One of the things that my Chinese students really like to do is go out for hot pot. Hot pot is basically the Chinese version of fondue except you boil vegetables and meat in soup that you can actually drink. While the pot boils right in the center of your table you can drop cabbage, mushrooms, slices of meat, dumplings, tofu, potatoes and squid into it and then dip them into special sauces like garlic and peanut after they are done cooking. It's delicious!
At first, like many foods in China, I didn't like hot pot and avoided participating whenever a group was going. I thought it was annoying to have to do everything myself and then wait for my food to cook. I was also a little afraid that I didn't know how long to cook things for them to be safe to eat. In addition, cooking hot pot makes you really warm and sweaty not only because the food is spicy but also because there's a big vat of hot soup steaming and simmering at your table for hours. When you leave, your clothes and hair smell like hot pot so much that other people can sniff you and know exactly where you'd been.
However, this semester for some reason I've been craving hot pot. I like to choose my own foods, I love the taste of the soup after everything has been boiled in it and it's fun going with a big group and just hanging out while taking a long time to eat. In addition, I've finally gotten the hang of what's best to order and how long everything should cook.
Last week Thursday night I really wanted some hot pot so Qin Chen and the German teachers Annika and Cornelia and I decided to head out to eat some. When we arrived at a favorite place near campus, we were surprised (but not really) to see that it was being gutted and remodeled to be a shoe store. This is one of the annoying things about China - it's changing so fast that you can literally see your favorite hot pot place from the bus on your way home from the bus and then later that evening it's become a shoe store.
We simply went to a different hot pot place and got a pot that had a spicy side and a non-spicy side (thank goodness!). We ordered: mushrooms, beef, cabbage, pumpkin balls, shrimp balls, lots of tofu, potatoes, quail eggs, rice noodles and squid along with four icy beers. We had a blast and the food was incredible! It's a little tricky grabbing slippery things from the pot with chopsticks but nobody cared if we were clumsy or not. I really wish we had hot pot in the states because I know I'm going to be craving some in a month or two.
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