小吃 (small eats, street food)

Lots of fun street food experiences in Taipei today! We started off at a breakfast diner with the classic soy milk豆漿, shaobing燒餅, youtiao油條 and fantuan飯糰. Great homey stuff and nice to reconnect with the old breakfast flavours from when Mommy was briefly a summer student in Taipei. Davy and Meg liked the shaobing youtiao the best, with the fantuan coming in a close second, right up until the infamous meat floss肉鬆 was discovered inside the roll. Not sure what is wrong with these two that they don’t like meat floss!

Later on in the day, we were up in Jilong (Keelung) and decided to stop by the main street food market to grab a little bite for lunch. Great aunt took us to a first stall, where they made their own fishcakes from scratch. We watched as they churned the paste, scooped up medium golf-ish sized balls, flattened them into patties, threw them into the deep fryer and then served them up with some special sauce and pickled cucumbers. Good, fresh fare for Davy and Meg’s first real street food experience! We had to beg off the oysters (don’t think the kids would have survived that one) and settled instead on some mini sausages for the second course. At that point, the kids were rather full and so that was pretty much it - they definitely don’t have the Chinese “gourmand” eat-everything-in-sight-that-looks-yummy gene, which will no doubt serve them well in their middle-ages when the old metabolism starts to drop.Read more