chu-ji

All right, so, this was conceived as being more or less a crafty/foody blog. But there isn't any rule that says the food has to be pretty, right? Since I don't have a quality camera or an oven with which to bake adorable hand-decorated cupcakes yet, and also since I didn't make this stuff, my landlady did, I'm going to post it just for the hell of it:


I can imagine the look on my boyfriend's face now. 'You put that in your mouth?!' Yes, and it was a one-way ticket to Yumsville. It's apparently such a typically Taiwanese dish that the landlady's daughter didn't even give me the name of it in standard Mandarin. In Taiwanese dialect it's pronounced more or less like 'chu-ji'.* It contains peanuts, lots of garlic, and also some little things that we're not sure what are in English, but they're tiny, they grow on trees, and they need to be harvested by hand which is a right pain in the ass. The whole shebang is cooked for ages and quite labor-intensive. I'm told it's similar to Japanese natto, which I've heard horror stories about for years. I could happily eat this all the time though!

To enjoy it properly, you keep it in the freezer and add little dabs of it to rice, eggs, noodles, or whatever. It's quite salty and the flavour is too intense for it to be eaten on its own.

*For anyone who's Chinese-enabled, when written out it's the character shu(4) for 'tree' followed by a tz. Not really informative!