Can I have some familiar food please!

We watched Treasure Island yesterday and Orlando Bloom's character, Ben is stranded on the island for three years. He has an unnatural desire for cheese! "Cheese is like a piece of heaven!" That's how we feel right now! I want some decent cheese with my omelette, and some real cream in my coffee and what about something fresh and raw?! Don't get me wrong Taiwanese food is fantastic and it IS fresh, but it's not raw. It's not that crispy cool salad with nuts and peppers and crunchy carrots. It's all cooked! 

So what? Make yourself a salad then! Well we don't have a fridge at the moment which means most of the ingredients to make a decent salad will go off! Did I mention double cream greek yoghurt?! So we can't make a salad! 

We tried a Korean restaurant the other day, and I ordered a "salad." It consisted of, onions, spring onions and sweet corn! Renalda had a bibimbap, which was actually pretty awesome, it comes in a thick steel bowl and is still sizzling when they place it in front of you. The rice at the bottom congeals and gets fried into a crispy delicious crust which is a little crunchy and a little chewy, but fabulously tasty. I had serious order envy! I had a few bites ;)

We also had a Korean hotpot at our downstairs food vendor, and tried a 1000 year old egg. The hot pot was something like a moerby stew, with everything under the sun in it. We ordered one with beef, but found pieces of fish, shellfish and other unidentified morsels in it. The egg varied in colour from translucent turquoise to black and grey. It's consistency was a little chewy, runny in places and powdery in others and it tasted like strong blue cheese mixed with stinky egg and is something I won't do again. 

We found out last night that all "barbecue" places aren't barbecues! We quite enjoy the Taiwanese barbecue shops. You get a little basket and choose some meat and veg which is then chopped up and fried or just mixed with some spices. We were walking around town last night when we saw what we thought was a barbecue. The options were the same, the baskets were the same, we just failed to notice the cardboard bowls that everything was served in. We made our selection, and were then asked what kind of noodles we wanted. We selected some, and then were handed a huge bowl of soup and a bag of cooked noodles. All quite delicious, but cooked, and now we know some barbecues are soup places, which is great, because we quite like soup! 

Unfortunately no food photos this time. Tuesday is payday and we have decided we will buy a little piece of heaven to satisfy at least one craving. Matsusei, the expensive, Japanese supermarket in DaJia, does have decent cheese, at a decent price. However we are still living on savings, so we haven't bought any. That will change soon. Cream? Not so much, and definitely no decent yoghurt, if I could find a cheap source of milk I'd make my own for sure, but it seems like dairy is not very important here.