By the way, I'm not as xenophobic as I sound here. However, I do fall into the category of people who don't particularly enjoy trying new things. I am not what you'd call a thrill-seeker. On the other hand, I'm not averse to trying new things. What I definitely am averse to is eating food that makes me recoil in horror, and in my defense, this is almost always something I have tried before. Luckily, Chinese meals are usually family-style, with many dishes split among several people. This gives me the opportunity to be choosy with the unfamiliar dishes while eating as much of my old favorites as I can get my chopsticks on. Oh, and did I mention how much food makes up these meals? I truly found out what it means to be full when I went to my first Taiwanese dinner party.
When Willy said we had dinner reservations, I didn't realize that we were going to a dinner party to which everyone in his housing area was invited. A stage and at least 30 tables for ten were set up underneath a huge tent covering the community building parking lot. We were seated at the vegetarian table, which was upstairs with the remaining ten or eleven tables. We heard the speeches and the singing through a speaker they'd set up for the occasion, and since I'm not adept at fully understanding spoken Chinese, it took me a while to realize that this was live singing. And I couldn't get over the fact that one of the singers sounded exactly like my friend Colin would if he were singing Chinese oldies. I almost went downstairs to check, but my good sense got the better of me.
Guests poured in, but not many vegetarians. We had only six people--the two of us, a middle-aged couple, an elderly woman whose children sat at another table, and a woman by herself--at our table for ten. (This should have set off an alarm, but like I said, it was my first Taiwanese dinner party.) First, the waiters brought out some sauteed vegetables, a plate of appetizers--pineapple, bits of vegetarian steak, sliced pickled vegetables of some kind--and tofu skins formed into something resembling what I would classify as stuffed chicken breasts. (Never was too good with meat.) So far, this quantity would have made a decent meal for at least five where I come from, if you include the dish of fake fish that came next--tofu of various textures prepared to simulate a whole fish. Willy explained that the food here was prepared to resemble the meat dishes at the other tables so that the vegetarians would have a similar culinary experience.
For me, however, this culinary experience would be like no other. Just as I began to worry about the sheer amount of food we would be wasting, the waiters brought out a fake chicken stew, followed by a vegetarian roast, followed by a fake beef stew, and only then did Willy mention that, oh yeah, a traditional Taiwanese dinner has ten courses. That's right--ten hefty dishes for six people. And that didn't count dessert.
We didn't even make it that far. (I imagine this happens a lot during traditional Taiwanese dinners.) Right after the ninth dish arrived, we had all pretty much had enough, and the other four diners were preparing to leave. The elderly woman mentioned that she didn't want all this food to go to waste. At first, I thought maybe her kids might humor her and bring home a doggy bag. Then I noticed that people at other tables were already dumping whole roasts and tureens of soup into a slew of plastic bags that the hosts were handing out. It seems Taiwanese customs don't permit the rampant wastefulness us Americans are so familiar with. So the old woman made off with the vegetables and the untouched roast, while we ended up with the chicken stew and the rest of the fish. The couple at our table quickly stashed away the bottle of scotch whiskey I forgot to mention, but we had already finished the wine and half a bottle of tea. The other four said their goodbyes and we surveyed the scene.
It was then that the dessert arrived.
I discovered another new food that I like, but I'm not sure what it's called in English. Pretty simple, though--unripe mango ice. Willy calls it passionfruit ice, even though he says passionfruit is a different fruit entirely. Anyway, it's green and icy and it tastes great.
The cake we had to take home.
Me eating unripe mango ice at a later date.
Ripe mango ice isn't quite the same.