Last night we went out for dinner at a Hot Pot restaurant. For those of you who do not know what Hot Pot is, the pictures below will help illustrate it.

The meal started out with a large pot of broth filled with noodles and pig bones. The pot is placed on a burner or hot plate and the broth heats up and cooks everything. As the meal progresses you place additional items in the broth and eat them as they cook.

Eating the pig bones is a dirty job. You can see that I have a glove on one hand as I am trying to extract marrow out of one of the pig bones with a straw. You can also see the sauce that I made up to dip items from the hot pot into. They have a bar of ingredients that you can use to make a sauce. Most of them are hot and spicy.

Here you can see some of the ingredients that will be dropped into the broth. In the foreground is some ox belly and to both sides you can see some thinly sliced meat. The thinly sliced meats cook very quickly. There were also quail eggs, frozen tofu, potatoes, multiple types of mushrooms, cabbage and many other types of meat and vegetables.

Here is a closeup of the ox stomach. The taste was not bad, but the texture was a little bit different. It felt like I was licking a wash cloth while I was eating it.

The students were enjoying the meal and I enjoyed watching them eat some of the items that I just couldn’t quite bring myself to try. In any case everything cooked together so if I didn’t flat out eat it, I had at least a taste of it. There were just a few items where I knew the texture would not set with me.

It was a nice meal and I really enjoyed it.

I then went for a nice long walk to work off some of the calories.

Steven