Restaurant: Chou Ma Ma’s Kitchen
City: Newark, CA

I had Taiwanese for dinner with my parents. We 6 dishes for a party of 3…which was way too much food for us! We typically order a little bit more, so we can have leftovers, but we ended up eating almost all of the food!

I picked the Taiwanese chicken roll as one of our dishes. It was ground meat with fish paste, with a piece of taro and water chesnut, wrapped in tofu skin. It was crispy on the outside and soft inside.

Chicken roll doesn’t include chicken. Here’s what Just. One. More. Bite said of this particular food:

Taiwanese chicken rolls (ji juan). There’s not an ounce of chicken in this recipe but it is supposed to mimick chicken. The tofu skin represents the skin, the carrots and mushrooms the bones (and give the dish more texture), and of course, the fish paste and pork mimick chicken meat.

In the chicken roll I had, perhaps the water chesnut and taro did a better representation of the “bones” as chicken bones aren’t orange and black…