A Short List of New Cuisine

Dear All,
A benefactor of the school took all of the teachers out to a fancy dinner. By fancy, I mean by its menu, decor, location, and amount of English, it was one of--if not the--nicest restaurant in the city. It also cost NT$500 a pop. That's only $17.oo each, but for Changhua, that's expensive. As is often the case with super fancy restaurants, the menu was virtually all exotic ingredients by Tiawanese standards. The following is a list of foods I had to eat--completely--at dinner.

Asparagus
Shrimp
Some kind of melon that was hard to chew
Oodles of onions
Mushrooms--the funky-smelling kind
Clam soup, shells and all
Funny tasting chicken
"Orange Juice with lactic acid" (that's what the menu said, but I have no idea what it means given the beverage that came was bright blue and had a pony's worth of orange juice at the bottom.)

The following are things I had to try (because others ordered them), but did not have to eat all of:

Rare (and I do mean rare) steak
Roast Duck (looks disgusting, but tasty if you can overlook appearances. Upon reflection, may have been organ meat. Ewww.)
Mixed greens consumme with shark lips

I won't lie, for someone who hates to eat even a bit of something I don't like, it was not the always the best of times. Still, I won the lottery with the clam soup. (My choices were clam, pumpkin with abalone and mushrooms, mixed greens consumme with shark lips, or seafood consumme Italian style [which contained many whole seafood critters].) It was actually very good.

This, however, has inspired me to list some of the new foods I've had here.

Passionfruit
Starfruit
Goat meat
Beef heart (suspected, not proven)
Shark lips
Asparagus (apologies for all the Thanksgivings I've shunned it, although I stand by my dislike)
Egg-Brown Sugar Drink
"Devil's Tongue" biscuits
Grass Jelly
Fried Sweet Potatoes
Pork and onion dumplings