When Asians say it’s a steamboat party, they mean it.
Despite my relative silence over the past month or so, it’s actually been a very busy time for food for us here at Gravy Central. I feel like every day I’m assembling some sort of dish to take to one party or another, and with a Gravy Baby who grows seemingly by the second and demands more and more of my time, it’s getting increasingly harder to photograph every dish that I’m cranking out.
I made an exception a few weeks ago, when we were invited to a friend’s house for what the Malaysians call steamboat. It’s called huo guo in Mandarin Chinese, or literally, “fire pot,” and the Japanese call it shabu shabu. The Swiss might also call this fondue on steroids, but I’m not sure, because the only Swiss person that I can verify this information with moved to Australia a few months ago, thus reducing my Swiss friend count to exactly zero. But that’s another project for another time.