Steamboat Dinner!

I love steamboat! Don’t always eat them at restaurants but we always have them at Reunion Dinner during CNY. That was a way larger scale though.

We have a mini steamboat here and i decided it would be nice to have a steamboat – just the 2 of us.

So, we set out today to eat steamboat for dinner. Simple ingredients.

Last week, i made an online order at butcher2u.com.au – they package the meat however you want to and deliver it to you on specific days. I got some chicken thigh, chicken breast, sausages, chuck steak, Basa fish fillets, pork chops and minced pork. Taking for example minced pork, i usually buy around 600gm at the butchers and take home and split them up into smaller bags. On the website i can specify exactly how much meat in total i wanted and how to split them. They would all come frozen and vacuum packed nicely and labelled with the product name, date, weight and price. So i always know what i am looking at. :) You know sometimes you go into your freezer and find this piece of frozen meat and you have no idea what meat that is? yup.

So today, i got out ard 250gm of chicken thigh (i bought 500gm and asked them to be split into 2 bags) and 100gm minced pork.

Steamboat aint difficult, just needs preparation and marinating (not long if you it was a last minute meal like mine was).

These are the ingredients of what we had tonight:

A 300gm packet of sliced waygu beef that fish bought from the supermart downstairs. He marinated the beef in sake, mirin, soy sauce and ginger paste (we buy fresh ginger then grate it using a ceramic grater).

This was actually not originally meant for steamboat. I had brought it out earlier in the day to defrost cause my tummy wasn’t feeling too well and i thought i might make myself porridge to eat. but since we decided to have steamboat, i just lightly marinated the minced pork in sake, soy sauce, sesame oil and a little ginger paste. I didn’t know what i was going to do with it until the last minute. I just used my chop sticks, grabbed a small amount and put it into the soup. Almost like meat balls – irregularly shaped. :)

 
Chicken of course – after hui’s awesome chicken at our reunion dinner. I used the chicken thigh meat after removing much of the fat and sinews. then sliced them into thin bite sized pieces. marinated them in soy sauce, sake, sesame oil and ginger paste too. (By the way, it looked like a really small amount in the bowl and when i finished cutting it – but it’s deceptive. We couldn’t finish all the chicken. granted that fish preferred his beef and chicken and pork were mostly for me.)

We went downstairs to get noodles and i got a pack of oyster mushrooms. cause i love mushrooms. and it was an absolutely right decision. I love these mushrooms after they’ve had a good soak in the soup. It absorbed all the lovely flavours. and i had a great time eating them – cause fish didn’t appreciate them! :)

Hmm. i should have stuck to normal hokkien noodles. these were. not the best.

 
What was seriously lacking was chilli! and not just any chilli! sambal chilli – and i don’t believe in the ones sold at supermarkets. So the sauce master – fish – came up with this dip that was amazing. It had dashi powder, soy sauce, japanese 7 pepper spice, hua diao jiu, sesame oil and a little water. Yum yum yum.

We didn’t have those spoons we usually use when eating steamboat, and it was difficult to hold on to a piece of chicken waiting for it to cook. so i remembered the colander and it fits perfectly. so the mushrooms and veggies are on the outside, and the meat and noodles can be cooked within the colander. The best thing, the handle of the colander doesn’t even get the slightest bit of heat. so it’s absolutely safe! and my meat won’t disappear!

So this was our little spread tonight.

If you look carefully, there are 2 ingredients that i did not mention – on the bottom right hand corner. It is a piece of egg tofu and a pack of fuzhou fishballs. – which under normal circumstances, i love.

The tofu tasted off – Shi hui…..
The fuzhou fishballs were EWW! They smell really really fishy. but i ignored it and put 4 balls into the soup. and when it was ready, i tried one and it was disgusting.

you know the nice thing about these balls is the springy texture and the soup you get from the pork inside the balls. these were hard and rubbery. there was no soup, instead it was all oil. and not even pork fat which might have tasted better. It tasted like i broke open a pill of pure fish oil. it was so so so so so so fishy and disgusting tasting. I threw the rest of that ball, took out the other 3, the rest from the freezer and down the bin it went. Eww. just in case, i don’t remember the brand – but it writes there in red – first in Australia – i think the last would be more appropriate.

Onto much better tastes….

the soup!

we just took a pack of Campbell’s Real Chicken Stock and added the same amount of water. Fish added 2 carrots, 1 big onion, a whole lot of corn kernels, spring onions and cilantro. Just boiled it together for a while for everything to soften.

The soup was very sweet and tasty – just one carrot next time ok fish?

it was just enough for the 2 of us in our small little hotpot and we started dinner around 2030 and ended (including the washing up) at a little after 2230.

yum yum.

 
This is the leftover soup and veggies – fish ate a lot of veggies which made him very full. This soup is now a thick and delicious smelling soup – you can smell the veggies, the beef, the pork, the chicken all in it.

It is one invincible soup too. The eww-ness of the fuzhou balls and the slightly spoiled tofu didn’t mar the soup one bit.

But the soup is very oily now obviously, with the fats from the wagyu beef and the sesame oil used in marinating.

So it’s in the fridge now, and when it cools down, the oil will coagulate, forming a layer of white fat on top of the soup, which we can then proceed to remove easily before heating it up when we need it. :)

i had a great great dinner with fish tonight and i hoped you have had a great one too! :)

Foggy’s kinda cranky today. :p