- The scarier thing that is over on this side is spleen.
(upbeat music)
- My name is Tiffany.
I was born in Taipei, Taiwan
and I immigrated to the States when I was two.
- Do you live with anybody?
- I live with my husband and my dog.
- His family's from Taiwan,
but he is very American.
He loves pizza and burgers.
I really just like to make soup or noodles,
so we have very different taste in food.
- I like to get a lot of things for soups.
So there's bonito, dried scallops, and dried squid.
I also bought a lot of pork feet.
A lot of those things just add complexity to broth.
- Once a week.
- 150 a month.
I have a mindset of scarcity.
As an immigrant in this country,
you're not used to having an abundance of stuff,
so I actually start at the sales rack
and get like a whole bag of eggplants
or mangoes for 99 cents.
(laughing)
- Yeah.
- Taiwanese is like an amalgamation of Chinese dishes
that were preserved in Taiwan
but also evolved to adapt
to what was available on the island.
- Very much so.
Even being able to have like that cafeteria meatloaf,
I really wanted to try it.
It was really fun to try my first pop-tart,
mac and cheese, tater tots.
(laughing)
- There's a type of chicken called silkie chicken.
They're known for their black skin.
The best thing to do with them is to make soup,
and it's always been like a comfort point for me
to have that soup made by my mom.
Chinese women believe a lot about certain things you eat
to comfort you while you're menstruating.
And so, the soup would change as my life would change.
It was a sign to me that she was still
paying attention to where I'm at in my life.
Wow. I'm getting kind of emotional thinking about it.
- My parents divorced when I was nine,
and she tried so hard to stay in my life.
She would still find ways to make the soup for me.
When I visit her at her house or we're living in a hotel,
she'd try to find ways to order it from a restaurant
and then add her little touches to it.
- Yeah, it's been like a dish that reminds me of her.
- Let's see, some duck necks.
You can make really good soup with it,
and then if you pick all the meat out of it,
it actually works really well in fried rice.
The scarier thing that is over on this side is spleen.
(record scratch)
- The, uh, spleen.
That's the pork spleen over there, it's for my dog.
I don't know how to make spleen for myself.
- When I have my days off,
I really like to pour a lot of my energy
into making a dish and doing it well.
- Uh, no. He's sort of not allowed in the kitchen.
The kitchen is sort of my domain.
- He used to cook a lot better, I feel like,
before we started living together.
- Yeah, I feel like
he's gotten a little bit comfortable now.
- I've adopted it only in the professional sense
when I cook.
It's hard to work American food into my diet
when I haven't really grown up with it.
- It's lineage, and it ties you to places,
it ties you to people, it ties you to history,
but at the same time,
it's also like a means for exploration.
Getting to know a different culture.
(upbeat music)