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Photos by MJ Klein

A few hundred meters from the Flower Market is Hong Kong’s famous Yuen Po Street Bird Garden. You walk around the corner to the left….
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Photos by MJ Klein

Hui-chen and I love Hong Kong and we’d like to show you around some. This series will take you to several places of interest that we recommend.
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Photos by MJ Klein

Hui-chen and I thought it would be a good idea to travel to the Hsinchu fish market and pick up some fish for grilling. It’s hard to beat the flavor of a nice fatty fish on the grill!

We have blogged on other fish markets before but not on this market, which is the closest one to our home in Hukou. On this day the available selections seemed a bit lighter than usual.

Before we went shopping for food, Hui-chen suggested that we eat at one of the restaurants. Yes, the hard-selling is still going on, and it’s still just as annoying! Here we see many of the wonderful greens that Taiwanese cuisine is famous for.

These are soft-shelled crabs. Each restaurant cooks a representative dish of their most popular offerings. I took some shots of the more interesting ones.

I am really not sure what the blue creatures are. When I find out I will update this post!

Naked frogs.

Hui-chen always gives me the same look when I snap a candid of her like this. We are waiting for the dishes to arrive.

This is our friend Michael Turton’s favorite: asparagus slathered in sweet mayo.

This is a sweet and sour deep fried fish (shot with flash to bring out the color of the sauce). The fish was the perfect size and the flavor was just great. I liked the sauce because it wasn’t overpowering like the sweet and sour sauces in the USA.

Standard fare: peel and eat shrimp.

After lunch we walked around the market and I spotted this carpet shark.

These are very large fish eyes just waiting for someone to buy them….

Now this is one of 2 things we came to get. I absolutely love salmon on the grill. The other thing we came to get were tuna steaks but there were not to be found. I did find a tuna subspecies tail section but I thought the price was too high.

Hui-chen carefully selected 2 beautiful salmon steaks for us.

These shots show just how nice the fish looked! Awesome!

Hui-chen wanted to get some clams for a dish she had in mind.

These are good prices for clams. 3 baskets for NT$200, or roughly US$6.

We put the fish in the freezer and took it out on Tuesday:

These are some of the blue shrimp that Shao-hui had the other day.

This is a lousy shot of the salmon grilling.

And this is the final shot of a piece of grilled salmon. I cannot tell you how good this was! The fat cooked up beautifully and created smoke that flavored the meat to perfection. I loved this meal!

technorati tags:Taiwan, Hsinchu, Hukou, grilled, fish, market

Blogged with Flock

Photos by MJ Klein

Sunday morning, up with the lark
I think I’ll take a walk in the park
Hey, hey, hey, it’s a beautiful day
I’ve got someone waiting for me
When I see her I know that she’ll say
Hey, hey, hey, it’s a beautiful day
Hi, hi, hi, beautiful SundayThis is my, my, my, beautiful day
When you say, say, say, say that you love meOh, my, my, my it’s a beautiful day

DANIEL BOONE lyrics - Beautiful Sunday

Hui-chen and I decided to go to the Hsinchu fish market, not far from our home in Hukou. We wanted to pick up some fish for grilling.

We have blogged on our visits to several fish markets before, but never on the Hsinchu market. The last time we were in that area with blogger David Reid at the Dragon Boat Festival. Back then I was so sick that I didn’t even blog on the Dragon Boat Festival, but there are lots of photos on flickr.com at the above link. I will blog on the food aspects of our trip to the Hsinchu Fish Market on Bushman’s Asian Food Blog, but for this post I want to talk about Beautiful Sunday.

When I say that the air was clear, I mean that it was amazingly clear! This jet passed overhead and I could almost count the passengers! Just look at that beautiful deep blue sky!

The wind was blowing so hard that it blew my hat off! Fortunately I had the lanyard tied tight so it didn’t fly away. These are some vendors set up outside the fish market. They are selling anything and everything that blows in the wind and they picked a great day for it!

Inside the fish market, it was business as usual….

But outside, the water was choppy. Check out the whitecaps on the Taiwan Straight in the distance. There was a lot of wind borne turbulence in the harbor.

A couple of guys had aerobatic kites and due to the high windspeed, you couldn’t follow the kites with your eyes because they were moving so fast. Check out the streamer - it’s almost tied in knots! I’ve never seen a kite move so fast before. The wind was quite literally typhoon strength. Hui-chen and I had trouble walking and I took off my glasses because I thought they would get blown off my face.

On the way home, there were several dust storms kicking up.

This is one of the lighter dust storms. Sometimes it was hard to see the mountains in the distance.

But the high winds also had a good side to them, as they blew the junk out of the air that normally hangs over Hsinchu (this and the following shots were taken from the car).

Notice the signs knocked down by the high winds. We haven’t had a direct typhoon hit in a couple of weeks. These signs were pushed over by recent high winds. Fortunately by Monday the wind has died down somewhat….

technorati tags:Taiwan, Hsinchu, fish market, wind, clear

Blogged with Flock

Cross posted from Bushman’s Asian Food Blog
Meals featured: Sashimi; Fish Hot Pot

Our friend Michael Turton came up to see us again this weekend, and we decided to take a trip up to the Yong An fishing port! Its a great place to walk around and see all the activity both inside and outside the port.

There is a dredging project going on, to open up the port depth apparently. This backhoe operator is skillfully using the backhoe to move the barge along. It was fascinating to watch!

Working at the entrance to the port.

This is a shot of the famous bridge from the market side.

Once inside, you find the first section: restaurants. There are quite a few restaurants, and more of them feature the typical pushy Taiwanese hard selling person in the front. Annoying and insulting to Westerners, they say the same crap at every restaurant: “The food here is so good!
Everything is fresh!” etc., and then try to draw your attention to the menu. The truth is, I never go into a place with a hard seller because I do not want to reinforce their behavior. I don’t want
them to think that my decision to eat there was based on their “selling” technique! Turns out that Michael feels the same way. On this side, the restaurant people were a lot less aggressive.

Here are some more shots of the restaurant side:

Next, we went into the “fresh fish area” as its called in Chinese. This is the actual fish market building.

This guy is doing what most Taiwanese vendors do - telling him what he should buy, without asking a single question about his needs. The variety of fish is amazing.

That’s shark meat in the center.

Dried offerings (above and below).

More fish than you could ever imagine….

These are the various squid taken off the coast of Taiwan.

The number, and size, of the squid was surprising.

This is Mexican abalone.

More shark meat.

This is the auction area.

We couldn’t have gone all day in a fish market without buying something! We got some sashimi from one of the many vendors, and took it outside to eat. Excellent!

This is Michael Turton displaying his chopstick skills with a fresh piece of sashimi.

Hui-chen and I decided to get some fish to make “hot pot” for dinner. Here she is picking out the fish meat she wants.

These carcasses and other pieces are for making stock. We bought a large tuna chin and used it in our hot pot. It made for a very tasty soup!

This is the overall shot of the hot pot ingredients.

Vegetables, tofu, and tofu skin.

Mushrooms/fungus, and fish meat.

This is a closeup of the fish meat, which includes salmon and tuna. On a cold night, a fish hot pot meal with fatty salmon and tuna is very satisfying!

We hope you enjoyed reading about our visit to Yong An Fishing Port as much as we enjoyed going there!

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