A night in China, Pennsylvania

Experience a uniquely original and traditional Chinese Hot Pot dinner for my good friend JaJa’s Birthday

The night started by a random phone call from a good friend inviting me to his birthday dinner in a few hours. As anyone who knows me at all understands that all someone needs to do is suggest a dinner or meal to me and the chances are I’ll be there without question.

Therefore I immediately started to think about what I needed to bring as a gift and what I was in for that evening seeing as I would be the foreigner for the night.

So I grabbed a bottle of champagne for his birthday and headed over, with my trusty companion, Beau my dog, of course.

The moment I walked into his house my olfactory and visual senses started going haywire and I immediately felt as if I had stepped off a plane into rural China.

The old school wooden butcher’s block adorned with an ancient meat clever on top rounded out the table of ingredients and vegetables I have never seen before.

Briefly glimpsing over the table of foreign ingredients I started to pick up a few familiar smells and colors such as the neon pink sheen of the fish cakes snuggled right next to the raw pork belly.

The stock pots boiling on the back burners coupled with the defrosting fish balls and fish cakes on the end of the table fully encompassed the spectrum of flash frozen ingredients to a roaring stock pot full of an unknown number of ingredients all adding a unique flavor or subtle undertone to the stock.

The meal was a good two hours from being finished and the tantalizing scents of the kitchen triggered a Pavlovian response which is why I had to take my dog for a walk until the dinner was ready. Now normally I would have asked the cook how she was cooking and what she was doing but because I don’t speak a lick of Mandarin nor her English we were at a stand still.

When I returned there were two Hot Pots on the table, one spicy, one not. All of the accoutrements were on the table just waiting to be submerged in chili oil.

List of Ingredients: Chili Oil Hot Pot, Bok Choy, Spinach, Rice Noodles, Scallions, along with a myriad of crispy treats that I couldn’t name or explain, Steamed White Rice, Sliced Pork, Fish Balls, Fish Cake, Enoki Mushrooms, Grilled Pork Belly with Szechuan Peppers, Ground Pork with Chopped Bok Choy and of Spam to round it all off…

After I took Beau for his second walk I returned and there were home made dumplings being slid into the intensely concentrated chili oil stock. For me that was the perfect ending to the perfect meal.