Steamboat Dinner

Last Friday, I was invited to a Steamboat dinner – also known as hot pot dinner. Steamboat is a Chinese cooking method, prepared with a simmering pot of flavoured broth. The broth can be a simple chicken stock, or as in this particular meal, my friend prepared a herbal stock.

When all is ready to sit down to dinner, the stock is heated up and food is placed in the soup to cook. The kind of food varies – depending on the diners’ tastes and preferences, or on the host’s. In other words, almost anything is possible – thinly slice meat, (the reason is obvious – so that they are cooked quickly), prawns, chickens, fish, vegetables, mushrooms, dumplings …. Let's see what we had last Friday.

On the top left, there are mushrooms, cuttlefish balls, and crab meat balls. (I don't think cuttlefish and crabs have balls, but they are called that because they are in the shape of balls. They are actually cuttlefish meat, or crab meat mixed with a little flour and spices, and shaped into a ball.) Next to it are the fish balls - again they are just fish meat mixed with a little flour and spices, shaped into balls. On the bottom left, there is chicken meat, prawns and scallops.

These are fish fillet.

These are tofu with stuffings, red and green chilli with stuffings. The stuffing is usually fish paste.

These are okra, (also known as lady's fingers), and bitter gourd. Again they are stuffed with fish paste.

These are crab meat. They are already cooked. They just need a dip in the hot pot to be warmed up.

These are cockles. These too are cook and prepared for consumption without further cooking.

And some leafy vegetables. The greens are Garland chrysanthemum, know to the locals as 'Tang O', and the whites are cabbages.

One thing to note in a hot pot dinner is the sequence of food to be cooked. Raw food goes into the pot first so that they are properly cooked. Followed by the food that are already semi cooked. Vegetables do not take long to be cook, so they and the already cooked food that needs warming up go in last. The sequence is important if you want an uninterrupted meal. Otherwise, you might dish up food that are half cooked, or food that are overcooked.

When all the food is in, you cover the pot and wait for a couple of minutes for the food to cook. As you wait for the food to be cooked, you can talk about how you can save the world. Or you can gossip about your mutual friends. Or you can talk about recipes, and exchange recipes. The hot pot dinner is a good way to socialize over dinner.

In days gone by, clay stoves were used, and coals were used to keep the fire in the stove going. The fire is a bit more difficult to control. It was much more troublesome then. You also need to have hot coals on standby to replace the ones in the hotpot when they died.

It is now much easier with electric hot pots, or induction cookers. You just plug in, switch it on, and wait for the hot pot to heat up. There is a fire control knob for you to control the fire. When the food is cook, you just turn down the heat, and when you add new stuff into the hot pot to be cooked, you just turn up the heat. There will be many rounds of this before the food is finished, or until all have eaten their fill.

This is the induction cooker used at last Friday's dinner. As you can see, there are plenty of functions and control. Very convenient indeed.

Another advantage of a steamboat dinner is that, the food will not get cold. And this is especially useful on cold weather evenings. You can all gather around the hot pot and take your time with your dinner, enjoying a nice meal, and the camaraderieship and company of good friends, and at the same time keeping warm.

A friend of mine said he doesn't like to go for steamboat dinners because the thought of everyone dipping their chopsticks into the same pot puts him off. Well, not if everyone has his own set of utensils. My host made sure of that. The chilli sauce is for those who like their food spicy. Everyone has his own dish of that too.