Food in Taiwan is a complex balanced equation.

One half of it is all about the cute. Take for instance these adorable little bunny rabbit steamed red bean buns. Someone painstakingly moulds each roll into the shape of a bunny and then decorates the finished product with loving accuracy.

This sort of labour en masse would cost you a bucketload in the west but in Taiwan it’s the norm. Long gone are the days you’d walk into a joint and expect to eat a normal looking meal.

Well, almost.

One side of Taiwanese cuisine is all about the cuteness and then there’s the seedy underbelly. Food so plain looking your wondering if whoever came up with it even gave a crap to begin with, or was simply blind.

The following dish was a gift from a beef noodle shop I’d been eating at regularly for a while. One day I was waiting for my order when some guy walked in and handed one of the chefs a bag of strange looking rock things before sitting down inside.

Curious, I asked the chef what just happened. From my point of view it looked like the guy wanted them to cook the food he’d brought in and serve it to him.

Of course with what little Chinese I understood this was miles off. Turns out the guy was a long time customer and the little rocks were actually a gift from his parents to the store.

Having enquired now and become involved there was little I could do to protest taking one of the little lumpy rock things with me. Once again the generosity of Taiwan got the better of me.

On my desk the little lump of green didn’t look any more appetizing then it did bagged up in the store.

Like I said, one minute your fighting an internal moral dilemma of eating adorable bunny rabbit buns and the next staring at food that looks like something a horse just crapped out.

Food in Taiwan is complex.

Lucky for me horse crap tastes pretty good here. I don’t quite have any idea what the dish is called yet (will get a name and update when I do) but the green unattractive outer casing is actually gelatinous based and quite tasty.

Inside you have what seems to be your standard peppered pork bun filling.

Delicious.

I haven’t seen these bun type things on the street yet which is probably a good thing. I could easily have a few of these for lunch a couple of times a week.

Meanwhile ‘eating horse crap looking food’ has now been crossed off my to do list for living in Taiwan.

I wonder what’s next.



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