Congee is a bland food. That's why it's a breakfast food in countries from Vietnam to Japan. But at the congee restaurants on Fuxing Road between Da'an and Technology Building MRT stations, it's a midnight snack.
Xiao Lizi is one of those restaurants with floor-to-ceiling windows revealing an ample buffet. A hostess stands outside telling passersby to stop for a snack. The place is less flashy but more popular than the others on either side and both floors fill up by 8pm, with customers streaming in and out into the wee hours of the morning. With a clean and simple decor, it's the perfect place to take a breather from your night on the town.
Congee can suffer from bad texture, which just compounds the problem of its blandness. But the congee you'll find at Xiao Lizi is a far cry from the leftover rice soaking in milky water that visits many a breakfast table in Taiwan. The ingredients are simple enough -- rice and water -- but a good consistency is difficult to attain with congee. If you cook it for too long, the rice grains disintegrate -- too short and the broth will be too watery. After cooking, the excess water can be drained to create a Western porridge-like consistency or left in to make it more like a soup. Xiao Lizi's congee is somewhere in between. Chunks of yam are thrown in to sweeten and thicken the mixture and the result is a pot of smooth, glowing goo.
PHOTO: MEREDITH DODGE, TAIPEI TIMES
The buffet table is the other option at Xiao Lizi. The first thing you must remember to put on your tray is a bowl of youtiao -- a stick of fried bread cut into sections to be soaked in the congee until it's tender and squishy.
Another typical congee side dish is thousand-year egg. One of the substances used to preserve the eggs (is it the charcoal or the lime?) reacts strangely with sweet flavors and if you take a bite of congee after a bite of the thousand-year egg without thoroughly rinsing your mouth, you will be greeted with a most unpleasant bitterness.
I found that, in general, the sweeter dishes went best with the congee, especially the deliciously crunchy lotus root and the tender leeks. If your stomach is up for it at that time of night, there are many other tempting dishes to try: stinky tofu, kung pao chicken, and several hearty stews. A selection of greens can be stir-fried or boiled to order.
If the thought of eating salty, fried dishes with sweet porridge turns you off, just ask for a pot of steamed rice instead.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located