hotpot time!

Due to something beyond my control, i love hotpot. i figure it's somewhere between the truly social nature of the meal, and that you can pick and eat your way through a night. add in the make-your-own-dipping sauce, and it can be fun. to be honest, i think we drank a lot more than we ate.

This is most of the food that i prepped for the meal. included (clockwise from the bottom) is: noodles, winter melon (dong gua), mushrooms (enoki, shiitake, oyster), potatoes, fried tofu, a menagerie of balls (fish balls, beef balls, cuttlefish, and a lot of other crazy things - i just grabbed things that looked good), sliced beef, silken tofu, pakchoy (i think).


I ended up cheating, and making the soup from a tom yum base, and then adding lemon juice and fish sauce to get the flavours balanced. it had the chilli at the right level, but really needed the zing of the lemon to make it nice. everyone loved it (thank god - i always have a nightmare about cooking for people and they hate it. i think it's almost as scary as the dream where you walk around naked)

the sauces i had for everyone to play with were a ground chilli sauce, bull's head barbecue sauce (i cannot begin to describe how "barbecue sauce" is false advertising, but it was nice), sesame paste (tasted like peanut butter), sesame oil, and garlic. and so it began!

Sixin and Ying enjoying the hotpot.

I think that between the 4 of us, we only ate half the ingredients, so i'll throw it together for a stir fry later today, with garlic, chilli, and some good oyster sauce.

Victims of the subsequent drinking were:

• Korean raspberry wine
• Limoncello
• Japanese plum wine
• Bress winery apple cider http://www.bress.com.au
  
• Glenlivet 15 year old single malt
• frozen margarita bucket
• chang beers, and i think some other things (can't find the bodies)
  

Of course, most of this was consumed playing dice games...


Over all, a good time i think ;)