One thing about Chinese New Year celebration is it surely involves food and gatherings.
On one of the Chinese New Year days, I organized steamboat to eat at my humble home and invited my parents-in-laws over since they syay nearby and I knew my mum-in-law might be too tired to cook meals.
Steamboat is actually hot pot like many places address it as that. It is an easier way to settle a meal, for me at least. The work revolves around the buying of ingredients and washing of the ingredients before arrange them around the pot.
After having a good breakfast, I started preparing the ingredients for the hot pot lunch before my parents-in-laws arrived.
By the way, I had an unintentional discovery of how delicious the mini mandarin oranges go well with salad.
So what are the raw ingredients we had?
Straw mushrooms, enoki mushrooms and oyster mushrooms.
Pork shoulder slices as the funky hair of this person on the plate hahaha.
Striploin beef slices
Pork belly thin slices
Patin fish fillet
Romaine lettuce as the vegetables
Imitation crabsticks
Assorted seafood and fish balls such as seafood tofu, lobster balls etc.
Fried yee mee which is a type of noodles usually used for hot pot here in Malaysia. I don't really eat yee mee but only will have some during hot pot time.
I used a ready packed soup powder from Haodilao, a famous hotpot brand or restaurant from China. I chose the clear soup flavour and it has the taste of very slight herbal taste which I really like among all its flavours available.
In the pack there is also a vacuum packed red dates pieces.
I also prepared ladles like these for each person to dish out the cooked food from the pot.
When the ingredients were all ready, then it was time to add in the ingredients into the boiling soup.
That day, I rested from cooking but waiting for the cooked food to be passed to me. Hahaha yay! The husband did the cooking. Hooray for him! I was seated tooo far away from the hot pot.
While waiting for the food to be cooked, the children who were sitting at the children's table had their white rice first as their pre-meal "snack".
I think we all enjoyed lunch. I personally loved it.
After lunch, the second son had some after meal entertainment with his grandma playing the beach ball.
