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 (
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.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Together they will turn Ilan specialties such as candied fruits, sticky-rice cakes, duck jerky (
Ilan County has long been a traditional agricultural society and has been described as "behind the mountains" (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
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.
EVENT INFORMATION:
What: Ilan Food and Tourism Festival
When: Feb. 23 to Feb. 27
Where: Ming-sheng Market, 6 Ming-sheng Rd, Luo-tung Township, Ilan County (
For more information, call the Ilan Tourism Association at (03) 988-8333
Participating Restaurants:
Cha Bu Duo Restaurant (
Good Taste Seafood (
Du Hsiaw Uye, Luo-tung branch (
He Feng Hot spring Hotel (
Thai Dynasty Restaurant (
Kinmen Restaurant (
Du Hsiaw Uye, Ilan branch (
Chili Garden (
Jing Dian Restaurant (
Jin Tsun Restaurant (
Sea Capital Restaurant (
Musashi Japanese Restaurant (
Wu Tao Restaurant (
Yo-ai Hotel, Dim Sum House (
Landis Inn, Luo-tung (
On April 26, The Lancet published a letter from two doctors at Taichung-based China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) warning that “Taiwan’s Health Care System is on the Brink of Collapse.” The authors said that “Years of policy inaction and mismanagement of resources have led to the National Health Insurance system operating under unsustainable conditions.” The pushback was immediate. Errors in the paper were quickly identified and publicized, to discredit the authors (the hospital apologized). CNA reported that CMUH said the letter described Taiwan in 2021 as having 62 nurses per 10,000 people, when the correct number was 78 nurses per 10,000
May 5 to May 11 What started out as friction between Taiwanese students at Taichung First High School and a Japanese head cook escalated dramatically over the first two weeks of May 1927. It began on April 30 when the cook’s wife knew that lotus starch used in that night’s dinner had rat feces in it, but failed to inform staff until the meal was already prepared. The students believed that her silence was intentional, and filed a complaint. The school’s Japanese administrators sided with the cook’s family, dismissing the students as troublemakers and clamping down on their freedoms — with
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster
RSS