Ordering KFC in Taiwan

One of my absolute favorite things about traveling is food. I love food, I love to try new food, I will eat anything once (including the eyes, feet, brains, and testicles of various animals, dog, worms, and insects). But sometimes you just want something familiar - the comfort food syndrome. I experienced this in the worst way during my first trip to Taiwan.

A school-sponsored trip, a group of people from the Chinese language program were cooped up together in the ShiDa university’s dorm in Taipei. One of the girls and I were out wandering one evening when we were both struck with the urgent need for fried chicken. And conveniently enough there are a lot of KFCs in Taipei. Despite my willingness to be adventurous with culturally different foods I am a remarkably picky eater. When the question is foul, I don’t eat dark meat. This left me at somewhat of a disadvantage when ordering chicken. 

At this point in my language study I’d had little experience with practical application, and ordering at KFC was not a chapter in our text book. So I did the next best thing.

Charades

I told the extremely startled people at the order counter that I wanted white meat. But since I didn’t know the words I simply said that “I want these” (要這些) while pointing at my breasts and flapping my arms in a gross misuse of the chicken dance.

And that I did not want these (不要這些) while running a finger illustratively up and down my arm then lifting my leg as high as it would go to do the same.

Needless to say the employees and other customers that night at KFC were experiencing something unique.

In the end I didn’t even need my charades because by then we were both so hungry we ordered a bucket (my friend being happy with the dark meat) and thought to share it with some of our other classmates. Of course by the time we got back to the dorm we were ravenous and so sneaked in by getting off the elevator a floor early, walking down the hall to go up the last flight via the stairs and thus avoid having to walk down the hall where all our classmates were. We locked ourselves her dorm room and devoured our treat. While I might normally have felt a little guilty for eating that much fried chicken, I kind of felt I’d deserved it.

The Strawberry Shortcake Debacle

Baking is one of my favorite hobbies. I started making birthday cakes for people at work mostly so I could bake and try out decorating techniques (that never really worked out) on unsuspecting people who just wanted the sugar. I have always liked to bake and that extended to the interminable summer dinners when I lived with my parents that seemed to consist largely of strawberry shortcake.

My dad is what my mom calls a ‘hobby farmer’ which means in addition to the variety of animals we also had some small crops. Among them were strawberries. Have you ever had to spend your summer under a hot sun hoeing weeds around freaking strawberry plants? Not fun. Although I, cleverer than my siblings, discovered pretty fast that if you weren’t helpful, Dad didn’t want you to help. So a couple perfectly healthy strawberry plants were slaughtered while I feigned ignorance over what was strawberry and what was weed. I was relegated to the house. Drat.

Part of the trade off was that I hulled, washed, mashed and froze the berries when my brother and sister brought them inside. So much easier, thank you. One night I also volunteered to make the biscuits for the strawberry shortcake.  

They came out of the oven and were so beautiful; lightly golden brown and light and fluffy.

We all poured strawberries of the warm biscuits and dug in. And then noticed something odd. Have you ever heard of Pop Rocks? They were this great candy the fizzled and popped in your mouth, kind of like Rice Krispies to nth degree. Well that’s what the strawberry shortcake was doing. And then the biscuits turned purple.

?!?

How strange. What was going on here? 

The mystery of the fizzing purple strawberry shortcake was soon resolved but people were not happy to have their dessert delayed. Particularly not my grandfather. My mom quickly made another batch of biscuits and in end everyone had their non chemistry experiment sweet fix. But what had gone wrong?

I learned an important lesson that day; there is a difference between baking powder and baking soda. Huh. Who knew? Well probably a lot of people did but not I. I do now though.