Taiwan Breakfast and Markets

We are back! So it is time to get back into the blogging mojo. Basically, we have spent over a month around Asia so the next few posts will be dedicated to giving a recap about some of the culinary adventures we had there – really just a self indulgent way for us to relive our holiday. First up is Taiwan, a small island off China which we spent 8 days travelling along the coast of. I was warned that the street food here is excellent, so I should always leave room for “after dinner snacks”.  In addition to all the night market adventures, I actually did something new this time around and decided to film everything – I did a series called ‘Hotel Edits’ in which I tried to edit my days video footage each night. Without getting into the nitty gritty, it was chaos! Needless to say, I did not get a good night’s rest for the duration of our time in Taiwan. So for the first time with commentary, I would like to present to you – “Taiwan – Day 1*”.

After getting off the 9-hour plane ride behind two crying babies. They were twins. I know. The last thing on my mind was breakfast. It was 6am in the morning, raining and freezing cold when we arrived at this tiny restaurant in Taipei. People often say that the dingiest restaurants in Asia have the best food, this place was no exception. Their specialty is “Savoury Soy Bean Soup”, which is a traditional Taiwanese breakfast food consisting of unsweetened soy bean milk (dou jiang) soaked with deep fried bread (you tiao) and other condiments. If anything were to brighten up my morning, it was this. My mum makes this at home, so the appearance of goop is not new to me. If you haven’t tried this, just know that looks are deceiving – add some vinegar and this is the breakfast of champions.

The restaurant also had a variety of other deep fried pastry. They make their own deep fried bread which was just as fun to watch as it was to eat (see the video at 0:37). Had we not been so full, I would have gladly tried that duck pancake – how sinful does it look?

Look at the lines, and it’s 7am on a rainy morning. Unfortunately, this leg of my adventure was part of a tour, and the itinerary is all in Chinese, so I have no idea the name of this place or the prices. Googling ‘Taipei Soy Bean Restaurant with Green Tree Logo’ has proved fruitless thus far. Anyhow, you will definitely find this everywhere – food in Asia is always abundant!

We then went up to Jiufen, which is a mountain district in Taipei. The photo above is the middle of the winding market place – basically an entire street of side-by-side food stalls. If you couldn’t already tell by everyone’s attire – it was pretty cold up here so the first thing we tried was taro and sweet potato ball in ginger soup (2:05). I would like to compare it to the one’s back at home (Meet Fresh), but that would be doing it an injustice. The glutinous balls were so generous and made so that they were the perfect type of chewy, the ginger soup melted my insides and I became a Kinder Surprise left in a kid’s back pocket. Would have loved to stay and eat my way out of here!

P.S. Hope you enjoyed the video – sorry, there are not too many photos of our trip.

*Unfortunately I did not upload all 8 videos onto Vimeo, so only the select few will be shared.

Christmas Cookies

We are celebrating our first Christmas here at Basil and Lamb! It has been a great year documenting and sharing our dining and kitchen adventures with you. We aim to be a bit less sporadic with our posting schedule for the new year and wish everyone a safe and happy holiday. As a gift to some family and friends, we turned our kitchen into a cookie factory and made edible Christmas presents. Arnotts is now looking to buy us out as well. Not really. Now I’ve discredited my entire blog. One lie too far.

We did a little something different and combined some images with text. Really ground breaking stuff. I made them in really swirly font in the hopes that you can’t read what they say. There is some seriously poetic stuff hidden here.

 These ones were my personal favourite, we actually intended to buy mint flavoured candy canes but accidentally purchased some cherry flavoured ones. Still tasted good though! Also, now that the holiday period had started we can both resume our addiction to Candy Crush – if you don’t know what Candy Crush is, consider it a blessing. I am too far behind to try to catch up, but watching Edwina slave over it is pretty amusing.

We also made some Peanut Butter “Gingerbread” Men! Hold the ginger. Don’t they look handsome with their little hearts in their chest? We gave them jam-filled hearts so they would be ‘Peanut Butter Jelly’ flavoured. As a kid, I have always thought that Americans literally put “jelly”, the equivalent of our aeroplane jelly into their sandwiches. This thought both had me confused and envious. It was only later that I realised what we call ‘jam’, they refer to as ‘jelly’, which kinda makes sense, considering it does wobble and all that jazz.

The wheelies on the right are Earl Grey and Lemon cookies – the recipe for those will be posted up soon, so keep your eyes peeled if you are a fan of tea infused desserts!

These ornament cookies were fun to make, but you would be hard pressed to find me hanging them on any tree. They are lemon flavoured, like the Christmas Trees, and were shaped by using a smaller cookie cutter to cut within a larger cookie cutter.

When I lifted the biscuit, this creepy smiley face appeared. Hold me. And on that unsettling note – Have a Merry Christmas!

P.S. Just a small note to let you know, we will be going overseas for a while – look out Asia, we are taking you one meal at a time – prepare for an onslaught of photos when we return.

Pistachio and Raspberry Ice-cream

The heat is back, and appropriately, so is the ice-cream machine! In all honesty though, ice-cream is something that I can eat in any weather. It’ll be freezing at midnight and I could still crave it. I don’t think I have ever eaten Gelato Messina in the day, I am just saying. We love experimenting with ice-cream flavours, so this particularly day seemed like a good one to finally try pistachio ice-cream – is it criminal that we have never tried it before?

This here is a basic ice-cream recipe mixed in with pistachio paste and frozen raspberries. Edwina used the recipe from here. “The best way to skin pistachios …” is to not skin them at all. To be honest, you spend 2 hours shelling and peeling the skin off pistachio nuts for what? For it to taste like an almond. Once you boil them down, they actually start tasting a lot like almonds. Pistachios don’t exist – they are merely almonds dressed more warmly. Seriously, no wonder pistachio paste is so hard to find – who on earth has the sensible mind to sit through the ordeal? (And I am speaking as a person who had to watch another person do it).

I really liked the crunchy texture of this ice-cream, and the balance of sweet and sour. However, it really tastes more like almond than pistachio – so much that it was like eating a macaron infused in ice-cream. Additionally, no matter how great it tastes, it is still not enough to actually labour a day away to make it.

What flavour combo should we try next?