Chapter 13: Hot Pot

When you are already familiar with the process, seeing it modified according to one person feels a little jarring.

There are a table and a chair, the latter can be slotted into the table, giving the customer space to feel comfortable sitting for a meal. The table consists of a pot, a big tool where one of the cooking uses is by boiling them with water or stock. Beside the pot, there is a plastic jar filled with transparent light brown liquid, I presume it might be a soup stock as making one with water will be very time-consuming, especially when the manual doesn't involve me boiling the stock. I fiddle around the table as there are some buttons to press, where I can open it for the table to release heat in a specified area, which is in the center. I quickly pour the stock onto the pot, the volume turned out fairly small, fitting for one but unsatisfying for a glutton.

With the stock turned on so my time to wait for it to boil is slightly reduced, I approach the white fridge identical with the one on the caravan near the table. The only difference is that instead of being empty, this fridge is full of food at a first glance.

A container of meatballs, a bouquet of vegetables, a bundle of noodles, a bowl of eggs and a box of white tofu. There is so much food that I almost forgot to ask myself have long they have been stored inside this freezer?

My answer? I don't care, it is a glutton's paradise. Cookies are way too passe.

Like a person rushing to get himself to arrive at his job site in time, I grab on the things I want to eat in a hot pot, which is honestly anything. I grab, I open and I place the one person meal in front of me.

It is then I open the gas heater that my rationality kicked in and see the feast in front of me.

Placing some of them into the refrigerator and waiting for the water to boil, I remember the meal times with my aunt or my mother, who usually make dinner where the portions are too much for the entire family to be eaten. Even though I did ask them to cook a little less as a way to reduce spending and calories, the family that is born in the restaurant refused to budge down a size, presumably because it is a Chinese tradition where feasting with their own family is a virtue.

However, I think the bigger reason for the big portions (especially for my mom) is because as a child I am quite a glutton myself, pushing my self to eat 2 bowls of rice everybody until I start being an adult, where my food consumption has been slightly lowered, but with my mom's insistence and her past bias she won't ever change what has been familiar to her for the past 20 years, aside from adding pasta in our meal times.

Hotpot or I should actually call it steamboat, is one of the meals where my family gather together, sharing a pot of boiling, flavor enhanced chicken stock. Each carrying a ladle and a ladle with holes (for people who don't want to drink the soup for the fear of losing their hair), we put in the prepared to be boiled food into the pot and wait for it to cook and feast when it is ready. There are many studies on how they should have the best experience. In a Hong Kong tv drama, for example, a good way of having steamboat is to put in the vegetables first in order to absorb the oil above it before putting in the meat.

Everybody says that hotpot should provide the biggest benefit when you are in a social environment, happily joining the conversation when the stock is still boiling and cooking for the others after a round of boiling is over. But for me, I just love the experience it being like a buffet, where you have the illusion of getting whatever you want from the pot and drinking the soup with the meat.

Still, what do you do where it is just only one person having steamboat by himself?

The soup is warm and while the food is bland the textures are quite varying (the crunchiness of the vegetables are a welcome after crunching cookies for a day) for the tongue to play with, but it is just a slow wait for the stock to boil again, having no noisy distractions to make the progress go faster.

In my last batch with the noodles and the egg, my stomach is full, the upper refrigerator door has been opened. It is just when I look at the cleared pot that seems fine with not being cleaned, my soul feels a little empty inside.