The Peoria Dispatch

There is nothing like sharing dinner among friends on the night before CNY.   Jim and I had Karl, Kai Mei, Kipp and Beth,  Anh and Jim, Robbie and Kim over for a hot pot dinner.   What’s a hot pot you say???  Well, some might call it a firepot (that’s probably direct translation from Chinese, i’m not real sure).  The traditional hot pot is basically a pot with two levels.  The top level is where the broth goes and the bottom level has an opening where you would put red hot coals.    Well as you will see from my picture below, ours is made of a hotplate and a Cuisinart aluminium pot .

What we do with the hot pot is basically put fresh food into the boiling broth.  Once it’s cooked, everyone dishes out their food with a little net to their bowl.  Traditional broth consist of pork broth with winter melon but ours is Thai Tom Yum soup with lemon grass.   Among the ingredients that we had were beef, mushrooms (oyster, straw, button), nappa cabbage, shrimp,  fishballs, squidballs, etc.   Those of you with gutter mind…..  fishballs are basically made out of fish fillets, tapioca flour, salt and spices.  The ingredients for the fishballs are mixed together, rolled into balls and steamed.

Anh brought over her delicious spring rolls and they were yummy appetizers.  The kids ate a whole lot of spring rolls and pot stickers while chugging down milk and orange juice.   Wished we had taken a picture of that but we missed it.

We did prepare a few cheese and crackers for the faint hearted who are not familiar with scary looking food .