Hotpot

Hotpot vs. Steamboat

Hong Kong people call it 打邊爐 (fishing beside the cooker), the mainland Chinese call it火鍋 (meaning fire pot). I've gradually changed to calling it hotpot. Both names mean the same thing: FOOD, and lots of it. It's a great excuse for people to get together, sit and eat. Noone has to do the cooking because it's all there and all you need to do is to pick the stuff that you like and put it into the steaming hot broth.

I enjoyed my first hotpot last week; the first sign of the winterdays. Of cold and dark days....

Sichuan or Chongqing is famous for the hotpot. Not just hotpot, but SPICY hotpot. I remember back to when I went to Sichuan almost exactly 4 years ago. I was invited to have hotpot. The 'water' was red. Chilli, fiery red. But it was amazing. When we eat it at home, we use water, with a few added extras. At the end of the night, the soup is amazingly sweet and it's almost the best part of the meal.

These razor clams were moving. Yep....still alive. I remember when I was younger, we used to go back to Hong Kong every so often. My grandparents loved to go this steamboat restaurant with the whole family. We would all sit around the huge round table; young and old, in a lovely air-conditioned room, around a steaming cooking pot. The uncooked food would be placed around and we would all cook whatever we liked. I have absolutely no recollection of any of the food, apart from the skewers of live prawns. I can still visualise the large moving prawns being thrown into the water......

Fishballs. 魚蛋
An essential for all hotpot dinners. The youth at our church used to eat tons of this. Tons. Now all of them have left Hull....gone to study elsewhere. Everytime we thought of hotpot, we would shout out: 魚蛋 !!