Here is the food table, next to the eating table. In China the plates of food for hot pot come out on a multi-tiered cart, but because I don't have one of those, I used a card table. There are meatballs, little smokies, lotus, rice sticks, quail's eggs, noodles, squids, and two kinds of tofu. (We also had golden mushrooms and chicken pieces but those were already on the table.)
Here is a shot of the table set up. I bought an induction cooker to use in my apartment, because that's the kind of cooker I had in China and I found I prefer it to the convection cooking more popular here in America. I used it that night for the hot pot; not only is it portable to the table, but inductions don't get hot like convections so no one was going to burn themselves. It worked really well.
Hot pot tables in China are built into the table, like this:
I wonder if they would be considered a fire hazard here in America, due to the open flame below the table? I'll have to ask the next firefighter I see. I'd love to build a hot pot table for my house.
The small white bowls on my table are filled with the sesame oil/garlic/cilantro/msg mixture you dip the cooked food into before eating. They all loved it! I was really happy to be able to share this part of Chinese culture with them, and of course eat deeleeciours hot pot.
Just the smells of hot pot brought back so many memories! My most memorable hot pot was when I ate bull penis, and my second most memorable was eating it at 4 AM with friends after leaving a club. I knew I was a real Ma La Chongqing girl when I could eat hot pot at 4 AM.
