May 17th & 18th: Experimental Cooking

Steamed Vegan Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

Rightside-Up...

The curious divets are from water dripping onto the cake after condensing on the lid.

Upside-Down (and elsewhere)

The cake was VERY soft.  Too soft. T_T Less water next time.

Pineapple rings!

We also eat real food.  Like vegetables.

香春 Chinese Toon/Chinese Mahogany

An aromatic herb.

Making 香春醬, it's like pesto, but smells kind of like onions, and is DELICIOUS.

Also, trying a drier steamed cake.  It turned out quite dry.

At least it marbled nicely and had a good crumb!

Also, this elevator:

Bring protected during somebody's remodeling project.  Usually they just cover the thing in blue tarp and a thin foam sheeting like things.

May 16th: Veggie & Vegan Options at Burgery

Actually, there are no vegetarian entrees. But if you ask they'll make you a vegetarian salad (vegan if you ask for no cheese) with either balsamic or orange salad dressing. I prefer the balsamic (can you believe I used to hate balsamic vinegar?!), but the orange is delicious as well. It tastes like Fanta, but more orange-y :D

Vegetarian Salad with Orange Dressing.

 The salad is quite filling, though at NT250 rather expensive.  I'm a pretty happy camper with one of those and a bottomless milkshake (yes, you read that right.  BOTTOMLESS.)

Bottomless Chocolate-Banana Milkshake.

All their drinks are bottomless. Except alcohol, obviously.  All the regular entree meal things come with drinks and you can upgrade to a milkshake or smoothie for NT60.

The banana milkshake is made with REAL bananas, and shitty chocolate chips.  If I got it again I'd ask them to leave off the chocolate, it's waxy and disgusting.  Or, use chocolate ice cream.  I don't know why they don't; they HAVE chocolate ice cream (it's what the chocolate milkshake is made of!)

I've also had the OREO milkshake, which was FANTASTIC and not too sweet (a major factor in consuming as much milkshake as possible; at NT150-160 you've gotta get your money's worth!)

For vegans there are the smoothies, which are just fruit and ice and I think some sort of sweetener/thickener -- I've seen drink places use a mysterious syrup that makes this occur.  It doesn't make me sick, and I'm fairly sensitive to chemicals, so I don't worry about it ^^.

I've had the strawberry smoothie, which was filled with real strawberries and very cold (a deterrent to maximum smoothie consumption).  There's also kiwi, strawberry-banana, hazelnut coffee (probably not vegan), and a couple other ones that didn't tickle my fancy.

Last but not least, there are cheese fries, which are AMAZING.  They're made with nacho cheese and come with a tasty mayo-based dip.  I think it's chipotle mayo but I'm not positive.

I don't know why they don't offer nachos.  It would be fantastic.

GLORIOUS Nacho Cheese. It may very well be the only nacho cheese in all of Taipei.  Or, at least within a 1 mile radius.

Oh yeah all this stuff is su (素), for all you crazy-diet people out there like me ;P

May 10th: Epic Meal Time -- Leftovers Edition ;P

Making food in a shared kitchen is harder than you'd think. Not only is there the obvious issue of fridge space and cleanliness, you also have to take care of other peoples' leftovers (i.e. turn them into delicious things and feed them to hungry people so that they don't hang around forever) and gauge how much everyone will eat so YOU don't leave leftovers for the next person to take care of, or worse, sit uneaten in the fridge until it goes bad!

AMAZING fried rice with green beans, red peppers, and vege-ham.  I don't know how Putao does it.  We don't even have a wok!

This is especially important for me 'cause I make dinners on Thursdays, and there's no Friday or weekend classes that require meals, so any leftovers will sit until Monday, at which time they are probably not so delicious. But before I get to do anything Putao (the CUTEST little old lady EVER) makes lunch for the daytime Thursday class. It's always difficult to gauge how much will be left 'cause even though there are 50 people not all of them stay for lunch. This particular day she made food for 50 and only 30 stayed, leaving us with a GLORIOUS amount of leftovers. Since dinner is usually about 20 people's worth (sometimes 23-25 if Tingquan and/or another adolescent male shows up) this worked out AWESOME for me :D

May 9th: Taiwanese Ratatouille

But first, a surprise dessert! Lishui brought it back from somebody's house...I can't remember who's, but it's delicious!

White Fungus Dessert Soup with Nuts and Dates

I love dessert soups ^o^ Growing up mung bean soup was my fav, but recently taro has taken its place! I really like wood-ear/fungus too, so this was a really tasty one.  That orange thing is a yam, not a carrot ;P

For Thursday night I planned for ratatouille, 'cause I'd been having some MAD eggplant cravings.  Also zucchini cravings.  TT___TT Apparently the market by my mom's house has zucchini sometimes; the one I live by doesn't.  either way they're hard to come by here, but we DO have eggplants in abundance.  Delicious delicious Asian eggplant~  Guess what I subbed for the zucchini?

May 2nd: AVENGERS

It was a lovely Wednesday to go see Avengers in (accidental) 3D at the Ambassador Theater in Zhongshan!

"Do we have to see it in 3D?!"

Turns out Gracie doesn't like 3D movies.  But it was the only showing at a time we could all meet up, so 3D it was.

Face of resignation.

We met up for lunch first.  Found Kirin Pasta in an alley, and they are vege-friendly! :D

April 28th: Garden + Wa Pizza with Tai and Gracie

 Some weeds flowers in the garden.

These ones close up in the afternoon and reopen in the morning!

Yellow flowers in bloom.

Yellow flowers with buds and fluff head.  Love!

 Food and People after the jump!

April 26th: Spaghetti Galore + 1st Day of Light Messenger Beginner Course

Maggie made super-colourful spaghetti!!! She prepped all the ingredients herself (with some washing & cutting assistance from Zhenxing) and I made up the spaghetti for her ahead of time so it could be sauteed with the ingredients.

Tomatoes, pinch of sugar, herbs, and cheese.

Look at those COLOURS!!! Everything was so delicious!

Balsamic Tri-colour Peppers with Herbs.

I used to really dislike balsamic vinegar, but it's grown on me.  I actually ended up adding extra vinegar to my spaghetti 'cause it wasn't sour enough for me xD

Chopped cheddar cheese, for even more flavor!

My humble contribution consisted of cranberry-orange steamed banana cake with vegan ice 'cream'.

The cranberries were donated by a Chi-mate who'd come back from the States.  They were from Trader Joe's, and they are AMAZINGLY GOOD.