Preserving a Slice of Taiwan’s Culinary History: Meet Rich and X Wang of Chicago’s Minyoli Taiwanese Noodles 民有里台灣麵館

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Before Minyoli became a Taiwanese restaurant in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood, it was the name of the military dependents' village where chef Rich Wang and his family had resided for decades. In 1949, the Kuomintang government established hundreds of these villages called juan cun 眷村, to house KMT military personnel and their families who fled to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War. Wang grew up in the Minyoli juan cun for the first nine years of his life before life in the village became…

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From “幾乎沒有 Basically Nothing,” Pop-Up Chef James Chang Defines Taiwanese American Cuisine in Kansas City

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1440"] Photo provided by James Chang[/caption] Chef James Chang was perusing the aisle at the Pan Asian Supermarket in Overland Park, Kansas when I spoke with him. Along the way, he picked up soy paste, oyster sauce, black vinegar, rice wine, ChingKiang vinegar. These were items for his upcoming pop-up and a collaboration dinner he was planning for the following week. Chang grew up in Taiwan and Southern California, then moved to Kansas City where he made…

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“Baking is working, right?”: Meet Baker Cat Cheng, from Netflix’s “Blue Ribbon Baking Championship”

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Baker Cat Cheng of Cat’s Bakes on Discovering a Her New Talent and Chasing the Blue Ribbon Cat Cheng became a music teacher straight out of college, but found herself struggling to continue down that path despite devoting much of her life to the craft. When COVID hit, she, like many, took to baking as a hobby and a distraction. But her skills quickly flourished and she saw the potential for baking to become a small business. Within a few short years, she launched Cat’s Bakes, a home baking business,…

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 Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food

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Introduction by Cathy Erway for TaiwaneseAmerican.org You can always tell the books that have been enjoyed the most by how damaged they are. Those books have been on adventures: Maybe you took them to the beach and clogged up their spines with sand. Maybe you rounded their edges from banging them around in your tote bag for weeks.  In the case of Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book Volume I, a copy of which sits in my parents’ bookshelf, the wear and tear is evident. A constant sight for as long…

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A True Family Business: Jessica Wang of Gu Grocery in conversation with Tiffany Ran

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I thought I first met Jessica Wang and her mother, who lovingly goes by the name Mama Peggy, at the LA River Farmers Market a few years ago. But looking back in my shoebox of old photos from high school, I dug out a picture of my friends enjoying a park picnic and there she was. My friend had asked to bring along a family friend that day. We'd all enjoyed a day at the park and I hadn’t seen her since. That is, until the day at the LA River Farmers Market so many years later, when we started chatting…

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Taiwanese Soy Milk & My Transnational Story of Migration

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BY ZIXUAN LIU / Feature Photo Credit: https://elizbeartravel.com/ From Yonghe District, New Taipei, to Shenyang, Manchuria, Bottled in 99 Ranch Markets During my first twelve years of growing up in the former capital of the Qing Dynasty, Mukden, now called Shenyang in PRC, I never skipped breakfast. For most of my childhood, my mother always took me to this one breakfast shop called “Yong-he Dou-jiang”, a chain in China that solely served Chinese breakfast foods for all meals. We always…

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“One Order of Dan Bing, Please”: Creative Non-Fiction by Tristan Tang

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Grand Prize Winner, High School Category 老闆, 我要一份蛋餅!  Summers in Taiwan are brutal. I mean, think of the thrashing Da’an heat, cooking you alive like a fried egg from a breakfast shop. Or picture an army of mosquitoes, all nosediving towards you with their suckers out, ready to unleash an unrelenting week of itchiness.  Buzz.  The irritating sound made me sigh.  A mosquito flew in circles around my ear, taunting me for not killing it before it’d injected its…

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Salty Like Tears: Creative Nonfiction by Grace Hwang Lynch

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Grand Prize Winner, Adult Category March is the rainiest month in Taiwan. Not the afternoon cloudbursts of a tropical summer, nor the furious monsoons of early fall; in the time between winter and spring, the sky is a steady  stream of black. But this was the period when the boys and I could spend some extended time on the island. During that first family trip to Taiwan when the boys were seven and ten, the kids and  I stayed in Taipei after my husband flew back to the states for work. My job…

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New on TaiwanPlus: “Kitchen Remix” presents Taiwanese Food… With a Twist

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Two Taiwanese Americans. 20+ recipes. Taiwanese food as never seen before. In a small kitchen in Taipei, Clarissa Wei and Brandon O’Neal set out to tell the tale of Taiwanese dishes. Equipped with extensive knowledge of culinary history, personal memories of each dish and a deep love for the flavors of Taiwan, the two Taiwanese American chefs are giving global audiences a whole new way to understand Taiwanese food. The format of “Kitchen Remix” is fairly simple: Clarissa leads the…

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How Dragon Boat Festival zongzi are my mom’s love language

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For as long as I can remember, the scent of steaming Taiwanese zongzi (or bahtzang, in Taigi) filled my childhood home the weekend ahead of the Dragon Boat Festival day. Before the convenience of Asian grocery chains having a prepared foods section, the memory of my mom sitting on a low plastic stool in the kitchen making zongzi comes to mind. The warmth from the gas stove mixed with boiling pots of zongzi cooking on all four burners signaled to me the start of summer. Zongzi production is…

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