Cold House; Hot Pot - Easy Meal For A Lazy Day

It's cold outside and it's cold inside. It's just plain cold right now. When it's cold, it's time to bring out the hot pot, also known at a lot of places as Shabu Shabu. Not only is it a convenient way to cook with very little prep time, it also serves as a heater for my chilly dinning room.

It's very simple to prepare. We have a half and half pot. A lot of people do a spicy and a non-spicy soup. We instead did a tomato and non-tomato soup instead. Unlike a lot of fancy restaurants, we don't do anything fancy to the soup base, just water and salt. On one side we threw in a bunch of tomatoes right away so they would be boiled to smithereens to flavor the soup. The other side we just left it natural and let the food we add eventually flavor the soup. We just prefer it this way. By the end of the meal the soup would be way pretty rich with just a plain water base so it's not absolutely necessary to make the soup so fancy to begin with. It could add to the taste if you prefer a specific flavoring.

(Half and Half Hot Pot)

With hot pot, we can add all the things we want or just a very few items. It's almost like a left over casserole except with using a bunch of random raw meats and veggies. It's pretty inexpensive and makes the dinning experience just a bit more fun. It also forces you to actually sit at the table a little longer and get some conversations going since you have to be there to cook your own foods.

(Raw Beef and Chicken)

We always have a plate of raw beef to add to the soup. Beef cooks extremely fast and is just perfect with hot pot. Chicken is good too, but it's much harder to control in the cooking cause it can get overcooked rather easily. We don't get the expensive Shabu Shabu meat that's thinly cut by machines. Yeah those do cook easier but they do also cost a lot more. Instead we thinly cut the beef by hand, marinate it with some soy sauce and some cornstarch. The chicken was also thinly sliced by hand and marinated with salt and a tad bit of cornstarch.

(Seafood and Tofu)

We also got some other items to add to the pot. We got shrimp, one of my family's favorite, squids, sea cucumbers, fried tofu and normal tofu plus a few different veggies. Shrimp is a common thing to add to a hot pot, but I'm just not a fan of boiled shrimp. It just doesn't do it for me. Yes, it taste still pretty good when you dip them in a chilly peppered soy sauce, but I'm just not a fan. This is totally a personal preference though. Squids are good for hot pots, the small ones at least. They were very fresh and had a crunch in them. Dip them in a bit of satay sauce with soy sauce and it's just perfect.

With the sea cucumber, we had a bunch of them soaked in water to get them soft before actually putting them in the hot pot. It takes a long time to prep sea cucumbers and this was actually our first time giving this a try. It really shouldn't be used in a hot pot. Sea cucumbers really have no taste of their own, just a jelly texture. It absorbs the flavors of whatever else it's cooked in. Because of this, especially towards the beginning of the hot pot meal when the soup is still very light in taste, the sea cucumber pretty much had no taste to them. Even in the end, the soup is just not thick enough as a way to add real flavor to the sea cucumbers.

I love tofu. I love the deep fried tofu and the normal tofu. No hot pot would be complete without it. I normally prefer having both the fried tofu as well as silky tofu. With the fried tofu, the soup is absorbed into the tofu because it's pretty hollow on the inside. So you'd have to be very careful when eating them as to void burning your tongue. I prefer the really silky tofu for the texture. I like it sliding like silk in my mouth. But that also can lead to burning of your throat if you're not careful. Some people like firmer tofu.  We had both tonight. Firm tofu is nice when it's cooked long enough to really absorb the flavor of the soup. We ended up with some cheap tofu so it wasn't as silky as it could be. But it was still good.

We had a bit of veggies on the side and udon for carbs. We switch it up between udon, rice noodles and various cuts of vermicelli noodles at hot pot. As with veggies, just grab your favorite kinds of veggies from the market and cook them. You really can't go too wrong with most vegetables. The only thing to consider is if you get veggies that are more fragrant than others that some of your diners may not like. I say eat what you like and avoid what you don't. For the most part it really doesn't matter.

No hot pot would be complete without seasoning. The easiest to make at home would be adding soy sauce to Chinese barbecue sauce, which is also known as satay sauce. But there's a lot of other variations that is commonly done. You can add sesame sauce, sesame oil, peanut butter sauce, peanut butter oil, vinegar, fish sauce, hoisin sauce and pretty much any other sauce you can find in the Chinese market. you could theoretically use anything if you like the taste. One thing that used to be done a lot is to mix all this sauce with a raw egg. Then you would dip your cooked meat and veggies into the egg sauce, pull it out and then eat it. It cools down the meat and keeps your mouth from being burnt. This actually taste very good, but a lot of people stopped doing this because of salmonella scare.

For me, hot pot can be as lavish as you want or as simple and easy as you like. I've had hot pot with crab, live shrimp still jumping around, peeing shrimp, all sorts of different kinds of fish, an assortments of fish and meat balls, a huge range of vegetables and mushrooms, goose intestines, tons of different cuts of meats, Japanese fishcake and pretty much anything you can find in a Chinese supermarket. I've enjoyed it with upwards of thirty or so people at a church function and as few as three people at home many times in the past. It's one of those meals that can't really go wrong no matter what you do. It's just putting the food in the boiling water; take them out when they look cooked; eat. If you're afraid of germs, you can use separate chopsticks to cook with and to eat with. Oh yeah, you do need to learn to use chopsticks if you want to be effective with a hot pot meal. Forks just isn't going to cut it.

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Quick get-together: It's not rocket science

It doesn't take much to put a little gathering together. I'm still growing as a cook and I still have a lot to learn. But I am good enough to get my friends to actually eat what I make. I'm one of those cooks who cook from instinct. I seriously do not even know where the measuring cups are at my house. When my friends asks me for my recipes, I can list the ingredients, but I can't tell you how much of what I've put in. I just "feel" it.

Last weekend a few of my friends got together for a potluck. I made a red and green bean dessert soup. It turned out rather well. It was even better the next day after it was chilled in the fridge overnight. I'll blog about this specifically with the recipe later. During the potluck, we decided to get together again this weekend. But it turned out that I couldn't make it this weekend after all so I pushed it up by one day, to today. I was totally unprepared and hadn't any clue what I was going to make.

My original plan was me spending most of the afternoon figuring out what I'm going to make, but that was cut short when I got a last minute audition notice late last night for today. I was off in Studio City in the afternoon and didn't get back until 5pm. I had two hours to get food on the table so I resorted to what  I knew how to make, hamburgers.

(Bruschetta)

But I didn't want to make hamburgers for the actual meal. It didn't feel right for the holidays. I just wanted to make the patties but present them in a different way. So I got a roll of sourdough bread to make mini-burgers. I also had to keep in mind that one of my friend is a vegetarian so I had to make a version without the meat. I had tomatoes and an onion in my fridge. I defrost the two sticks of ground beef by placing them in a bucket of warm water. This is a much better way to quickly defrost something instead of using the microwave.

After prepping everything, my vegetarian friend arrived and saw what I was doing and asked if I was making Bruschetta. I had no idea what that was, but apparently it's exactly what I'm making. Mix some diced tomatoes with diced onions, add some Italian spices, black pepper and olive oil. Serve them over a slice of bread and voila; bruschetta. I did toast the butter spread bread first in the oven. As it turned a little golden, I topped each slice with some of the tomatoes and onions. I didn't want those toasted too long turning the vegetables into mush, but just enough so that it doesn't feel raw. Put a bottle of wine next to it and it turned out to be a classy appetizer. The best part; it only took fifteen minutes to make.

(Baked Mini Half Burgers)

Then I made my baked mini half burgers. The ground beef was premixed with paprika, italian spices, creole mix, steak mix, olive oil, black pepper, eggs, onions and a little bit of rum. I sometimes add or subtract some of the spices depending on what my mood is. Yes, I am a moody cook. I would also substitute the rum with bourbon or whiskey or beer depending on what I happen to have or what I feel like. I do think adding a little bit of alcohol to the patties enhances the beef, giving it a slightly nicer aroma on the palette. Once it's mixed in for a little while, I take out little chunks and put them on each slice of the bread. I used sour dough, which I much prefer over baguettes. After baking it till the meat looked cooked, I topped it with a little bit of the tomatoes and onions and baked it just a little longer. Another very simple to make finger food.

(Oven-Baked Meatballs)

I had a lot more meat then I had bread. So I decided to just bake the rest of the meat in a meatball format. I'm a firm believer of just making do and making it work. I said this long before Tim Gunn started saying this on Project Runway. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Unwittingly I turned what would have been one dish into three different appetizer. All I really needed to do is add a little slice of pineapple under each meatball and it would really have been a totally different dish: well, next time. I baked the meatballs with the onions and tomatoes, so the flavors mixed in more with the meatballs rather than just topped with the burgers. It felt and tasted slightly different. My friends had to double check with me if the meatballs were the same as the mini burgers. So it wasn't too obvious. I didn't intend to make three dishes really, it just turned out this way.

(Harvest Veggie Udon Soup)

The main dish for the night was a veggie soup. I did this a month ago at another small gathering with my friends. I threw in some tomatoes as the base with some wild corn. My friend Mai brought some veggies over. I had no idea what she was going to bring beforehand, but I trusted it would be great. She brought bok choy, mushrooms and tofu. We just threw it all into the pot with a little bit of salt and let it do its thing. It did its thing. We added a little udon to it at the end to get a little bit of carbs into the meal. It was a healthy and light soup, and all those veggies made it very flavorful. Having friends bring over their favorite vegetables and just throwing it all into a pot feels good. It's like a communal effort and it can't really go wrong. It's also something that you can over eat just a little without feeling like you just cost yourself an entire week of working out at the gym.

(Bellagio Hot Sipping Chocolate)

We had a bottle of Artis Italian sparkling wine and a bottle of german Riesling with the meal. The meal was light so having lighter white wines were perfect for this easy and simple evening. For me, it's that simple. A few friends, some simple but delicious foods and a glass of wine makes a perfect evening. But being the holiday season, I finished the night by serving all my friends a serious cup of hot chocolate. These are not your generic Carnation/Swiss/Nestle hot cocoa. I used Bellagio Sipping Chocolate instead. I did add a little creamer since I didn't have milk and a little whip cream so it's not too rich. Not everyone can handle real sipping chocolate. Personally if it was just me, I would add a few extra teaspoons of sipping chocolate with some whole milk. But not everyone can handle the bitterness so I kept it more mainstream for everyone.

(Bellagio Sipping Chocolate)

For me, it's really easy to just throw something together. It doesn't need to always be super fancy. It just needs to be real and honest. What you have in your fridge or can easily get at the grocery store can really go a long way. Keep everything light and just let the food speak for themselves. It will do its magic and a great evening is born. A quick get-together is really just an hour or two away.

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