Till we're back, cheers!
Friday, 19 July 2013
Off to Hong Kong!
The Chillin team is off to Hong Kong for 4 days, we hope to bring back more insights of great food and shopping to share. We'll also be attending a coffee knowledge class, really excited about that! I hope to be able to master some basic coffee art as well, wish me success =)
Sunday, 14 July 2013
Milk Tea Gelato
Taking a break from our Taiwan posts, we'll still be writing maybe one or two more on Kao Hsiung once we are done editing the photos.
For now, back to ice-cream making...we've just experimented with Milk tea gelato yesterday! We are both regular tea drinkers, hence decided why not try something using our 3-in-1 milk tea sachets at home.
Here's the recipe:
Milk - 150g
Cream - 100g
Sugar - 100g
Water - 150g
Milk tea powder - 1 sachet of Old Town White Milk Tea 40g
First, mix the milk tea power with water just like how you will usually make milk tea. Then stir in the milk, heat the mixture slowly. Pour in the sugar while stirring continuously, bring temperature to 87 degrees. After that, cool down the mixture in a cold bath, then add the cream. Once it's cooled down, move it to the fridge. At this point in time, the mixture is like 'Teh Gao Gao'.
Usually we'll leave it overnight and churn in the gelato maker the next day, with our trusty Cuisinart ICE-100.
The texture and sweetness turned out pretty ok, with very minor ice crystals but the disappointment was that the tea taste and smell did not come out strong enough. That sets us on a pursuit to look for a stronger tea flavour, definitely an improved version will be on the way!
To our readers: whoever knows where to get quality milk tea or tea flavours, do drop us a note. Will be greatly appreciated!
For now, back to ice-cream making...we've just experimented with Milk tea gelato yesterday! We are both regular tea drinkers, hence decided why not try something using our 3-in-1 milk tea sachets at home.
Here's the recipe:
Milk - 150g
Cream - 100g
Sugar - 100g
Water - 150g
Milk tea powder - 1 sachet of Old Town White Milk Tea 40g
First, mix the milk tea power with water just like how you will usually make milk tea. Then stir in the milk, heat the mixture slowly. Pour in the sugar while stirring continuously, bring temperature to 87 degrees. After that, cool down the mixture in a cold bath, then add the cream. Once it's cooled down, move it to the fridge. At this point in time, the mixture is like 'Teh Gao Gao'.
Usually we'll leave it overnight and churn in the gelato maker the next day, with our trusty Cuisinart ICE-100.
The Process:
The Outcome:
The texture and sweetness turned out pretty ok, with very minor ice crystals but the disappointment was that the tea taste and smell did not come out strong enough. That sets us on a pursuit to look for a stronger tea flavour, definitely an improved version will be on the way!
To our readers: whoever knows where to get quality milk tea or tea flavours, do drop us a note. Will be greatly appreciated!
Thursday, 4 July 2013
Our Indulgences in Taiwan - Part 6 Shifen-Jiufen-Keelung
From some other blog sources, we learnt about the basic travel options to Shifen-Jiufen-Keelung and decided to plan the most optimal way to go about this day trip. From our hotel, we took the MRT from Ximen station to Taipei Main Station and found our way to the ticketing counter. The counter will display all the train timings, look for the train that goes to Ruifang (瑞芳車站). Usually there will be a few train companies that operate the route, you can choose Tze Jiang or C.K. Express (莒光號) depending on which timing suits best. We took the 9.15am train and the journey is about one hour to reach Ruifang station.
Hence what we did was just buy some little souvenirs back i.e. mini lanterns that glow in the dark =)
After walking the stretch for about half an hour, we decided to sit down and eat lunch at this small shop near the train platform. We ordered beef noodles and beancurd which tasted surprisingly great!
After lunch as we had some time to burn before taking the train back to Ruifang, we went around walking on the railway tracks and took some pictures. Just remember to shove off the tracks when the train comes! And random cute cat and kitten spotted along the way...no Chillin boy is not attempting to step on kitty, he just wants to show the size comparison against his shoes.
We took the train back to Ruifang to head to our next stop Jiu Fen and it was about 3pm already, we spent about maybe 2 to 3 hours at Shifen and honestly that's more than enough. Unless you are game to take a 45 minutes walk to the waterfall, then allocate more time for Shifen. From Ruifang train station, exit to the main road and you will see a bus stop on the side of the train station but do not take the bus from here. Cross the road to the opposite side, there's no proper bus stop but just a flag pole that shows the bus numbers. Any bus that goes to Jing Gua Shi will pass by Jiu Fen, that includes 1062, 1063 and 788. The bus will go uphill and takes about 30-40 minutes.
Key highlights of Jiu Fen - Taro balls sweet soup and Ice-Cream popiah! Absolutely loved the ice-cream popiah packed with crunchy peanuts.
Jiu Fen is just one street to explore so we allocated just 1 hour+ here, before heading off to our final stop for the day Kee Lung. Find the bus stop near the end of the Jiu Fen street, take bus 788 which should be heading downhill. We left at about 5pm and took about 50mins to reach Kee Lung, alight at Yi Ren Er Lu. If in doubt, just double check with the bus driver they are always friendly enough to help.
So here we are at Kee Lung (基隆), once you alight on the right side of the road walk straight and cross to the centre you will see this large neon sign of KEELUNG in the far view (like a cheap replica of the HOLLYWOOD sign). And from there look to the left and there's the start of the famous Kee Lung night market. A lot of people seem to rave about this night market, even the Taiwanese who live in Taipei like to travel slightly out to this night market for some good food and apparently the famous dish here is the crab soup.
There are many stalls selling seafood and crab soup, we didn't know which are supposedly good so we just settled for one of them along the way. The crab soup wasn't fantastic but good enough. We ate some other snacks like the fried dumplings, sweet potato balls and the prawn balls. But we would advice against buying the prawn balls, they look good on the outside but is really more flour than prawn and they are not cheap. At 150NT, I'd rather save the money and stomach space for something else.
We took a train from Kee Lung train station straight back to Taipei Main Station before 10pm (about 45 mins) and that concludes our day trip out of Taipei. Overall, we were immensely happy with our exploration of Shifen and Jiu Fen as we discovered interesting sights and food. Kee Lung was slightly disappointing (maybe we didn't pick the right things to eat) but nevertheless was good to experience another night market out of Taipei. Hopefully this itinerary will be helpful to our readers, if you follow this and keep time along the way Shifen-Jiufen-Keelung is definitely accomplish-able in one day. Happy exploring!
At Ruifang station, approach the ticketing counter which is at the platform itself (do not go downstairs) to buy the Pingxi line ticket. This Pingxi ticket is a one-day ticket that gives you unlimited rides along the Pingxi line. For us our main objective was to get to Shifen to experience the railway tracks, how the train passes through the old shophouses and the sky lantern so we did not explore the other train stops. Note that once you miss the train, the next one will only arrive in 30-40 minutes so it's good to plan your stops and the time you spend sightseeing in advance.
Here's how the tickets look:
The Pingxi railway line is one of the 3 historical lines built by the Japanese and it will pass through some nice scenery including a waterfall before it reaches Shifen. 十分老街 is actually an old street started with just 10 families living here and subsequently made famous by the movie "那些年，我們一起追的女孩 (You are the apple of my eye)" simply because the couple in the show let off a sky lantern (天燈) here in one of the scenes.
So be warned that this place has now become a bit commercialised as there are lots of tourists and also shops that set up meaning to earn tourist $ from the sky lanterns. We observed some Hong Kong tourists avidly setting off lanterns at one of the shops and decided not to release one ourselves, because the lanterns though made of semi-paper material eventually seem to end up in the mountains contributing to nothing but rubbish in the environment. Worse still if they end up in the river or sea and choke some fishes, and trust me the wishes are not going to reach the deities by any chance.
Hence what we did was just buy some little souvenirs back i.e. mini lanterns that glow in the dark =)
After walking the stretch for about half an hour, we decided to sit down and eat lunch at this small shop near the train platform. We ordered beef noodles and beancurd which tasted surprisingly great!
After lunch as we had some time to burn before taking the train back to Ruifang, we went around walking on the railway tracks and took some pictures. Just remember to shove off the tracks when the train comes! And random cute cat and kitten spotted along the way...no Chillin boy is not attempting to step on kitty, he just wants to show the size comparison against his shoes.
We took the train back to Ruifang to head to our next stop Jiu Fen and it was about 3pm already, we spent about maybe 2 to 3 hours at Shifen and honestly that's more than enough. Unless you are game to take a 45 minutes walk to the waterfall, then allocate more time for Shifen. From Ruifang train station, exit to the main road and you will see a bus stop on the side of the train station but do not take the bus from here. Cross the road to the opposite side, there's no proper bus stop but just a flag pole that shows the bus numbers. Any bus that goes to Jing Gua Shi will pass by Jiu Fen, that includes 1062, 1063 and 788. The bus will go uphill and takes about 30-40 minutes.
Key highlights of Jiu Fen - Taro balls sweet soup and Ice-Cream popiah! Absolutely loved the ice-cream popiah packed with crunchy peanuts.
Jiu Fen is just one street to explore so we allocated just 1 hour+ here, before heading off to our final stop for the day Kee Lung. Find the bus stop near the end of the Jiu Fen street, take bus 788 which should be heading downhill. We left at about 5pm and took about 50mins to reach Kee Lung, alight at Yi Ren Er Lu. If in doubt, just double check with the bus driver they are always friendly enough to help.
So here we are at Kee Lung (基隆), once you alight on the right side of the road walk straight and cross to the centre you will see this large neon sign of KEELUNG in the far view (like a cheap replica of the HOLLYWOOD sign). And from there look to the left and there's the start of the famous Kee Lung night market. A lot of people seem to rave about this night market, even the Taiwanese who live in Taipei like to travel slightly out to this night market for some good food and apparently the famous dish here is the crab soup.
There are many stalls selling seafood and crab soup, we didn't know which are supposedly good so we just settled for one of them along the way. The crab soup wasn't fantastic but good enough. We ate some other snacks like the fried dumplings, sweet potato balls and the prawn balls. But we would advice against buying the prawn balls, they look good on the outside but is really more flour than prawn and they are not cheap. At 150NT, I'd rather save the money and stomach space for something else.
We took a train from Kee Lung train station straight back to Taipei Main Station before 10pm (about 45 mins) and that concludes our day trip out of Taipei. Overall, we were immensely happy with our exploration of Shifen and Jiu Fen as we discovered interesting sights and food. Kee Lung was slightly disappointing (maybe we didn't pick the right things to eat) but nevertheless was good to experience another night market out of Taipei. Hopefully this itinerary will be helpful to our readers, if you follow this and keep time along the way Shifen-Jiufen-Keelung is definitely accomplish-able in one day. Happy exploring!
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