Cooking and eating in my family, a thread.

This is not going to be "cooking and eating in Taiwan" because I honestly don't know how much of my (extended) family's idiosyncrasies are in any way generalizable.

But this is why mealtimes take like 4-5 hours, daily:

Before we go further, something to illustrate the mindset:

Going to the US and trying their plant milks was a lesson in "wtf did you do to the original subject matter" because almond milk in Taiwan is so fragrant you can smell it from two streets away. https://twitter.com/KatjeXia/status/1262566648248066048?s=20

How do they achieve this?

Well...

The thing is...almond milk in Taiwan isn't precisely made with the almonds we all know and love.
We have 南杏，北杏 (southern xing, northern xing) and then you have 杏仁，which are almond nuts.

Northern xing is...poisonous in large amounts.

Y'know how cherry pits taste vaguely almond-y and are poisonous with minute amounts of cyanide?

Well...

Apparently poison is delicious.

Anyway, southern and northern xing are actually not related to "almonds the nut" at all, but are apricot kernels.

Not from the same type of apricots, because northern xing has poison but has a stronger "almond" flavor, and southern xing also called sweet xing has a milder flavor and no poison.

In order to make "almond milk/tea" in Taiwan, a mixture of both are used.
No nut almonds at all.

Same goes for "almond jelly".

No nut almonds were used in the process, which results in something intensely "almond-y" and delicious.

So yeah, that's vaguely the mindset. "This is delicious and vaguely poisonous but it's okay, everything is poisonous in large amounts".

My family doesn't do leftovers. It's not a thing. Leftovers are bad for you. The qi of the food has departed and what is left is only the husk and why bother.

(I hate this mindset, but what can you do)

So everything needs to be cooked fresh day of.

I genuinely don't know if this stems back to "traditional Chinese medicine theory" or "refrigerators were expensive and not really a thing for most of forever" or "my family is screwed up", but we're not the only ones, so.

The worst part is this extends to canned/frozen food.

You can get canned corn, but that's about it for canned veg for the most part unless you count bamboo shoots, which I don't.

Buy frozen veg is ...genuinely just not a thing unless you go to Costco and even then the selection isn't big because people here don't like it.

There's heavy emphasis on texture, crispness, and freshness of veg.

Almost none of the veg come pre-washed, which is another shocker for someone used to US groceries, so just rinsing all the dirt out from the greens can be a half hour long process.

If you've been to the farmer's market, kinda like that, except with irritatingly small-leafed, delicate things like spinach and yam leaves, so you're stood over the sink doing an at-home quadruple wash to make sure you don't have gritty greens.

All veg is stir-fried, which means you need two big basins of veg for four people. That's ...a lot of rinsing.
When I have my own place, I'm putting in an island with an extra sink in the living room I don't care, because that's an entire job on its own.

Unlike in the US, people here do not do pre-made sauces for stir-fry.

Never happens. Also no pre-minced garlic/ginger/basil, whatever.

So every single meal, you mince that chili, julienne that ginger, and garlic presses are for the fancy kids with no knife skills.

At this point this is sounding like a vale of tears, which it kinda is, but the one area where we win at prep is -- the person who sells you meat at the market will shred, chop, dice, or butterfly the meat for you.

If you don't like handling raw meat - there you go.

For most at-home dinners, which is every single day right now, RIP all the cooks, the usual expectation is "one veg, one meat course, one egg/tofu course, and a soup".

An egg course can be as simple as everyone getting an egg fried sunny side up, sprinkled with salt or soy sauce

It can be as complicated as julienning scallions, dicing tomatoes, and then making a tomato scrambled eggs.

Tofu - sometimes you dump it out of the box, add some bonito, some soy sauce, century eggs, and call it done.

Other times it's mapo tofu, which is a CHORE.

In my experience, meals aren't really complete without a soup to cleanse the palate.

The good news is that it can be an easy egg drop soup.
Or tomato egg in pork broth.
Or seaweed egg. (do we see a pattern here)
Or daikon in pork is very nice.

We make our own soy milk at home, because storebought is strange and who the hell buys storebought when they are physically capable of making it at home?

My gugu, or my father's elder sister, refuses to buy frozen dumplings, so my family is just WEIRD.

That's... dinner.

So, the good news is, my parents are actually fairly open to eating frozen dumplings for lunch, or some other simpler thing.

Otherwise, my father's brother's wife does this same epic quest for lunch.

Have we talked about breakfast yet though!

The traditional breakfast is rice porridge - and not Canto rice porridge where you dump all the ingredients in and you're done.

Oh no.

This is plain rice porridge with an ARRAY of "little dishes".
Think Korean banchan.

Before you ask, no, our family doesn't do this either because ain't nobody got the energy for that.

But we USED to. Thankfully you can buy a lot of these:

The classic - egg with scallions and preserved radishes - is a must.
Pork floss.
Fish floss.
Preserved bamboo shoots.

Minced preserved radish fried until fragrant with garlic, fermented bean paste, and chilis.

Garlic-fried tiny fish. Think 1/10 the size of anchovies.

Century eggs. Salted eggs.

It's 6am in the morning, but you have to have fresh veg with every single meal, so you're washing heaps of yam leaves and then stir-frying them with garlic.

Deep-fried gluten balls that get braised with peanuts.

Preserved cucumbers. Another type of softer preserved gourd.

If you read Phoenix Chosen, there is one scene where she goes to breakfast and this sort of spread is what I mean.

Just...endless arrays of things.

And if you have a long-suffering cook, then often you'll want a pan-seared whole fish to round things off.

Adding here that my mother, for much of her life, made her own spring rolls, wontons, and dumplings, which I think is some sort of hell when you have very good frozen options available.

There's an almost paranoia about how other people cook food and what they put in it.

So Mia points out that a lot of places in Taiwan don't have proper kitchens or kitchens at all and so clearly my entire family, all branches of it, are off their rocker.

Which they are.

But also, I come from extremely old-fashioned people.

You don't get married before you can afford a home, frex, which is a place with an actual kitchen.

Or if you can't afford it, you live with your parents if you're a man.

And once you're married, it's mostly expected that the wifey will cook.

My woman cousins actually don't know how to cook, which is a topic of MUCH consternation in the family, but they were always too busy with school, cram school, graduate degrees, and then jobs to actually be in the kitchen.

My aunt was taught how to cook by her MIL, trial by fire