have we discussed the brilliance that is hot pot?

last night's hot pot feast. l to r. meghan, jennifer, jessica, sandrine, brad, lindsey, duff, amy (completely hidden by the fu wu yuan), the fu wu yuan (waitress), erin, and everett.


for me, one of the definite highlights of china is hot pot. in chinese, it is fire pot. i had hot pot my second meal in china when i came on the sustainable transportation study tour with huxley college my senior year at western. we visited the great wall, brilliant, but cold, windy and polluted, and then pulled into a small town for lunch. around a large circular table, we each had a personal pot, there was a cylinder in the middle filled with burning charcoal, and a moat of broth around the outside. you cook your own food in the broth, and immediately i was hooked. perhaps it is not the best meal if you aren't used to using chopsticks (it can be quite challenging, and that may detract from the pleasure), but it was fun for a group of university kids to struggle with our food.

after that first meal, it was a long time until i had hot pot again. a few weeks after i arrived to teach, our chinese friend nicole took us to a hot pot dinner. months later, duff and i had a crazy hot pot experience in harbin. we had a book that my chinese teacher made me with different foods, written in chinese, and english with pictures. as we were flipping through it, the waitress though we wanted EVERYTHING in the book, and the two of us wound up with a ridiculous amount of food. the whole restaurant cheered duff to the finish line. i really didn't get hooked, though, until we went to visit nicole in her home town. in a hot pot, there is boiling broth that can be seasoned with no spice up to extreme spice. a variety of raw food is put into the pot, and when it is ready, you grab it with your chopsticks. then, you can dip it in a variety of sauces (my favorite being a sesame butter, zhi ma jiang, or garlic and oil), let it cool for a moment, and eat it. delicious. the best part about hot pot is the frozen sliced lamb. we went to lunch with nicole at her friend's house. they had known each other from high school. duff and i sat down to a hot pot lunch with the two girls and the friend's parents at their home. we had some spinach, and a garbage bag full of lamb. i am not kidding. next to the father there was a plastic bag three feet tall filled with frozen, shaved lamb. the father, who didn't speak english, would grab huge chop stick fulls in put it in the pot. and there was never ending sesame sauce. the best hot pot i have ever had.

we enjoyed hot pot so much, duff and i begged nicole to take us again. she introduced us to a fancy chain of restaurants by the name of guo jia guo. this means pot inside pot. there are two pots, set into the table over a burner. the outer ring is spicy, and the inner in just broth. fortunately duff and i have a great group of friends, most of whom enjoy hot pot as much as we do. last night, we had a feast. it is always fun to go with a big group of people because of the variety of food we can get. these include lamb, beef, tofu, crab, shrimp dumplings, rice sticks, mushrooms, carrots, cauliflower, potato, braided bread sticks, tofu noodles, hot pot noodles, spinach, cabbage, bean sprouts, and probably a half dozen other things i am forgetting. it is amazing. there are also other choices on the menu: brains, hearts, pig's blood, and the like, but as we don't know how to order them....we are pretty safe. one time, lindsey, jennifer and i went to hot pot and the table next to us had a cut up eel served to them which was still flopping. flopping a lot. and the couple who was dining took a while to drop it in the pot, and it just kept flopping. there is also a dog hot pot, that i am excited to try (i have to do it soon, the chinese eat dog mostly in winter to keep warm), it is a little more expensive. and i want to make sure it is shaved, or something. eating dog meat off the bone is a little too out there for me.

come to china, we'll take you to hot pot. it is fabulous. jennifer and jessica, i believe, say they will open a hot pot restaurant in america, and when they do, i'll be there far too often. i love hot pot.