We arrived in Taipei on Saturday, December 27th in the late afternoon. By the time we got to my Aunt's house, it was already dinner time. For dinner we got 薑母鴨 to go and ate it at home. It's a ginger duck soup base that you can use for hotpot and is only available during the winter months. The broth is made of duck pieces seared with hot oil and ginger, and then boiled in rice wine saturated with Chinese herbs, roots, and berries:
Day 1
Our first morning, and every morning afterwards, we'd get Taiwanese breakfast at different breakfast places around my aunt's neighborhood.
This is a popular chain, 永和豆漿 where we went most of the time. The first day, we went crazy and got enough food for a dozen people but it was helpful for us to try everything and to figure out what we wanted to eat in the following days:
This is a vegetable garden across from where we were staying:
Later that day, we had lunch with my two uncles and aunt from my dad's side of the family. We ate at a traditional Taiwanese food restaurant and sat around and chatted at their house afterwards. Later that night, we had dinner at Addiction Aquatic Development (which is a giant fresh fish and seafood market) with my maternal uncle's family and had an enormous Hokkaido snow crab that was super delicious. So delicious that I can never eat crab again in my life and be satisfied. You know that feeling you get when you spend all this time cracking crab legs and all you get is a small amount of meat out that leaves you pretty unsatisfied? Well, not this crab. This crab leg was the length of my entire arm and the meat came out so easily that I actually got full off of one leg. To say that it was amazing is probably not enough but it truly was amazing.
(All photos shot on Fuji Superia 200 film)
