Imperialism, food etc...
I'm just back from a short vacation to Taipei. This was a long awaited return trip for us after a period of four years. It was a toss-up between Australia and Taipei when we started planning for the vacation. However, the vacation theme was not sightseeing but food. And Australia never had a chance. You don't think of any nation inhabited by English-speaking white people when you think of food or culinary skills. What could you possibly eat? Steak? Hamburger? Fish and chips? Hmmm. Kangaroo meat - well, that sounds a bit exotic but still it's again only meat with salt and perhaps pepper. I'd rather go for a Brazilian churrasco when I feel the urge to eat meat - tonnes of it.

Talking about British cooking, BBC says an Indian woman is trying to popularise it in India through a TV show. Good luck to her. Has she ever wondered why Indian food is popular in Britain? Or, why Chinese food is popular across the world? As someone said, the main reason the English went around building an empire was because of the rotten food. And of course, the weather.

Wife: "Honey, dinner is ready. It's fish and chips."
Husband: "Bleaargh.."...runs out.
Wife: "Hey, where you going?"
Husband: "It's urgent. The Queen wants me to go conquer Hyderabad. She needs some frikkin' spice in her life (and me too). Will write you, bye".
That's how the whole imperialism thingy started.

So, there we were in Taipei, where something like the Taiwanese version of monsoon, known as plum rain season, was in full swing. Incessant rains, but it didn't affect our schedule, as there was no sightseeing involved to begin with. Get on the subway and go to the day's scheduled pit stop for food. Or, hail a cab, show the map, and you're at your favourite restaurant. My wife had done all the necessary research and had all the eateries highlighted on a map. My only precondition when visiting Taipei was to go to Chili House, a Szechwan restaurant I fell in love with the first time I visited. Sadly, the place had modernized and the food had lost some of its bite, probably to please the int'l clientele including the Japanese. I was no longer able to see the kitchen. No more smell of red chillies being fried. It lost the ambience I was looking for. The tantanmein (dandanmein), a spicy noodle, was still good for me to go for a second helping the next day.

Other places include a Pekinese food place, where we had something like our paratha - not what the N. Indian's call paratha, but the real McCoy, "the Kerala Parotta" - inside which you roll up different things like shredded beef, vegetables etc and then put a piece of scallion dipped in a miso-based sauce and eat. The parotta is very thin compared to ours but tastes exactly the same.

A Shanghai-style restaurant had small steamed buns inside which you put big chunks of braised pork. Exquisite. I ordered a stinky tofu, the deep-fried version, but the lady got it wrong and got us the non-fried one. It really stank. We had to cancel it. Not because I hated it but because the pork and the side order of tofu dish and onion pancake for my son had filled us up thoroughly.

The only person who was affected by the rain was my son. We had planned on going to parks etc., so that he could expend some of the seemingly bottomless reservoir of energy a 2-year old possesses. The rains meant we had to search for indoor recreation places. So we ended up going to an indoor water park and another children's amusement park. Both small, both I felt were too expensive. We also went up the current tallest building in the world - Taipei 101. Another daylight robbery. About $13 or 14 to go up the world's fastest lift. The only thing I found interesting in that place was this big 5-metre tall ball hung at the centre of the building cutting across a few floors, called a damper, that protects the building from heavy winds and earthquakes. Probably the remnants of my long lost engineer-hood that attracted me to it.

Anyway, I'm back and planning to cook some good Indian food, including some dosas. My son's teachers at the nursery have invited themselves over to try out some Indian cuisine. Have to keep my hands off that chilli powder.