fantuan 飯團 (rice balls)
Tiffany brought along a Hong Kongese friend yesterday when we went out to the hot springs yesterday, a nice guy who has to repeat every sentence he says at least once for me to get it. (Every once in a while Tiffany also doesn’t understand what he’s saying and yells at him for his non-standard, Cantonese inflected Mandarin, which is gratifying to those of us who assume that we’re idiots who have wasted years of our lives trying to learn a language we’ll never really understand as soon as we don’t understand what somebody is saying.) He had just gotten back from a birthday visit home; when asked what kind of fun he had had over the five days he was back there, he answered: “Eat.”
So forgive me for yet another entry on foodstuffs; just take it as a sign of my ever-progressing assimilation.[1]
After that day this summer[2] when my parents finally got a gander at “oil sticks,” a Chinese not-so-delicacy (would the opposite of delicacy be roughicacy?) that they had been hearing about for almost a decade in my miserable for-humor-value-only translation (it’s sticks cooked in oil, see, not oily sticks—although who can tell the difference), I though maybe I’d try to add some specificity to my discussions of the food here other than talking about how people are always eating, or if they’re not eating then they are talking about eating.[3]
So here without further ado is some strip-tease style documentation of the Japanese style ‘rice balls’ they sell in the convenience stores (hand made Taiwanese style rice balls are about three times as big and often includean oil stick—hi again— in the middle to give it some crisp). This one is a shredded pork rice ball, although the one I usually prefer is a tuna fish salad. And now with only slightly further ado...
[1] Did I ever tell you about going hiking on a Very Serious Hike a couple of years back with a group from my friend’s office? After driving halfway down the length of Taiwan, we stopped in a town famous for its Hakka foods and walked around and ate ourselves silly. Then we spent the rest of the afternoon going very slowly along the windy roads on this very serious mountain, up to the indigenous settlement with its rustic hotel, where we proceeded to have an enormous dinner. The next morning we got up about two hours after the crack of dawn and had an enormous breakfast, after which we started the hike, which was at most two hours in one direction along seriously unsteep paths. When we all met up at the far end, at the top of the trail we were hiking, everyone pulled out of their backpacks the crispy seaweed wrapped crackers and the fish flavored chips, and we had a nice little junk food meal right there before returning to the hotel, where we had an enormous lunch. You get the picture.
[2] We went out to their favorite restaurant with a friend who couldn’t resist introducing me to the owner as Our Friend Also Speaks Chinese. Far from reacting in the way I suspect I would have reacted (“Um, yeah, so do a billion and a half other people”), she chatted with me and then came back a couple of minutes later to offer us some fresh-fried 油條 youtiao, long, thing strips of tasteless fried dough. At some point when I was living on the mainland I wrote home about eating youtiao and sweet soy milk for breakfast, and they somehow made it into family lore as one of the Weird Things of the East.
[3] I first noticed this when watching two people who were meeting for the first time talk for half an hour about the different kinds of sweet-things-topped ices their home regions had produced: very coarsely chopped versus very finely slivered. (It is, however, undebatable that things like mango ice are among the very best things this world has to offer, chopped or slivered.)
So forgive me for yet another entry on foodstuffs; just take it as a sign of my ever-progressing assimilation.[1]
After that day this summer[2] when my parents finally got a gander at “oil sticks,” a Chinese not-so-delicacy (would the opposite of delicacy be roughicacy?) that they had been hearing about for almost a decade in my miserable for-humor-value-only translation (it’s sticks cooked in oil, see, not oily sticks—although who can tell the difference), I though maybe I’d try to add some specificity to my discussions of the food here other than talking about how people are always eating, or if they’re not eating then they are talking about eating.[3]
So here without further ado is some strip-tease style documentation of the Japanese style ‘rice balls’ they sell in the convenience stores (hand made Taiwanese style rice balls are about three times as big and often includean oil stick—hi again— in the middle to give it some crisp). This one is a shredded pork rice ball, although the one I usually prefer is a tuna fish salad. And now with only slightly further ado...
[1] Did I ever tell you about going hiking on a Very Serious Hike a couple of years back with a group from my friend’s office? After driving halfway down the length of Taiwan, we stopped in a town famous for its Hakka foods and walked around and ate ourselves silly. Then we spent the rest of the afternoon going very slowly along the windy roads on this very serious mountain, up to the indigenous settlement with its rustic hotel, where we proceeded to have an enormous dinner. The next morning we got up about two hours after the crack of dawn and had an enormous breakfast, after which we started the hike, which was at most two hours in one direction along seriously unsteep paths. When we all met up at the far end, at the top of the trail we were hiking, everyone pulled out of their backpacks the crispy seaweed wrapped crackers and the fish flavored chips, and we had a nice little junk food meal right there before returning to the hotel, where we had an enormous lunch. You get the picture.
[2] We went out to their favorite restaurant with a friend who couldn’t resist introducing me to the owner as Our Friend Also Speaks Chinese. Far from reacting in the way I suspect I would have reacted (“Um, yeah, so do a billion and a half other people”), she chatted with me and then came back a couple of minutes later to offer us some fresh-fried 油條 youtiao, long, thing strips of tasteless fried dough. At some point when I was living on the mainland I wrote home about eating youtiao and sweet soy milk for breakfast, and they somehow made it into family lore as one of the Weird Things of the East.
[3] I first noticed this when watching two people who were meeting for the first time talk for half an hour about the different kinds of sweet-things-topped ices their home regions had produced: very coarsely chopped versus very finely slivered. (It is, however, undebatable that things like mango ice are among the very best things this world has to offer, chopped or slivered.)
posted by blahgstein at 9:35 AM
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