Taiwanese Cooking Class | 4everdiscovering

Learning How To Cook: Taiwanese Style

Taking Lessons from Momma Ivy, and Eating Everything in Sight

Now, I think we all know that I love food. You’ve (hopefully) read my other blog entries about the different food Emily and I have tried in Taiwan. Some of this food has been mouth-watering, and others I prefer not to talk about it. With any new cultural food experience, there is always some good and some bad. For now, we are going to stick to the good! After trying so many delicious dishes here, we decided it was about time to do some cooking for ourselves. It’s hard to cook when we only have a hot plate (that’s right, no kitchen). Instead of dirtying up our few dishes we own, we thought we should use a real kitchen and learn how to cook some of our favourite meals here!

After school, we headed to Ivy’s Kitchen; Emily found this place online and it had great reviews. It was a little pricey, but we decided to splurge. It is the holidays and we need to treat ourselves a little now and then. We made it to the house, and were surprised to find it was Ivy’s own apartment. She greeted us with a friendly smile, and invited us in for a cup of tea before we started cooking. It was really relaxing; she was actually trying to get to know us a little instead of taking our money and pushing us out the door.

We chose three dishes to cook for the night: pork belly sandwich (my favourite), tomato beef noodles, and sesame balls for dessert. Ivy even accommodated our choices for us, and went out of her way to let us cook what we wanted. Sesame balls aren’t usually on her menu, but she was more than willing to teach us how to make them!

Because all three of the dishes took a long time to cook, Ivy said we were going to cook them all at the same time so we could eat dinner sooner. The best part about cooking is being able to eat the finished products! We started with kneading the dough for the pork buns. Everything was made from scratch; this was really the first time I’ve made anything from scratch. I’m more used to pouring my KD noodles and adding my own processed cheese type of cooking lately (unless you count picking out my own pizza toppings as well). Cooking from scratch takes a lot of time and patience. Next time, I will make sure not to start starving. I wanted to eat everything; cooked or uncooked, I didn’t care.

After making the buns, we started on the tomato beef noodle soup. We cut the fresh beef and tomatoes, and added them into Ivy’s secret broth recipe. Spoiler Alert: One of the secret ingredients is extra pork belly fat from previous cooking classes. Ivy freezes it and uses it to add flavour in her other dishes! Genius. Who doesn’t love more fat? Once we got the broth cooking, we started on the sesame balls. Again, making everything from scratch, we had to crush the sesame into powder and make the outside dough for the balls. It took a lot of tender love and care, but we eventually made about 15 balls and ate the leftover sesame. I wasn’t kidding when I told you I was hungry. It was like being able to lick the spoon when your mom makes cupcakes. You never say no.

While everything else was cooking away, our last step was to steam the buns. One of the best things about living in Taiwan is how most of the food is steamed. It is a much healthier choice to cook, and is quite cool to use the bamboo steamers. We had 6 buns ready for steaming; Ivy put the pot on high and placed the steamer on top. After about 13 minutes, our buns were ready, as well as our tomato beef noodles. We decided to eat dessert last this time.

Now, this was just a quick overview of our night. We spent about 3-4 hours at Ivy’s house, learning how to cook these meals. Luckily for us, she printed us out the recipes so we didn’t have to memorize everything. If you really want to know more details about the recipe, I guess I can share the secret with you (for a small fee of course). OR, better yet, you can wait until I get home and I can try to cook them for you! I don’t know how they will turn out, I make no promises, but I can try my best!

Our meals at Ivy’s Kitchen were amazing. The pork belly sandwich was just as tender as the ones I buy near our apartment; the tomato beef noodles should make the top 100 CNN rated dishes; and the sesame balls were the perfect dessert to end a delicious meal. I felt good knowing that I (somewhat) cooked this food. Ivy was a fantastic host, and spoke excellent English. Believe it or not, she learned her English from teaching foreigners how to cook! She is a super busy lady, and hard to schedule in an appointment, especially around the holidays. All I know is that I loved the food, but don’t mind getting my takeout here. I forgot how much time it takes to cook for yourself! I’m getting too spoiled with all of the cheap street food here; I’m going to go through culture shock when I go back home and can’t go to my sushi stand every night!