DIY Hot Pot.

hot pot... A popular Chinese style of eating where you cook raw food items in boiling soup on a the table is called Hot Pot. Everyone eats around the pot and cooks prepared raw food items such as different kinds of vegetables, meat and noodles. As you cook the food for longer, the soup also gets more flavorful, giving even more flavor to food items you put in later. It is a great way to have a relaxing meal with friends as it is very casual. You can chill, eat and have fun all at the same time!
For this particular "Hot Pot Session," my friend, Florence prepared all the food (she was also the one who prepared the DIY Korean BBQ meal). We used the same "Tiger Brand" cooker that we used for the DIY Korean BBQ meal, as it doubles as a "Hot Pot Pot" if you replace the grill with the pot. There were about 7 of us, so we had lots of food available. Some of the food items that we had included sliced beef, sliced pork, sliced lamb (which is all prepared in thin slices specifically for Hot Pot). We also had beef balls, fish balls and Korean dumplings. For those of us who weren't pure carnivores, there was also a wide selection of vegetables such as napa cabbage, bok choy, enoki mushrooms, tofu and some other stuff.
One of the most key parts to hot pot is preparing a dipping sauce. Some people like just use soy sauce to dip their hot pot cooked food items and others like to customize their sauce with satay sauce, soy sauce, peanut sauce, hot sauce and anything else mixed together. An example of this is the simple yet tasty sauce that my friend Jess makes.

Jess' Famous Dipping Sauce:

• Ingredients: Soy Sauce, Egg, Satay Sauce
• Pour Soy Sauce into a bowl and mix it with one or two spoonfuls of Satay Sauce
• Crack an egg and pour the entire raw egg into the sauce
• mix it up!.... dip anything and everything into it!

Some people might be turned off by using the raw egg, if you are you could cook the egg in the hot pot for awhile, but don't overcook it, or else it'll just be a hard boiled egg (which is awesome to eat during Hot Pot as well. The runny egg mixed with the soy sauce helps coat whatever food item you dip into the sauce and tastes HELLA good!
Later in the meal, we also threw in some Udon noodles and served bowls of Udon noodle soup with vegetables, meat and whatever was left. In addition to this, we also had yam noodles, which are prepared and eaten in knots (as in...tied in knots). These have a chewy texture and go great in Hot Pot. We also had alot of Baked Sea Bass ..mmm (quick recipe in previous post). Everything in this Hot Pot meal was bought at the T & T Supermarket Downtown (222 Cherry Street), except for the baked sea bass.