Ilan festival serves up gourmet delights

The festive atmosphere still burns two days after the Lantern Festival with events and celebrations going on all over the country. But the end of the Lantern Festival marks the end of the whole Chinese New Year season, and a good way to calm down from a whole month of holiday excitement is to escape from the city, take a trip by train to Ilan County and join the Ilan Food and Tourism Festival (宜蘭觀光美食節).

The festival began on Wednesday and will last until Sunday at Minsheng Market (民生市場) of Luo-tung Township. The festival lets tourists enjoy food, the beautiful Ilan scenery and take part in a stir-fried rice contest, all in one trip, according to Ilan County magistrate Liu Shou-cheng (劉守成).

Like last year, Liu and the Ilan Tourism Association (宜蘭縣觀光協會) recruited award-winning chefs to create dishes that are the highlights of the festival. This year, there are 16 chefs who have come from 16 Ilan restaurants and hotels for the festival.

Together they will turn Ilan specialties such as candied fruits, sticky-rice cakes, duck jerky (鴨賞), kao-cha (糕渣) and hsi-lu meat (西魯肉) into banquet dishes worthy of a five-star hotel. Participants can enjoy these special dishes and can also learn how to make the exquisite foods.

Ilan County has long been a traditional agricultural society and has been described as "behind the mountains" (後山) because it's blocked from cities by high mountains. Its remote location has allowed its specialties to survive unchanged.

Each of the foods has a geographic connection. Duck jerky, for example, was created because of the constant flooding of the Tung-shan River (冬山河). The floods affected the harvests and made farmers raise ducks by the river for extra income. Because it was inconvenient to transport fresh duck meat, farmers began to smoke the duck meat with sugar cane in order to make dry meat to sell elsewhere.

Kao-cha, a deep-fried meat cake, is a dish originally created from left-over food. People used to mix bone soup stock, pork fat and corn starch, then freeze the mix to make meat jelly, and finally deep fry the jelly blocks.

Chef Chen Chao-ling (陳兆麟), the lead chef of the food festival and a celebrity chef who took charge of President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) national banquet in Ilan, presents a high-end version of kao-cha. The bone soup and pork fat is replaced with ground chicken, pork and shrimp that are made into a paste. The paste is mixed with chicken stock and potato starch to thicken it and then the "meat tofu" is cut into blocks. The blocks are deep fried until they turn golden.

Apart from the local specialties, the food fair also presents 100 chicken dishes to mark the Year of the Rooster. The dishes are prepared by the 16 participating restaurants, and among the 100 chicken variations are braised chicken breast, chicken salad, stuffed chicken, roast whole chicken, chicken stir fries and plentiful choices of chicken soup.

Finally, the festival offers a stir-fried-rice contest for all participants where they can show off their cooking skills. Although a simple and common dish, stir-fried rice can be a disaster if the cook is given only 20 minutes, some ham, pork shreds, eggs, beef, shrimp, garlic, scallions and only a few seasonings to work with.

Of course, a food fair is not complete without drinks. Heineken is offering a contest to let participants imitate the Heineken TV commercial by dredging up beer bottles from an ice bucket. Plenty of beer will be given to the winners.