The next morning we visited the rooftop garden where two dishes of the previous evening’s meal were grown.

The rich soil, sub-tropical climate and ample water all make Taiwan a perfect garden. Peoples toil and passion for the soil means every little piece of this island nation sprouts in green.

Each village or district takes pride in their dominant crop. This can be seen by the large replicas of the produce you often see as you enter a village. Pineapple Gaoshu, Taro Keelung, Mango Meishan, Redbean Daliao.

Every good meal is finished with a plate of fruit. A lot of effort is spent in growing it.

Any idle land is quickly commandeered and converted to garden. Often in parks, on sidewalks and spare patches of dirt between paths, someone will have cordoned it off and converted it to greens.

In the park near our place almost all the spare patches of dirt have been converted to small vegetable gardens by some older women.

(As a side note, the sign on the roller door in the background says the house is for rent. These signs are going up at an alarming rate at the moment!)

And here between the elementary school path and the road. Whose land, whose vegetables?

A popular trend has been cultivating fallow fields in flowers and then promoting people to visit them when in bloom. Daliao has done this for a dozen or so fields each of the last two years.

When concrete and pavement makes growing directly in the soil impossible, people scrape dirt into something and grow things anyway.

Having grown up on a broad acre wheat farm it is amazing to see such incredibly productive land.

Though Taiwan is small and the population large, there is no doubt the land is productive enough and the people resourceful enough that there will always be plenty of green in the diet.

Some of our favorite street vendors are the pancake, deep fried hot-dogs and salty-crispy fried chicken. Fried chicken includes all bits of the chicken (excepts feathers- normally)

If that is not enough oil to get you going, try this glutinous rice meat dumpling dish. It is kept in a wok of warm oil until you order. It is then sliced and covered with soy sauce.

One of our favorites is the dumpling and pastry restaurants. The preparation and cooking is done at the front of the shop. Inside you help yourself to sauces and choose a couple of the small dishes to complement the lightly fried and steamed meal. Very tasty.

Here are some of the night market specialties;

eel and noodles

thin noodle soup

skewered fish balls, pig-blood rice and fish cakes all boiled in a light broth.

stir fried shrimps

a particular favorite at seaside venues,  BBQ squid on a stick, painted with a sweet chilli sauce and sprinkled with sesame seeds.

Of course seafood is a Taiwanese staple and a sumptuous rite.

A wonderfully popular local dish is hot-pot. A large pot of soup is placed on a fire in the centre of the table to which you add meat, mushrooms, vegetables and all-sorts. You select the broth flavor with many shops offering a split pot for two different broths. These are incredibly popular, especially in the cooler winter months.

The devastating end of a hot-pot meal.

Not long ago if you wanted to experience tastes from beyond Taiwan you were rather limited to the local interpretations of foreign dishes. The sizzling steak house and curried chicken dishes have been around so long that they have blended into local dishes. One of the great things to occur in the last twenty years is the inflow of foreigners along with some great foreign dishes.

A lot of Vietnamese spouses have opened local noodle stores. These are generally simple places serving a Taiwanese version of Vietnamese dishes (or Vietnamese version of local dishes). Our favorite shop in Daliao offers superb meat and salad baggett, chilli mint salad and knock-over strong coffee.

Kieren at Escape 41 in Caishan quality controls the pizzas to ensure they are West Australian authentic. He also has an outdoor setting most Australians would die for.

Just recently I discovered chicken kebabs at our local Fengshan night market. The raw onion, fresh lettuce and chilli mayonnaise sauce make it a very foreign flavor for the night market. Perhaps they stuck with the sweetened bun wrapping so they didn’t completely scare the local customers.

The very successful Tex-Mex, Smokey Joe’s, is a great dining experience.

There are a good number of Japanese restaurants in Kaohsiung too. Run by Taiwanese with a very liberal interpretation on Japanese cuisine.

And for those out-of-towners that can’t find something local that suits their tastes there is always the internationally omnipresent McDonalds.

And surprisingly it is a very affordable dish. Where a dozen fresh oysters at home is a small luxury, here in Taiwan this dish is a cheap quick meal.

Well the port of Dongshih (東石) supplies 60% of the local oyster omellete market. We visted on a wet summer Sunday and discovered just how much oysters are part of this seaside town.

The large shallow bay is protected by an outer reef. Old oyster shells are strung on a length of line and hung on floating bamboo beds. Each old shell becomes the seed for many new oysters.

They are harvested and moved into one of the many shucking houses in town.

From there they are packaged and shipped to night markets all over Taiwan.

The town is littered with piles of the old oyster shells.

Not wanting to leave without a sample we purchased a small bag. At 200NT per kilo (USD7) they are cheaper than steak.

And as the old man who provided me a free sample later indicated with a rising finger, everyone the world over reckons raw oysters are great for mens virility.

A Hungry Girls Guide to Tiapei also covers this dish.

As you can see a fire is built in a hole and the heat is stored in the soil and a chimney of clay boulders. Once everything is hot enough the fire is removed, the food placed in and the whole lot is covered in earth. It is left to cook for an hour or so and then unearthed. The food is delicious.

We cooked eggs, corn, chicken and sweet potatoes. The eggs were packed in the centre of mud balls, then placed like bricks into the hole, the corn and sweet potatoes were in aluminium foil and the chicken well wrapped and packed with some type of leaves that gave the meat a lovely flavour. The style is very similar to the Maori Hangi but clay boulders are used instead of rocks.

There was lots of other food as well as the obligatory oolong tea ceremony.

There was a game of baseball, lots of running in the dirt and then wheel borrow races.

For young and not-so-young.

It was a wonderful day and fondly reminded me of the big family picnics we used to go to out in the country of Western Australia. Lots of kids, lots of food, lots of fun.

See more photos from the family day out here

If you click on any picture you should see a slide show of all the pictures in full resolution.