What have we been eating?

This is a good question!

Every day we go to breakfast at a little coffee shop across the street from our apartment. The owner knows us and I'm quite sure that if he could speak any English or I could speak any Chinese, we'd become fast friends.

We usually get the same thing every day: a cup of coffee, a ham sandwich, a hard boiled egg, and some jell-o. (Jell-o, by the way, is a very common thing here. Its eaten all the time and regularly served with meals at informal restaurants... I'm all about it!) The ham sandwich is on Italian or French style bread and its fantastic! It is the only good bread I've had since I left the States, and I'm quite happy to eat it every day. After breakfast, our meals are much less consistent and predictable.

One of our favorite places to go to grab a quick lunch is a dumpling stand on our way to work. Women are sitting at this table all the time making dumplings and a furious pace. Its quite amazing to watch. They just have these huge bags of ground pork already prepared with seasonings and they use a little wooden spatula to scoop some meat into the pre-cut dough and then pinch the dumplings shut.

Nick and I usually order about 15 dumplings each and just eat them all for lunch. They're quite delicious, but usually give me a bit of indigestion. I typically have to take a trip to the restroom about an hour later, but I still really like to eat them.

Another thing we recently found was a stand across the street from our house where we can get breakfast when our little cafe is closed (on Sundays). They serve a sort of breakfast sandwich, except instead of bread, the stuff is in between two pads of rice. I'm not quite sure what all was inside, but I do know there was an egg, some beef, onions, and an unidentified fried-something (possibly fried tofu). It was actually pretty good, but also had me running to the restroom not too long after eating it.

One of our favorite things to grab on the go is something called "manapua" in Hawaii, and I'm not even going to try to give you the Chinese name. They are basically dumplings but the meat is inside of steamed bread, instead of pasta. They are one of my favorite snacks and only cost about $NT10 each (which is about 30 cents US).

Well, that's all the time I have for today. I'm going to try to start taking more food pictures, because I think food is one of the most interesting and fun things to explore in new countries and I want to share it all with you!