Mid-autumn festival with the Xie clan

I was fortunate enough to spend the holidays with the Xie family.

Xie Mama used to babysit Tina when she was a child. Their home is in Yong He - a district made famous by the World Soybean Milk Magnate, a 24-hour breakfast joint that is busy around the clock and imitated around the world.

Xie Mama's grandchildren sat on stools on the balcony around a small grill, cooking sausages, tofu, pork steaks, enoki mushrooms, bamboo shoots, shrimp and fish fillets. The apartment filled with smoke, creating a dream-like feel to the evening as we moved through the white haze.

Xie Mama is a jovial, youthful-looking 72-year-old woman. She wore a loose pink top and khaki capris. Her eyebrows were elegantly arched and her lips rouged with fuchsia. She spoke to me in Taiwanese the entire night despite everyone's gentle chiding and reminders that I did not understand. She has a loud, hearty laugh and when she experiments with English, her intonation rises: "I lubah you?" "Bye bye?"


Tina and I ate sliced guava, honey pear and pomelo which is like green grapefruit. When you cut pomelo, the Chinese use the word "sa" or kill. "With no other fruit do you use this term," Tina said. "You kill the pomelo." We savoured its sweet, floral taste; its flesh breaks apart in your mouth, like how cooked fish meat might flake.

Jack, Xie Mama's eldest son, handed us a bag of black seeds, which I stared at in amazement. It helps with digestion, he said. The black, shiny bits were shaped like the bottom halves of pandas or like bull heads. We broke the hard hulls with our molars and then ate the white, potato-like insides. (A search on The Google later revealed that they are water caltrops.)

Xie Mama's eldest daughter came to visit with her precocious daughter. An aunt gave the girl an orange sucker. "It's shit candy," Jack said.
"What?"

I looked at it and sure enough, it was shaped like a pile of poo, except orange. "Why?"
Jack shrugged. "For fun!"

We gourmandized and took turns sitting in a massage chair. We watched Taiwanese soap operas and force fed our glutted selves sweet caramel jiffy pop and green tea mochi balls. Xie Mama told us stories about how they used to lock Tina in the bathroom because she wouldn't eat and when she did, she would store the food in her cheeks like a chipmunk.

It was nice to do something that felt like home.

At 11 p.m., we passed a crowded World Soybean Milk Magnate on the way to Dingxi station. Tina says I stood transfixed by the food like I had just spent a decade starving in jail:




An hour and a half later, an earthquake rattled the country. Safe in my quivering apartment, I thought of all of the food bouncing around that restaurant. Hope none of it was wasted.

Fuel for fatty boomba: those famous dumplings

"Hey mom. Guess where I went today? Din Tai Fung."
"I'm jealous," she says seriously. "You know, you're going to get a double chin while you're there."
The xiao long bao, or steamed pork dumplings, are a famous Shanghai dish; but the Taiwanese say that they make them better.
Me and some new Chinese friends visiting from France decided this weekend to dine at Din Tai Fung, the legendary international restaurant chain that started in Taiwan.
At 1 p.m., the wait is 80 minutes at the one inside the Fuxing SOGO Department store. But we are determined so we take a cab to the Zhongxiao branch where we are seated in about 15 minutes.
Soon, our table is stacked with hot bamboo baskets with shrimp and pork wonton and steamed taro dumplings. The shao mai are cute little volcanos filled with glutinous rice and shrimp and pork.
I am careful not to break the steamed pork dumpling's delicate, almost translucent skin with my chopsticks - you can see the soup pooling at the bottom, weighing the little purse down - and I put the whole morsel into my mouth. All of the hype, the fact that the restaurant's brochure brags that the New York Times listed it as one of the top 10 restaurants in the world in 1993 - does not diminish the experience of the warm broth bursting into my mouth.
They have 40+ eateries around the world, including Japan, China, Australia and the U.S. Hey, how about Toronto? Then visiting Canadians can stop carrying DTF's frozen dumplings onto 20-hour flights.
The meal for the four of us costs about $1250 NTD and we have left overs.
Tina's friend, Leo, who we dressed up like a lion today for his birthday (more on that later), assures me that tons of Taiwanese restaurants serve comparable dumplings. So I now have a new goal, besides perfect grades: Eating as many dumplings in three months as possible.

Tell Sean that I'm coming back a Fatty Boomba

Now that I'm back in university, I'm working on my freshman 15.
All I do is eat. And it is glorious.
Sweet potato leaves tossed in garlic. Fried octopus burgers. Beef noodles. Biscuits filled with broth and minced meat. Mountains of mango chunks and sorbet atop shaved ice (a Taiwanese favourite). Panfried dumplings and soybean milk (the bill was about $1.25).
I had sushi the size of my hand the other day. Each piece looked like a burrito. I ate two and was full. I tried to eat Japanese yams which were crunchy and tasteless but I couldn’t get over the fact that they were covered in a film of snot. Strings of saliva clung to each piece when pulled from the plate.” Think of it like pizza cheese,” Tina’s boyfriend said.