Serious blogs are apparently not supposed to be of the “what I had for dinner last night” variety. Do I care what people think a serious blog is supposed to be about? No! I can think of few things I care less about, in fact.
So here is the ultimate “what I had for dinner last night” post. (Except it was not last night, but some nights ago.) (Oh, sorry, co-bloggers!) People asked for this, and so here it is….. It is the promised report on my noodle dish experiments, inspired by my wonderful Walkabout culinary experiences in Taiwan, described in several posts earlier (see e.g. here, here, here……)
A disclaimer: This is not really a recipe for beef noodles (beef “lo mien”), as I am not giving you measurements and the like. I am giving instead suggestions about things: ingredients and procedures….. I’m telling aspects of what worked best for me after a few attempts, a least so far. I’m also celebrating the “jazz” aspect I’ve noticed in Chinese cooking, which is the wonderful serendipitous aspect: I never use exactly the same things every time….. There are some broad themes for the framework, but some of the details can be swapped for others…. For example, I just like throwing in the butternut squash later on….. some nights I don’t…I use something else. And my green leafy vegetable can vary a lot too…..I just get a variety of things on the market on the weekend, and open the fridge and see what I feel like on the night.
A further disclaimer: I’m not a chef or a cook, and nor am I trying to be one! Any real chefs who know me, I apologize for this encroachment on your turf! (e.g. Mark B, if you’re reading, sorry!) However, I have cooked a lot, since I was young, and I’m going to assume that you can cook just as well (or whatever) as I can. So think of this not as a cooking lesson, but as though I’m telling you about a new song or melody I learned. Not teaching you to sing. (If you don’t cook…this might not be the place to learn.)
Your results may vary.
The day after I returned from Taiwan, I went to Chinatown. I wanted to find a good Chinese grocery store when I could get excellent ingredients and try to reproduce the flavours I’d been tasting on the walkabout. I found one after asking some people on the street. It’s fantastic (although I get funny looks whenever I walk in – I’m the only non-Asian I’ve ever seen in there so far – people are fine with me once they see I’m just shopping like everyone else) and full of excellent things…. at great prices….. including a wonderful butcher, and stacks of fresh noodles. After a bit of reading around for what the key themes and flavours are, I then went to the store and created a new supply of important sauces and other ingredients for my cupboard and fridge, and I’ve been experimenting with cooking in this style for a while now….
So take a nice bit of high quality flank steak and cut it into strips, against the grain. Pop the strips into a bowl, sprinkle a bit of cornstarch in, coat the pieces with it and then put in some dark soy sauce. It’ll sit there for a while and the sauce will penetrate into the meat, during the preparation of the other things. Start a nice big pan of water on the stove….. you’re going to cook some noodles in a few minutes….



A sauce for later: Some blobs of thick oyster sauce…amazing stuff…..never ever thought of using it before. Put also in some light soy sauce…. a spoonful or two. Mix that with a cup and a half of beef stock. You’ve either made the beef stock yourself from tasty beef bits in an earlier session and saved it in the freezer/fridge, or you’ve gone and bought some off the shelf. Good to have a supply ready at all times. This time, I did not have any stored, and so I used some good off-the-shelf stuff….Trader Joe’s does an excellent one, for example….it is not a specialist item.
Now, another fun part. Chopping stuff up with a big knife. First, garlic. Aside: People often get troubled by garlic….getting the skin off. No problem: Just take the cloves of garlic and crush them under the knife…… then they come right off. Ta-da!



Chop ‘em up nice and fine in a few seconds.
That water should be boiling by now. Take your desired quantity of fresh noodles (of a type that you like….I’m using some thin, white, flour noodles…lovely and soft and floury….) and drop them gently in, perhaps adding a pinch of salt… stir and agitate them a touch with something pointy (chopsticks, spoon, whatever) to separate them… and in a very short time they’ll be ready.



It turned out that I spied this potentially nice coffee place right next (a few doors down from) to my hotel in Hsinchu, and one lunchtime I thought it would be nice to go and sit there and have some coffee. It was not clear whether the place really did sit-down coffee though, maybe only serving over the counter bulk coffee (no tables really set up… possible counter seat or two, but not really sure), and so I thought I would go in and do a bit of a mime to get across my question (as I’d grown accustomed to doing). So in I went, and the proprietor was chatting with someone over the counter. I thought I’d wait, but they broke off and I started to try to say something when the customer (a knock-you-over-the-head-with-a-bat-pretty young woman) spoke to me in English and so I asked her the question. So she asked the proprietor (a charming older lady with no English) and it was established that I could have a cup of coffee there for $100 NT and could sit. I tried to talk to the customer a bit more by asking her if she had a recommended coffee she liked, etc, but then we ran out of things to say before she had to run off, and that was it. She left. (I kicked myself for the rest of the day for not asking her if she wanted to join me for coffee, and wondered at the fact that I’d missed an opportunity to reach out and make a new friend. Getting slow in my old age, I guess.)
The proprietor took an awfully long time to make the cup of coffee, and I stood there on my own in the store, thinking that it would be really ironic if all of this resulted in a really lousy cup of coffee….
then they would both turn and look at me for a moment, and then carry on talking. (Also, she came over and glanced over my shoulder at what I was writing, not knowing that I could see her doing this -I’ve eyes in back of my head, in case you are wondering-…..I was playing with a conjecture at the time and drawing lots of pictures and scribbling equations…wonder what she thought that all was?).
Well, anyway, the next excellent meal was in the morning. In a specialist breakfast place somewhere in the city (there are several by the side of the road), and I got to try several of those tasty eggy-things I recall from my first random samplings in Taipei eight years ago (see
A major component of the meal that I would never have been able to appreciate without Huei-Shih’s patient guidance through the menu: Soy milk drinks of various sorts. Perfect accompaniment, along with hot milky tea (which I knew about from the last visit and am addicted to)!
I’m a big fan of buns of various sorts (steady now…), and dumplings….. basically the whole range of soft, warm, yielding things you bite into to reveal some delicious filling or other. There is an infinite variety there that you can pick up for lunch or just a quick restorative snack between temples. Actually, it is quite common to find really excellent food places near temples. This is not an accident, I’m told. The visit to the temple would be followed by a stop for a good meal, going back numerous generations, so why not have them conveniently adjacent to each other, to this day?

But the real Source is Tainan, in the South of the island. Getting -at the last minute- the opportunity to go there, I gave a seminar on the 23rd December to the String Theory group (essentially all of the Taiwan string community came…this was part three of a series of talks), shut down my computer, excused myself as best and genuinely apologetically as I could, and grabbed my bags and headed for the door. A while later, after fortifying myself with a bowl of beef noodles (what else?) at Taipei Main Station, I headed for the bus, and the four and a half hour journey from Taipei to Tainan. There’s a bewildering variety of bus stops, and several bus companies to figure out, and getting on little shuttle buses to go to the other place to get the main bus….. and lots of yelling of destinations which I could not understand….I will not claim that I figured this all out myself……the brother of the friend I was going to stay with was also travelling this way, and so he offered to accompany me. I was dreading the bus journey, to be honest. It is not that I can’t do long bus journeys – as a student, to save money on home visits, I regularly took the marathon nine hour one leaving from from London Victoria at midnight, headed to every busstop between London and Preston – but that it was a bit cold, I only had my jacket, and I was not as well prepared in my mind for it either… I was not really in the mood for it, but it was the only way to get there and I was certainly going to go and was prepared to put up with whatever hardship it entailed.


One thing that I like a lot about the whole food culture there is the variety and/or serendipity you can get between different places. The beef noodles you get a couple of doors down might be rather different from the ones you got at that other place. It’s definitely the same dish, and no less delicious…..just different. I like that…it’s a sort of jazz culture brought to food. You have your standards, and everybody knows and loves them, but everybody plays them differently.
Well, the garden is a mess, front and back. So much of a mess that I’d be embarrassed to have anyone visit me at home right now (so I won’t). And I don’t know when I’ll get to it. Maybe next weekend. For example, the fig trees have dropped their large, floppy leaves everywhere and now stand naked. They need pruning, as does almost everything else. Exceptions include the citrus trees, and the camelia bush that is about to burst into flower.


