Hotpot （火锅）

We had hotpot (火锅) last night.

Nothing is more pleasant than sitting down with family and friends for a lovely meal like hotpot in a cold winter evening. After more than one week of non-stop snowing, the ground outside had been covered completely by a thick white snow blanket. Big snow banks had rose abruptly everywhere just in a couple of days.  White smokes were fogging into air from running cars and heating chimneies.

Having a hotpot meal is a convivial activity in this cold weather. A colourful array of meats, seafoods, vegetables, bean curds, and galss noodles line up around the hotpot on a big dinning table. The pot soup can be flavour of many different knids, including mala, jirou, niurou, lamb, suancai yu, wild mushrooms...any kind. It is really your own preference.

Don't forget to make a dipping sauce, the one of the most important components of having a hotpot fun. The sauce combines a plenty of various ingredients: soy sauce, sesame oil or paste, chili, garlic, coriander, vinegar, clipped green oinion......anything that you could think of for a dipping sauce. You definitely can create your personalized sauce with your favourite elements.

The real fun begins when the soup is boiling with a full pot of well cooked shiitake, enokitake, fungi, various specialty knids of tofu, fishballs, and mung bean sroupt......From there, every one dives into his/her delectable items.

I love hotpot because it is cozy, yet informal. It is simple, yet having a feast. It uses a single pot, yet it varies in ingredients, sauces, and cooking styles.

My most favourite part of hotpot is that you can talk, joke, sweat, and sniff from the steaming pot along with a variety of foods. At this moment, no one would care about the cold weather and roaring wind outside. Your spirits would keep high while even when the outside temprateure keeps dropping, cold outside and warm inside!