They are between the new Sogo and Takashimaya in TienMu on a smaller road -a bit hard to find.  View Business Card

Shi Dong Road Lane 91 #17

02-2876-1562

Taste – 8/10

Value for Price – 9/10

All of their 7 pizzas are either 200 or 220 NT, 3 of which are vegetarian.  They are baked in a stone oven and ready in about 10 minutes.  Unfortunately they don’t deliver, and on the night I visited there was almost an hour wait to get a pizza.  There is 1 table outside with 2 chairs, so I wouldn’t recommend going there to eat, but the pizza spoke for itself.

This was the German Sausage Pizza.  They used plenty of toppings and the flavor was OK.

This was my favorite between the two – the Goat Cheese.  It was a nice mix of flavors and herbs, I will get this one again next time I visit.

The pizza was awesome, we’ll be back again to try some more pizzas and this time we’ll call ahead.

In response to this, Taiwan has gotten organized.  All over town, restaurants are posting this picture in their windows:

I have been seeing this picture everywhere!  You can see from the symbolism that they’ve said NO to US Beef.   The red head on the cow shows that it is in fact MAD, and there’s even a number at the bottom unique to this store.    The situation has gotten to the point where Taiwan has asked America to respect its wishes and will stop importing these beef parts.  Last week, the Taiwan Legislature revised a law to ban the import of the Beef and now the executive branch is busy explaining why to the US government.

Taiwan has a convenience store culture.  There are 7-11′s, Family Mart’s, and OK Mart’s everywhere.  Furthermore, with the subway in Taipei being the highest rated in the world, lots of people get around via subway: hence the lack of McDonald’s drive thru windows.  So, our local breakfast sandwich is coming from a convenience store.   (By the way, if you want McDonald’s in Taiwan, you usually have it delivered via scooter at no charge)

This sandwich’s main ingredient is rice.  Actually, I’m assuming it comes from a japanese style dish called onigiri (rice ball).  You basically take some main ingredient, wrap it in rice, and then put a piece of norii (seaweed) around it.  I’m sure there are traditional chinese versions of it, but I’m guessing there’s a Japanese connection with it here in Taiwan.

So here it is.  I picked the bacon and egg variety.  Also, I picked 7-11 because they have the nice picture on the front, at the other stores you need to be able to reach Chinese to know what you’re buying.  There are also lots of seafood varieties, but I’ve always had a hard time eating seafood from 7-11.  This one costs 18 yuan which is about $0.55

You can see there’s about 1 piece of bacon an inch long in the whole thing…not exactly what you get at McDonald’s for $1.25.  It’s probably more like a potato salad with bacon.  Anyhow, it’s still pretty good

The lemon juice – garlic base is named Marvini and is pretty good.  Our favorite uses Parmesan cheese instead and it’s called Jamie Oliver’s Summertime Pasta.  This one uses shrimp and no cheese.

We’ve adapted a couple things from Jamie’s version.  First, we’ve substituted the pine nuts with bacon (3 slices).  Second, we’ve substituted the parsley with basil.  The herb doesn’t actually matter, both of which you don’t taste at all.   Hope you enjoy the pictures of our finished product

I like to read the Leaf, there are some excellent articles on tea there.  Compared with a lot of the information on the internet, they are much more in depth. Tea is simple in that you either like it or you don’t, so experimenting is a great way to expand your understanding of tea.  I think the first experiment I did with tea was with different temperatures of water.

One article called Gong Fu Tea Tips (Part 3) highlights a few tea experiments you can do. After a long time, I finally tried experiment # 4, using different cups.  A 30 min train ride from Taipei is a town called YingGe, which is famous for pottery.  It’s a great place to walk around, relax and view some really beautiful pottery.  The cobblestone streets are closed off to cars, and you can even make your own pottery for about $3 US.

While there, I purchased two cheap tea cups (Each $4 US) and after getting home realized my daily tea tasted totally different in them.  I got out my best tea cups. They are about 100 years old, and were a gift from a friend (Thank you Aaron!). The tea tasted quite different. The new cup had a slight unpleasant taste, and the old cup also gave the tea a certain smoothness or roundness. It’s hard to describe, sometimes in Asia people say good teas will immediately coat your entire mouth.  Almost like there is a different viscosity to the tea.  With the old cups the sensation I got was more like this.

Does this really matter?  I think the main point is that I bought some bad teacups.  I’ve bought other cheap, new cups before and never had this experience.   When comparing these bad cups directly to my best ones, I was really surprised to find out how much difference there is.  How can this be?

This picture was taken in Ying Ge, which is a pottery town a 30 min train ride from Taipei.

Some of the places are pretty small and have fairly standard items.  However, at just about every bakery there are a bunch of concoctions that seem at least a little ludicrous.  You’ve still got all the traditional
French pastries and all that other
stuff you see in every bakery in the world, but there’s there’s the
local section, and each place seems to specialize in at least a few of their own combinations. There are a lot of pastries (~ 35% of them) here with meat in them.  It is almost always Pork and comes in one of three forms:

1. Hot dogs / sausages
2. Bacon
3. Shredded pork / Pork flakes (I don’t know what it’s called exactly)

At first it’s kinda funny to look at, and you’d wonder who eats it, but after a while you start getting addicted…

There is a bakery near school called Fashion & Bakery.  It has by far the most variety of pastries of any place I have seen.  A few of my favorites:

1. Hamburgers.  Strait up, room temperature cooked hamburgers on a bun.
2. Small pizza type pastries with everything from bacon to mushrooms and corn.
3. Italian style Parmesan cheese with ham inside.

I am told by Nono and another friend or two that these kinds of pastries are all over Japan too.  I can’t say that I noticed these many varieties of pastries there, but who knows.

You can click this link to see a few pictures I took at various bakeries.  I’ve been told I can’t take pictures at some, so I didn’t use the flash and a lot of the pics have a weird yellow color on account of the fluorescent lighting.  Guess you gotta visit to see em.

The tea I got is a very young green puer.  It is from wild leaves in the Yunnan region, Yi Wu area, from a small town called MaHei.  This tea was sourced directly by Sun Sing with a small production, looking at the images you can see it is under the Sun Sing branded label also.  Puer is pretty intimidating to buy because there is so much fake stuff on the market, and it’s hard to know what is real.  You have to either be an expert or trust someone who is.

This cake was $70 US and is a 2007 vintage.  If I was to store it properly, it should be aged about 20 years before it is in prime condition for drinking.  $70 is pretty expensive for such a young tea.  Puer seems so expensive to a westerner; and it’s often compared with wine because you age it and the flavor develops over time.  I think one of the main differences in the purchase with puer is that you are effectively buying a couple cases of wine, not just a bottle.  So, this $70 cake is about 60 to 80 pots of tea, essentially a buck a serving.  Each serving is 6 – 10 pots of tea also, so its a lot of tea you are buying with a cake.  I’m just supposed to wait 20 years to have it…

If you are wondering about pu-erh tea check out this cake available on amazon.

Anyone else got any good kale recipes?

I’ve got a lot of tea links posted on my delicious page, and would like to mention a couple of my favorite places to drink or purchase tea in Portland, Oregon.

Sacred Tea – This is a friend’s company, Paul Rosenburg.  He has been into tea and art for a very long time, and has turned the attic of an older house into a beautiful tea room with lots of beautiful art.  He serves some excellent aged puer teas also.

Portland Chinese Garden – Right in downtown Portland, this place is beautiful and peaceful.  There is a great tea shop in there which serves great Chinese teas and snacks.  It can get busy on a nice day, but on a rainy portland winter day there is no better place in Portland to enjoy a book and a cup of tea.

Tao of Tea – Their Belmont store is great, and there are 2 sides: One normal tea shop and one room that just sells teas and tea accessories.  The Tao is the company that operates the Chinese Garden Tea Shop, and their teas are high quality.  They are in my opinion, the center of the tea culture in Portland.

So those are a few places.  The NY Times wrote a great article about Portland and Tea this summer, which mentions some other places also.  The picture you see is a beautiful image from the National Tea Museum in China (China is where tea was discovered).  The museum is located in Hangzhou, just outside of Shanghai.