Chinese Hotpot

Beef Wellington, Prawn Cocktail, Floating Island... we can either call them old-fashioned or classic dishes. Fact is, they are all still being served both in restaurants and on our dinner tables.
Recently I watched a few episodes of a program called “Dine with me” where 5 strangers have to cook for each other and at the end a winner is be identified through a scoring system. Anyway, details aside, a good third of the hosts feed their guests on dishes they must have dug out in cookbooks printed in the 70ies.
Take my family and friends: the raclette and fondue equipment is taken out of the cupboards at least once or twice a year. Considering that most electric kitchen gadgets never see the daylight, fondue and raclette sets live a quite busy life.
At home at my parents we have fondue every Christmas. It’s the easiest way to satisfy my sister’s chicken-only and my no-chicken needs. I do grow sick and tired of the yearly fondue though… So I wasn’t half as excited as my neighbour when we decided to have a Chinese hotpot to celebrate the arrival of our new - Chinese – neighbour. Meat cooked in soup sounds suspiciously like fondue to me.
But it wasn’t. Well, the concept it sort of the same as my mum’s fondue: veggies, protein and seasoned/spiced stock. Just that the protein in this case was fish (prawns, squid, various kinds of fishballs) and the veggies were choy sum and fungus (they should try and find a new name for that kind of mushrooms, yak). In addition to that we had tofu and a variety of sauces, e.g. the Chinese version of Hummus (Tahini and fermented bean cured), crispy fried chilli sauce and my favourite which I believe to be more Japanese than Chinese: Soy sauce with a dash of mirin, ginger, garlic and a raw egg yolk.
No mayo based sauces in sight. Dipping the fish and veggies into a light sauce makes this kind of “fondue” so much more enjoyable than my mother’s version. No nasty surprises when you step on the scales the day after.
To make the hotbot base, we bought a ready made stock in See-Woo, a massive Chinese supermarket in North Greenwich. If I was to recreate the dish, I would probably make the base myself by adding lemon grass, ginger, Chinese chive leaves, Sichuan pepper, kaffir lime leaves, soy sauce etc to a home made veggie stock. Might not be authentic, but more yummy for my taste. The rest is perfect just as outlined above. And just like fondue and raclette: it is a very social way of eating and entertaining your friends.