Family picnic
Over the Chinese New Year we went to a big family picnic in countryside Tainan. A lot of the food was cooked in a traditional earth oven.
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.
[...] articles just for me! Stephen and his family went to a big family picnic in the Tainan countryside, where they cooked in a traditional earthen oven. I love this stuff! They dug out the oven, built a chimney and then lit a fire to heat it all up. [...]