Thanks!

-cvj

Ding Tai Fung has no branch in Tainan, actually in any place other than Taipei in Taiwan.

Considering the place pictured above with the large baskets with the steamed dumplings… is “Wan-Chuan-Hao”, a snack store aged more than 100 years.

I have tried various steamed dumplings in Ding Tai Fung. They taste good but not good enough for the extravagant price. At a fair price, we can easily find ones with (almost) equal quality. As for other delicacies served in Ding Tai Fung, I have not tried yet and no comment on them.

Welcome to the blog!!! I’m so happy to see a comment from you, especially since my memory of a number of the names and history of various things I learned is fading. Thanks for the reminder!

Feel free to add to (or subtract from) anything I say as a result of further memory failures….

Thanks for being charitable about the chopsticks. It was only that one time, really. And I happened to take a picture of it, embarrassingly enough…..In my defence, it was very late at night and I’d not had that much sleep the night before!

Cheers,

-cvj

So happy to be notified of your more posts about food in Tainan.

The name of the noodle is “Danzih Noodles”. “Danzih” is the stall which can be carried on shoulders and then people could sale the noodle anywhere. The name of the original and then most famous/delicious stall saling “Danzih Noodles” is “Du-Hsiao-Yue”, which means to overcome the slack season (of fishing).

As for the chopsticks in the dish……it’s Ok. We all know you were not really coarse, just really excited/eager to take the picture then forgot the details. We were there and felt the excitement so we understood.

Finally, I am looking forward to your noodle experiments very much.

Best wishes,
Huei-Shih

As for ginger. I’ll stand by candied ginger for fighting seasickness. It even works in dinky little helicopters in choppy air, and it doesn’t knock me out like Dramamine or Bonine.

As for dumplings, I did a History of the Dumplings site a while back (actually in the early 80s) that should be familiar to many physicists:

http://www.kaleberg.com/dumplings/dumplings.html

As for the illuminating neon sign. Yes ducks, and yes chickens. It’s always nice when a sign says what it means.

Cheers,

-cvj

Are you referring to the chain store selling the delicacies, or is that the name of a specific delicacy that I have forgotten. If the former then you are probably referring to the place pictured above with the large baskets with the steamed dumplings….. My host got a lot of things there for the party. Very tasty, if I recall.

Cheers,

-cvj

Cibo in Italian means ‘food’; every country has their food specialties. I miss German dark bread and Mexican burritos, but I think that my kitchen is gradually showing its influences from all over the world. I’ve succeeded to find the very-difficult-to-find items: oatmeal (fiocchi d’avena), healthy peanut butter (crema di arachidi), and dill (aneto), which can be found in health-food stores (there is one in my castelli romani town), or in the large international food store in Rome. I’ve _not_ succeeded to find sour cream (how do the Italians survive without it?), mango pulp (for my treasured mango lassi), canned pumpkin (for holiday season foods) or chai tea (I still buy from my Indian friend at his tea shop when I visit my old town Heidelberg).

Lacking these favorites, my refrigerator and cupboard are full with the fresh vegetables, fruit, and pasta that seems to be the heart and soul of Italian cuisine. My favorite food-learning experience takes place on Saturday mornings, when I buy my fresh fruit and vegetables from Roberto, the vegetable man (10 euros for a week of fruit and vegetables). Every time he teaches me a few new Italian words for vegetables (some of which I don’t recognize), I try to teach him the equivalent English words, then he says a few sentences for how to prepare it. Since he parks his vegetable truck right outside of my apartment, when we become stuck on a word, I can run inside my flat in a minute and grab a dictionary. The “Saturday morning Vegetable Language Lesson with Amara and Roberto.” I think it belongs on Italian TV. Better than the velina (*) !

One reason that Italian cuisine is so good is that most Italians think of food frequently throughout the day. Planning, thinking, preparing, so that by mealtime, they have put far more thought into their meal than any other culture I know.

One afternoon when I visited the National Etruscan Museum at Villa Giulia (Rome) with a good friend, we discovered the reason behind the Italians’ food thought-processes. They have had 2000 years to develop it from the Etruscans! At the museum we saw an exhibit titled ‘Etruscans and Food’, where we saw descriptions of the contents of their food, how they prepared their food, and how they ate their food (dinnerware). So you see you can do it too, but you might need 2000 years for your brain develop the skill…

(*) veline are the leggy, full-cleavage, minimal-speaking, dancing girls on most of the TV channels, who appeared concurrently with Berlusconi’s ownership / control of 95% of Italian TV. You think I’m joking, perhaps? The definition in the Zingarelli dictionary is the following: A velina (plural veline) is “a young television assistant who exhibits herself in succinct clothes during a transmission”. Those women who don’t qualify as veline can content themselves with less glamorous roles, such as letterine (women who hold the letters up), numerine (women who hold the numbers up) or microfonine (women who hold the microphones).

Surprising that you can’t easily get it in Rome in this day and age….having said that, even in LA where you can find it everywhere, I still get people sometimes asking me at the checkout what I’m going to do with it…. So I end up giving cooking instructions to the people at the checkout.

-cvj

P.S. Did you know that ginger has a use for helping air-sickness, sea-sickness? It is also supposed (someone told me) to remove poisons that might come with the sushi fish… (that is the reason that I heard that ginger is served on the side with sushi)

Well, all you other single types out there on Valentine’s Day night, why not dream with me a bit about food?

“The way to a Man’s Heart..is thru His Stomach”

Valentines Day is about chocolate:

Energy = Milk Chocolate Squared
[ I read somewhere Lisa Randall is a chocolate & ice-cream fan. The Randall Sundrum collaboration was initiated at an ice-cream store in Cambridge/MA. Food for Thought? ]

See here for other physics jokes

There has to be some Correlation/Causality between Food (”you are what you eat”) & Thought (Scientific Discovery).