved on from the Hakka place to a Japanese place).
Fried chicken! Or pork! Who cares! It is breaded and fried and therefore good.
Steamed salmon rice.
Giant broiled fish.
Beef for the sukiyaki!
Veggies for the sukiyaki! I am sad you can't see the four different kinds of mushroom there were.
Sukiyaki pot in progress.
Katsu curry that my mom got.
The Very Strange Vegetable that came with the katsu curry my mom got. We think it is broccoli, although my mom didn't eat the top because I freaked her out with my comments. I think other people couldn't figure out what it was either, as I saw several of them left on otherwise empty plates throughout the food court.
My croquette omu-rice curry! I had to get omu-rice after watching so much Sweet Relationship, since the characters keep making it. It is in that category of Asianized Western food that I so love (the rice is cooked with ketchup), which includes tuna waffles, tuna pizza, and "French" stewed beef with white rice that must be shaped like an upside-down bowl with a few black sesame seeds on top. Sometimes I am this enthusiastic about Westernized Asian food as well (I don't care, I like cream cheese and avocado and whatnot in sushi), though sometimes I mock it greatly (*cough*PandaExpress*cough*).
Bi Tan, which I think is in Yi Lan province. It's a little vacation place, and we were here for.... THE TAIWAN PREMIERE OF JOHN WOO'S RED CLIFF!!!! (If you can't tell, I was VERY EXCITED!!!!)
Bridge over the river at sunset. Alas, pretty much all my pictures from this night are going to be awful, as I have shaky hands that are singularly unsuited for night picture-taking.
Red carpet! Dude! I would have felt vaguely important except everyone was just hanging around to try and catch a glimpse of John Woo, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Tony Leung, Chang Chen, or Lin Zhi-Ling. (One of my dad's friends works at a company that sponsored the premiere and therefore got his hands on tickets.)
The hordes of people waiting outside, probably to see Takeshi Kaneshiro.
I mentioned the blurry photos, right?
Really blurry photos of a dancing troupe.
So blurry that I am going to pretend it's artistic photo of the view of the bridge at night.
Even worse photos! But! I forgot who the woman on the left is; she's some media person who often hosts star events. The woman in a pink dress is Lin Zhi-Ling, then Takeshi Kaneshiro, John Woo, Tony Leung, and Chang Chen.
I feel like I should have been more excited to see them, but you couldn't see anyone's faces (although we brought binoculars, so there), and it was this long boring ceremony of presenting things and whatnot. From what I could see in the binoculars, everyone on stage looked extremely bored as well, and I felt really bad for them, as they have probably already done a Hong Kong premiere. Also, even though it was cooler for Taiwan, it was still hot and muggy, and everyone was in formalwear.
In the end, I got more excited by the presence of the drummers! Takeshi Kaneshiro is very tall and skinny, and I think he was too skinny and his hair was too long, because he did not look that hot. Well, until he laughed at something, and then he was extremely cute! But mostly, he stood around looking bored. Tony Leung looked better, though also bored.
And then, fireworks, which scared everyone!
I didn't get to get signatures or take pictures with the actors, since they all went off to eat dinner instead of watching the movie (probably for the nth time). But John Woo was nice enough to come up and say a few words before the movie started.
I don't particularly remember what he said, only that it took a lot of money and time to get the film made, and that it sounded like a labor of love. And that the movie was in two parts, with the second part coming out during New Year. The movie itself I am extremely fond of, though a lot of that is probably just childhood fondness for Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Zhuge Liang stories.
Then we went to KFC to use the bathroom, ha. I got two Portuguese egg tarts there, one brown sugar mochi flavored, one Earl Grey tea flavored. I haven't had the Earl Grey one yet, but the brown sugar one was surprisingly good! You can sort of see the brown sugar mochi layer in the photo, and it was all melty and hot. I think I still like the plain ones best though.
And finally, memorabilia from the premiere! Everyone got a feather fan because of Zhuge Liang and because we sat outside (what were the planners thinking? It is Taiwan! In the summer!), a fancy schmancy invitation, and a little porcelain business card holder. I was going to say that twelve-year-old me would have wandered around waving my fan, pretending I was Zhuge Liang, but current me did that too.