by Mike Yuan
Let’s see…$300 x 4 visits…$1200…the amount of money I need each month for eating spicy hot-pot; 3 hours x 4 visits…12 hours…the amount of time I could spend every month eating it; and $200…the amount of money I save every time I choose to eat something else like a bowl of noodles and a can of apple sidra. Math figures are not what I love most, but they sure do come to mind every time I sit in front of Kungkuan’s “Fly to the Sky Ma-la Hot Pot”(公館飛天麻辣鍋). The equations above reflect the best case scenario, meaning, for example it would be best if I could eat hot-pot four times a month. The word “best” is ironic, of course, considering the recession in Taiwan; this should be the time when we save. As a result, my demand cannot always be totally satisfied, due to insufficient supply of cash. Some people ask me how can I be so fanatic about hot-pot? Well, imagine this. There on a rectangular table a hot-pot sits gracefully and quietly, like a meditating sage. Suddenly the calmness is broken by an intrusion of a variety of raw dipping materials, from traditional hot-pot necessities like beef, pork, lamb, prawns, cuttlefish and dumplings to specialties like pork liver, chicken claws, oyster, and crabmeat. He opens his eyes wide, and starts breathing rapidly, almost gasping for air. You feel an increase in heat around the sage as his eyes radiate burning flames. He takes all the different materials in one hand and flips through his enigmatic recipe with the other hand, and like magic the materials are made into a tableful of gourmet food. Fly to the Sky’s spicy ma-la hot-pot is different from the other hot-pot restaurants I’ve been to. The restaurant’s special tasty “pot bottom”(鍋底), a combination of duck’s blood, and tofu stewed in bone soup with a special mix of spices, is so delicious that it’s made me their loyal customer, and I feel I will never eat ma-la hot-pot in any other restaurant again. A key concept in Chinese cuisine is that we consider a plate to be “well-cooked” only if the many different tastes are all cooked “into” each other. For example, a mushroom chicken soup would be considered well-cooked if when you take a bite of a mushroom, you could feel you are eating chicken, because the taste of chicken has been cooked into the mushroom and into the soup. Usually it takes several hours of stewing for the tastes to cook into each other. Fly to the Sky’s duck blood, unlike the duck blood of other restaurants, which taste like they had just been added into the pot a few minutes ago, are well-cooked and will conquer your mouth and stomach, urging you to take another one from the pot. I usually see the sage perform his magical act two or three times before I feel full and satisfied. Then I serve myself a glass of ice cream, for free! Ah, how I wish I could be eating it right now! #Volume 7 Issue 2 a
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The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
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