celebration: hotpot

I had posted earlier about shopping at HMart because we three Asian women had loved our Seapot experience and wanted to share food and conviviality with our neighbors. We unloaded the food the evening before in our clubhouse and the next morning cooked broth and washed vegetables to prepare our buffet table. First the greens....chrysanthemum greens, pea shoots, napa cabbage, baby bok choi as well as a tray of kabocha squash and deep fried and soft tofu and Chinese sweet sausage. We hadn't even gotten to the mushrooms and already the table was out of room. We kept the enoki, beech, and king oyster mushrooms in their little plastic containers.                       

 

We put the spinach noodles, pork and pickled cabbage dumplings, thinly sliced lamb, pork, and beef brisket in the refrigerator as well as the individual portions of seafood (clams, shrimp, prawns, crayfish, and fish balls).

For condiments, we brought fresh garlic, sesame paste, soy sauces, Bullhead barbecue sauce, hoisin sauce and chili crunch.

And then it was a flurry of activity of moving tables, plugging in hot plates to extension cords and surge protectors before cooking and heating. The club house was full of steam--passersby could not see into the large room because of all the condensation on the windows. Truthfully, I would not do a hotpot again for this particular group of ladies as I don't know if they realize the amount of work that went into the shopping (which was so fun really), the hauling and preparing this feast, and they didn't seem to really enjoy having to cook their own food. It would've been better for them to have gone to a hotpot restaurant.