The Taiwanese Eating Machine (1 Good)

For Thomas, the success of a country, rests in its culinary offerings and Taiwan is no exception to this rule as it has given him ample new dishes to try (not all of them palatable).

So far he has munched his way through many dishes including some Taiwanese specialities, some of which are local to particular cities or towns only:

- Japanese style hot pot with noodles and fish (each table have their own gas rings and the bowl is presented to you with the raw ingredients including frozen fish, you cook your pot over the gas ring and add various fish as you go)

Japanese style hot pot with noodles, Kaohsiung

- fish broth
- fish wonton soup and noodles

Fish Wonton soup and noodles, Taipei

- spicy pot stickers and shrimp rolls

Thomas orders a variety of pot stickers including spicy Korean and garden vegetable

- Chinese style breakfast normally served stone cold consisting of congee (vile watery rice that tastes like wallpaper paste) and pickled vegetables
- clams and mussels
- pork floss (nasty stuff that the locals sprinkle over many dishes, especially at breakfast), unfortunately it was never candy floss

Pork Floss and Fish Floss (any kind of floss...)

- whole baby calamari
- battered small crabs
- squid lips (these are sublime and I'm not being sarcastic)

Taiwanese equivalent of 'fish and chips', Lugang

- spring onion pancake
- steamed buns filled with taro or pork

Steamed Bun Stall, Lugang

- red bean ice cream (not pleasant)
- pineapple cake
- custard tarts
- mango milk nougat
- monkey shrimps (mud shrimps)
- vegetable and pork wontons

Thomas eating wontons

- Taiwanese milk fish

Taiwanese milk fish and shrimp rolls (Taiwan speciality dish)

- shaved ice (Thomas's favourite, a Taiwanese speciality dessert covered in different combinations of your choice including fruit, condensed milk, tapioca beans, honey or sweet taro) - we were lucky enought to eat our shaved ice at the oldest establishment in Taiwan

Shaved Ice with condensed milk and fruit (Taiwan speciality dessert dish)

What we weren't brave enough to try:
- sticky salty pudding (one look was enough to make your stomach turn when you saw the gooey mess in a bowl)
- duck's blood curd
- chicken feet
- smoked duck head and neck

Smoked duck head and neck, Night market

- smoked pig ears
- hard boiled eggs left to soak in black tea

Hard Boiled Eggs soaked in black tea in 7-Eleven, Taipei

- stinky tofu (fermented tofu cubes deep fried in pig fat) - this has to be one of the worst smells ever, it is guaranteed to make you heave without even seeing the dish or getting within a hundred yards of the establishment serving it - I've been told that it is delicious)
- glutinous pork meatballs in some sloppy, gloopy sauce that resembles something that would have been used on Tiswas (again showing my age) or Noel's House Party by Mr Blobby
- vegetarian tree hedgehog silk (answers on a postcard please if anyone can actually identify what this is as I can't quite believe it is made from hedeghogs)

Vegetarian Tree Hedgehog Silk, one of the many snacks you can find in a 7-Eleven, Tainan

Drinks wise, the national drink is tea but not tea as we know it! While I longed for a nice cup of earl grey or a hot cup of Tetley or Yorkshire Tea with a nice splash of cow's milk, there wasn't much chance of finding it here. The Taiwanese are absolutely obsessed by tea and there are aisles of the stuff in plastic bottles in the chiller cabinet (mostly soya bean milk varieties or without milk) sold cold, or cruise down the soft drinks aisles to discover another world of tea, again sold in plastic bottles but a variety of black or green intended to be served cold. In fact, at first glance it appears difficult to hunt down a drink that isn't tea. From one perspective, it's healthy as there are hardly any fizzy drinks and fruit juices are very expensive. But what if you don't like tea?

We sampled various iced teas including black wintermelon tea (bearable but only just), iced lemongrass tea (not sure), iced green tea with passionfruit (gorgeous), turquoise tea with mango with varying degrees of success.

Iced Green Tea with Passionfruit, Kaohsiung

As we pottered down the streets, tea shops or stalls are as numerous as 7-Elevens serving 101 different varieties, many of them strange looking concoctions dispatched in sealed plastic cups to be drunk through straws. Some of the most popular are pearl milk tea, bubble tea and teas with tapioca beans floating in them.

If you want a hot cup of tea, Taiwan produces some of the finest tea in the world (just don't expect milk or sugar in it) including oolong (semi-fermented). The Oriental Beauty strain derives its flavour from young leaves that have been bitten by tiny insects. There's also green tea which is used to flavour every conceivable food stuff including ice cream.

We visited Maokong, one of Taiwan's oldest tea growing areas in south Taipei. The Taipei Tea Promotion Centre was a chance to meet a local tea farmer and taste all the different strains of oolong. Thomas got into the spirit of tea tasting, by trying every single tea that was poured out in front of him but he hasn't been converted to tea drinking just yet.