I love hotpots.
They really appeal to me.
But you know what's better than a hotpot?
A hotpot with a grill that's individualized and personalized just for you.
Now, I don't mean a grill or hotpot in your favorite color or your favorite character, but a hotpot and grill where you can put whatever food you want on it and in it, and you don't have to share.
It's great- I love it.
Because this means that I can cook whatever I want, and better yet, I have an option when going out to dine with friends of varying diets.
It used to take quite a bit of coordination when having hotpot with people of different dietary needs.
There were family members who were vegetarian and wouldn't touch a meat-tainted soup with a ten foot pole.
There were colleagues who were kosher and so couldn't have shellfish or pork in their soups.
Never mind that- one could have four different kinds of soups in four different pots.
But you couldn't do that with the central grill.
No matter how you divided it up with vegetables or cobs of corn, something somehow always crossed the border and made everything awkward.
Thank God for these trending grills and hotpots now, then.
Because now everyone can have their own grill, and no one need concern themselves whether or not the mushrooms have touched the oil from the grilled beef, or whether the chicken has been spoilt by the long feelers of the prawn which somehow touched it.
My soup today at this hotpot/grill place was fish.
I chose it because it was unusual- different from most places that offer you collagen, pork bone broth, mala, tomato, tom yum or herbal chicken.
Not to say that this place didn't have those- I think they had all of them- but the fish intrigued me, and I wanted a taste of how it was like.
The soup came served with a couple slices of white fish that I happily dropped into the pot and let them cook whilst I waited for the other ingredients to arrive.
I didn't take a picture.
I didn't take pictures of the other foods either.
But I know we ordered a lot.
For meats there were slices of pork belly both marinated and unmarinated. There were also slices of beef which we ordered both marinated and unmarinated as well.
If I'm not wrong, we had a few orders of lamb.
And then there were the usual hotpot stuff of cheese tofu, luncheon meat, cuttlefish balls and cheese-stuffed fish balls.
I liked those.
The fish balls weren't super great, but i liked how the cheese melted as the balls boiled, and out came a thick, bright orange river of flowing liquid that ran over your tongue as you took the first bite.
Best of all was how everything was prettily rolled up, neatly arranged.
I tend to be particular how my hotpot ingredients are arranged when they come served to the table.
Between the marinated meats and the unmarinated ones, I preferred the latter.
They cooked easily, they were less sweet, and I could toss them into the pot before dipping them into raw egg shabu shabu style.
It wasn't just the raw egg that I loved dipping the meat in.
I had a specially customized dipping sauce as well.
Different people have different tastes, and mine usually is sesame sauce with garlic and parsley.
And I don't make just a little bit.
I make the whole sauce bowl.
One thing about this place (just beside the Pagoda Street exit of Chinatown MRT) was the variety of food they offered.
There was much more on the menu which I didn't get to choose from.
But we did get a couple orders of fish.
And we made several orders of oysters.
I had thought we'd grill them but somewhere along the way my friend decided to try a hand at making orh luak over the grill, and shall I say that it turned out pretty well?
No greasy aftertaste, no oil on the palate whatsoever, just a well beaten egg, a handful of juicy hum, and some duck fat which we'd quietly sneaked in.
Of course, I was not going to have a hotpot without having my usual serving of vegetables.
I have my favorites.
And today I took lettuce, mushrooms three kinds, more green leafy vegetables, and sweet corn.
People may find it curious- like why do you like vegetables in soup so much, don't they become soggy and mushy (gasp) too disgusting to eat?
But (surprisingly) I like them this way, and I've come to like eating them this way for a while.