Defying Gravity

To begin today's post, I need to show some serious appreciation for anyone who gives their child a Chinese name, because it is a long and arduous process. I am saying this, because I am trying to get my Chinese name. I was under the impression that I could simply go online and choose one that has an interesting meaning, but apparently it is not like choosing a Western name. When you choose a Western name, you try to find one that has a nice ring to it and then find a good meaning. With Chinese names you also have to see if the characters look good, because there are characters that look masculine and vise versa. It requires a lot of research and hours pouring over a Chinese character dictionary. There are also websites out there with the deceptive tagline of "Translate your name into Chinese here!" This is a lie. They don't translate your name, they find characters that represent the sounds in your name. For instance, my name in Chinese is Ai mi li, and according to my cousin, the characters that make up this translation look masculine. Nice. So, it looks like I am going to get up close and personal with the character dictionary in the coming weeks, which will provide interesting fodder for the blog. Once I choose a name, then I am going to write the characters down with traditional calligraphy brushes. 

Now, the food news of the day:

My aunt made this interesting dish tonight for dinner. To make it, you boil a lot of different things together, season it with soy sauce, and serve it like soup or pour it over rice. Here is a picture of the dish:

It had cabbage, corn on the cob, frozen tofu, mini mushrooms, several different types of meat, and small dumplings. I have to tell you about frozen tofu. It is a relatively new dish, and its invention was an accident. The story goes, that a recently hired restaurant worker accidentally put all of the restaurant's tofu in the freezer. Upon hearing of his snafu, the boss fired him. But the boss didn't know what to do with all of the now frozen tofu, because he didn't want to lose money. One of his other employees had the idea to act as though the restaurant had meant to freeze the tofu. He asked the boss if he could try to prepare the frozen tofu and sell it as a new food invention. The boss agreed, and now frozen tofu is a popular food item. 

Here is a picture of frozen tofu

You can buy a standard package of silken tofu, and put it in the freezer. Then when you want to use the tofu in a dish, you simply defrost the tofu. Frozen tofu has a spongy consistency and it looks a lot like bread. It is better than its non-frozen prior form for putting in soups because it doesn't break into little pieces when you cook it. Personally, I prefer frozen tofu over normal tofu. I think that it tastes better. 

Here is a picture of the mini mushrooms:

At first, I thought they were noodles. Aren't they adorable? 

The round thing in the middle is a ball of pork, kind of like a meatball. There were also little pork sausages in the soup. 

This is what the little dumplings looked like. I think they were stuffed with pork as well. The Chinese are very fond of pork. It must be hard to live here on a kosher diet.

For desert, we had pieces of this little cake:

The dough that it is made with is similar to waffles, and it is stuffed with red beans. Yes, you read that correctly. Red beans are used a lot in deserts here. They cook them with sugar so they are sweet, but not overtly so. They provide a nice texture and a deep flavor profile to desert dishes, but only in winter. Apparently, red beans are served in winter as a complement to hot foods, while green beans are used in the summer as a complement to cold foods. This classification is similar to cooking wines, i.e. red wine with red meat, white wine with white meat. 

I will leave you all with one last tidbit from Taiwan. Here is the super famous Taipei 101 building. I haven't been in it yet, (we are waiting for a clear day so the view is good), but I have some pictures of the exterior for you:

                                              

It is so tall, that you can't even see the top from a block away. My uncle told me that the buildings previous rank as the world's tallest building was purely by accident. The woman who was having the building built only  wanted it to be eighty stories or so, but the engineers told her that it would be cheaper if the building was over 100 stories tall. The woman agreed, and decided that 101 would be tall enough. Only after the building was built did anyone discover that Taipei 101 was the world's tallest building. It enjoyed that title for six years, until the opening of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.