Happy M.F. Day!

Tomorrow the Mid-Autumn Festival, or Moon Festival, starts the first day of a 5-day holiday for us in Taiwan. The story can be found here, but it's basically a confluence of several legends and a ceremony. Most people just focus on grilling, eating pomelos and wearing the peel as a hat and passing on the Fruit Cake of the Orient, Moon Cakes. I enjoy them only because I score points by re-giving my box of "so yummy" moon cakes that my school gives me to others (foreigners excluded). I hate the things so much that moon cake and making moon cakes have become my favorite euphemisms for excrement and the process of extruding it, respectively.

Pomelos are larger than grapefruits and their taste is not as strong or tart. The character for pomelo (柚) has the same pronunciation as one character for blessing (佑). The pomelo season coincides with the Moon Festival and thus has become part of the ceremony. They make a hat of it because they really need a good reason to include this B-list fruit in something. Too bad durian isn't indigenous to Taiwan. Now there's a hat.

Grilling in Taiwan, as usual, is done with all the forethought of...oh say, including the Wonderbread headgear of fruit into a major festival. Because of the utter crappiness of their grills they recommend covering either the grill or food with foil. If you covered your grill, that would be baking or roasting, which could be indoors in the oven as well as on a flattop grill or in a device very much like a pan. But that would deny us the chance to squat in the street and burn things. So to clarify things, our good friends at The China Post ( no link because I know by now you already have it bookmarked) on Tuesday, page 20 instruct us that:

Zinc will melt at 460 degrees. The heavy metal, which is poisonous, is often
used to galvanize iron...Meat or fish have to be roasted at a temperature above
600 degrees Celcius.

That my friends, is 1112 degrees Fahrenheit. Safe holidays.