Reason #9 to Love Taiwan - Seasonal Foods

Young snow pears being cultivated in Lishan

I teach a class in Tucheng Industrial Park every Wednesday morning (I know - and it's really hard to get up for that class on days like today with steely skies and bursting wind). On the way there I can barely keep my eyes open as the MRT snakes towards Yongning Station, but on the way back I usually plug in my headphones and play a few TED talks.

This time I listened first to Jennifer 8. Lee talking about the origins of Chinese food (I've been to the Wok and Roll and seen Yanching Palace that she mentions) and then to Jamie Oliver's prize-winning talk on the state of food and obesity in the USA.

Listening to Jamie Oliver caused me to stop at the market on the way home. I picked up snake eggplant, two bell peppers, a pile of sweet potato leaves, half a pound of tofu, two large carrots and a bunch of cilantro (and got some free green onions as one should). The entire bag cost a grand sum of approximately US $3.

It was bought off the back of a wooden cart, sold by the woman who helped grow it.

That's what I love about Taiwan: fresh, seasonal food. One year I decided I absolutely had to make chicken curry for dinner - so I went to the market to buy tomatoes. It wasn't the season for tomatoes, so there wasn't a single one to be found! Not even Wellcome had tomatoes (to be fair, my local Wellcome is quite small). Sure, hard, greenish ones were available at Jason's for three times the normal price, but that was it. No chicken curry until tomatoes came back.

And just try to buy a custard apple, green jujube, dragonfruit or pomelo out of season, or get your hands on cilantro when it's not growing well.

In the USA I felt divorced from the idea of seasonal food. Under the great equalizing fluorescence of the supermarket, I could get almost any fruit or vegetable I wanted from whatever continent could grow it at any time of year. In Arlington, Virginia, if I wanted an orange in January or asparagus in December, I could find it. It might cost more (not punitively so) and taste like a pale imitation of the real thing, but I could get it. It wouldn't even seem that expensive, although while American produce prices don't seem that high when you're there, my $3 bag of healthy goodness sure makes them appear stratospheric by comparison.

Here, if I went to the local wet market right now and asked for, say, a dragonfruit, I'd get laughed at by more than one vendor.

To be fair, not everything in Taiwan is local and you can get out-of-season foods if you are willing to pay more, but that's just it: you do have to pay more and often hunt them down. In the USA the costs might fluctuate slightly but not enough to punish out-of-season cooks who can't (or don't care to) discern flavor differences in less-fresh produce.

I'm not a total mushy-heart though - I don't for a second believe that the market vendors don't sell out-of-season produce because "it's not as good and not as nutritious". They don't sell it because some of them are direct representatives of the farm that grew the food, and you can't sell what you can't grow. Others are middleman vendors who buy from various sources (which is why you can get California and New Zealand fruit in the wet market, too), but they sell mostly seasonal foods because they know the frugal market shoppers - often grandmothers who will bargain you down for a shaved penny - aren't going to pay inflated prices. If nobody will buy it at an out of season price, they won't sell it.

That's what happened with the cilantro, anyway: when it wasn't available I asked why not. One vendor assured me she could get it but she wasn't going to, because "I'd have to charge 75 kuai a bunch and do you think these people are going to pay that?" she said as she gestured towards the crowd. It's the invisible hand of the market, but in this case, it works.

It forces me to think seasonally, cook seasonally and as a result eat seasonally - something that more people should be doing.

Three Photos from Dihua Street's CNY Market

Three Fusion Recipes

Thanks to Michael Pollan, whom I now want to either hug or kick in the teeth for making my culinary life so difficult (wait, so you're saying that fresh squid is good, but squid chips are bad?), I've been shopping a lot more at my local traditional market - the one that sets up in the Jingmei Night Market area except, well, in the morning.

I've been asking the vendors where they get their food from and have been generally pleased with the responses - a fresh, grassy green from Wulai, tender bamboo from northern Taiwan, some sort of tasty bamboo shoot-like thing from Puli, sweet potatoes from Zhanghua, and I've been slowly trying every kind of green available with the exception of ku gua (苦瓜）, which I know I hate.

The good thing is that this forces us to eat healthier because, by cooking our own food, we know what's in it (though we still occasionally chow down on night market goodies, but try to eat fewer octopus dough balls and more sweet potato leaves). It also forces us to eat what's in season.

This presents a conundrum, because while something is in season, it's everywhere, really cheap and really tasty - but there are only so many times and so many ways you can cook the same thing and you start praying for the next season to arrive and sweep away all that food you're sick of eating.

My guide as I seek to create new recipes for locally-grown Taiwanese food has therefore been the simple mantra - "If you are a boring cook, your food will make you bored".

This has resulted in a lot of odd fusion meals. The following three recipes are for the three most successful of these (though all of them have been basically good).

Recipe 1 - Sake Bamboo with Buckwheat Noodles

Ingredients:

tender bamboo shoots or something of similar taste/consistency

about a cup of dry sake per half jin of bamboo (or to taste - I actually use more)

one large red chili

ginger, to taste, sliced into coins

two cloves of garlic per half jin of bamboo

salt to taste

a dash of chopped fresh coriander

1 drippy, generous tbsp Taiwanese honey per half jin of bamboo (clover honey is best, but whatever)

lemon juice (fresh) to taste

about 2/3 stick of butter per half jin of bamboo

one chopped green onion and a bit of chopped yellow onion (or to taste)

buckwheat noodles (duh)

Boil buckwheat noodles in separate pan. Set aside.

This is nice and easy - finely chop/press the garlic, red chili, coriander and various onions, slice ginger into coins, and saute in the butter until it smells good. Add the bamboo, chopped into slender rectangles or half-coins. Saute and make sure it is well-coated in butter. Add sake, lemon juice, honey and salt and stir-fry 'till done. Serve over buckwheat noodles with lots of the reduced sauce.

Wine - a nice, lightish red (I don't really go for white wines) or a Syrah

Dessert - fresh lychees, of course!

Recipe 2 - Mutant Fried Rice/Risotto Thing

Ingredients to serve 2-3

1 cup brown rice

3 regular-size, very ripe tomatoes

3 snake eggplants

2-3 giant mushrooms (you know, those big firm white ones)

Something a little crisper (I use tender bamboo but you could use whatever)

If you want meat, fresh pork is the way to go

paprika or capsicum paste (available at many organic markets)

red chili paste in the little glass bottle (the kind with vinegar, sesame oil and garlic)

chopped sweet onion to taste

a buttload of garlic

salt to taste

a hint of vinegar - balsamic vinegar or a darkish one is best

a good swig of red wine

any other seasonings you want - basil or coriander would work

a big bay leaf

olive oil

To cook - boil 2 cups of water plus a little extra with a touch of salt. Use to cook brown rice, which needs to steep a lot longer than white. Set aside for longer than you think you need to.

In a big pan, warm up olive oil. Roast the garlic in it, then add other seasonings, then onions, then finely-chopped tomatoes (do not peel, and don't use the ones from a can. Seasonal ingredients, remember?) after the onions have softened. Saute until it starts to look more like a sauce than a pile of vegetables. Add chopped tender bamboo or whatever your 'crisp' vegetable is. Add mushrooms chopped into nice fat coins, then eggplant a little later. Season to taste. When the eggplant is almost done, add the brown rice and cook risotto-style until it all melds together and the eggplant is thoroughly cooked. Serve hot.

Dessert: red dragonfruit wedges

Wine: a heavier red - a Malbec, Pinot Noir or Shiraz would be good

Recipe 3 - Green-Wrapped Fish

Ingredients:

a big ol' degutted fish (the red or grayish-kind from Keelung are good - the darker ones hold up better...anything seasonal)

Some sort of green leafy veggie - I got something grassy, but sweet potato leaves, bamboo leaves, those purple/green leaves or anything that is more leaf than stem will work

a couple of fresh limes

Lao Gan Ma black bean pepper paste in oil (this can be hard to find - try Jason's at Takashimaya)

You guessed it - garlic and ginger

A bit of soy sauce and rice vinegar

Sesame oil

A good swig of aboriginal millet wine or sour plum wine (optional)

Chopped green onion and/or coriander

A few sprigs of lemongrass if you can get it

Black pepper

In a low but generously sized cooking pot with a wide bottom and lid, put a bit of water (enough to steam up and cook a fish) and a metal rack which you can buy at any cheapo store in the night market. Throw a little of your seasoning in there, including a bit of the sauces. On the rack, lay out your green leafy veggie, which should be cut so as to have as much leaf and as little stem as possible. It should form almost a sheet with only a few open spaces over the rack. Put fish on rack. Squeeze the juice of as many limes as you like over it and into the gutted area. In a bowl, mix up your other seasonings (except lemongrass or anything you may use that has an obviously odd texture) with all the sauces into one huge pile of gloop. Spread that generously over the fish. Then stick in the lemongrass (if any) or lay it on top. Cover top of fish with more of your green leafy veggie. Set heat on low/medium, put lid on pot, and steam the heck out of it. It's done when a fork run lightly over the top brings up tender chunks of cooked fish meat.

Serve with a side dish - mashed sweet potatoes, a stir-fried green veg or some sort of cooked gourd/melon work well.

Dessert: Custard apple

Wine: I'm gonna say white this time. Pinot grigio.

Enjoy!

Things You Never Knew Until You Looked

We decided to spend the day - sun! Finally! - lolling about Dihua Street and looking at the puppetry (bu dai xi) museum one block over (coming from Nanjing E. Road, turn left at Xiahai temple on Dihua and it's at the end of the lane on the right).

Afterwards we got shaved ice at the old-skool place under the old Dihua market facade; the famous one with only three flavors of ice - red bean, green bean and almond - and coffee around the corner. That's when I noticed that the ugly newer building behind the old market facade had businesses in it! I'd assumed it was closed because the only other time I looked, it seemed abandoned.

The only market I knew about was the fairly small one that doesn't seem to be connected to this one, also with lots of fabric vendors, but including fruit, meat and religious item stores as well.

It's not abandoned - the inside is a massive fabric, clothing making, alterations and clothing accessory/bead/feather/ribbon/string market. You can buy any cloth imaginable - from silver tutu fluff to elaborate Chinese silk to fake black fur with white fur hearts on it to old-fashioned floral-print cottons. You can get the cloth made into almost anything, or get old clothes altered or repaired.

And to think - I used to believe that the best way to shop for fabric at Dihua Street (well-known among locals and in guidebooks as a mecca for cloth) was to go into each separate store and vet their inventory!