Susan and I, along with my friend Albert and his girlfriend Mickey (whom I have known forever!) were invited to Sean and Jane's house last night for dinner.
Sean and Jane own the bagel shop. Albert and I have been doing an informal language exchange on Tuesday nights with them for the last two years, but Albert has been more and more busy lately, and he can rarely attend. The language lessons have become less and less frequent since just before Susan arrived in Taiwan. I have been busy, or Sean has been busy, or Jane has been busy... the lessons are cancelled or rescheduled... so my Tuesday nights with Sean have fallen by the wayside of late.
This doesn't mean that my friendship with Sean and Jane has lapsed! About two weeks ago, Susan and I were having a snack at the bagel shop and we started talking with Jane. Jane has been attending a government sponsored course in Taiwanese traditional and specialty cooking. She has been really enjoying herself and she wanted to invite us over to her place for dinner! Susan and I accepted, especially when Jane said she wanted to play Mahjong after we ate.
We arrived around 7 o'clock and were treated to some really wonderful dishes. Jane knows how picky Susan and I are, so she was pretty selective in what she prepared!
There was my favourite soup: carrot and turnip (I guess it's a turnip... it might be a radish... I've never seen anything like it in Canada: they are generally as long as your forearm!). Whatever the "turnip" thing is, I love it in soup.
We had quite an assortment of appetizers: There was a special dish made with rice-noodles. It looked like Shanghai noodles, but tasted completely different. There was also a dish made with snap peas, beans, mushrooms, and carrots that was out of this world. There was some Tofu, prepared Taiwan style (with garlic and gravy). There was also some Chinese cabbage smothered in garlic butter with sweet carrots.
No proper Taiwan meal is complete without meat (unless you're vegetarian!) so we had three dishes to choose from: sausages, meat-sauce, and pork chops.
The Chinese sweet sausages were served in the traditional Taiwanese way: with fresh slices of garlic. You are meant to eat a slice of garlic with each mouthful of sausage. This creates a mix of sweet and sour flavours in your mouth. It's a little overwhelming at first because of the garlic being so strong, but it's really good!
The meat-sauce is something called "Lou-Ro", which means deer meat. This isn't actually deer meat, but rather a thick stew-like goulash that has huge chunks of meat in a really delicious sauce. It is meant to be served over rice or noodles as a main dish, but as tonight was Jane's showcase for various things she'd learned, we were treating it like yet another appetizer. There was, of course, rice available, but we were encouraged to eat it over the rice-noodles. This was especially nice because of all the different flavours coming together!
Finally, there were also some fresh Chinese style battered pork chops, which everyone enjoyed.
For afters we had some fresh fruits: apples, oranges and something that looked like green eggs, but were more like apples with a pit in them. I wish I could be more specific but I can't for the life of me remember what they're called in English. Sorry! You eat them like apples, skin and all, and they are quite juicy... not guava... nope. Sorry ...drawing a blank!
Finally, we opened a bottle of Champagne that Susan and I brought instead of wine (we still had it from New Year's Eve and this seemed like a good occasion to use it!). We toasted to friendship and to 2007.
After dinner we played Mahjong, and Susan kicked everyone's butt... despite not having a clue what she was doing at the start of the evening, LOL!
It was a really nice evening. It was especially great to just sit and relax among friends. When everyone was good and tired, we crashed on the sofa and let Sean show off his plasma screen TV and surround-sound in-home theatre system. We watched the last half hour of Star Wars 3 on TV, then headed home.
All in all, it was good night and definitely something to write home about!
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