All together now…

A steamboat dinner certainly seems very popular these days for the Chinese New Year’s Eve reunion dinner or the one on the night of Chap Goh Meh, the 15th Day on the Chinese lunar calendar and other occasions. For one thing, I guess it symbolises togetherness as everyone is involved in the cooking (or throwing everything into the boiling soup) and at the same time, everyone will be eating from the one same pot.

I remember when I was young, my family would join everybody at my maternal grandmother’s house for the New Year’s Eve dinner (31st December) and during the day, my mother would join all the rest in the preparation. I remember there would always be steamboat – the traditional style with hot burning charcoal…and I loved it when whoever that was slicing the canned abalone (now over a hundred ringgit or more a tin) would let me eat a piece or two. Yummm…it was so fragrant and so very sweet unlike the ones that we may get these days at the restaurants.

Nowadays, with the electrical ones, it is easy to have a steamboat dinner or party anytime but the purists would insist that it is not as nice. Anyway, I have one in the house and we had steamboat earlier this week for Chap Goh Meh. My problem was that my mother is allergic to prawns and all crustaceans so that ruled out quite a number of things that I could include…and besides, both my parents cannot eat meat – they find it too tough and they are not able to chew so I had no choice but to use minced meat instead.

First, I prepared the stock by boiling a whole lot of meat bones with lots of garlic in a big pot of water and let it simmer to get the sweetness into the soup. In the meantime, I got ready all the things that would go into the steamboat…

– quail eggs, tofu, bean curd sticks, tang hoon (glass noodles), young baby corn and golden needles mushrooms.

I also fried some stuffed tau kwa (bean curd cake) and rolled some minced meat balls and I had fish balls too…

…but I did not bother to go through the hassle of preparing my own.

I bought some sea cucumber, beef tendon and fresh fish fillet…

…and I also boiled some of the seaweed noodles that I received sometime ago but I can’t for the dear life of me remember who sent it. Was it you, Yee Ling or was it somebody else? Gosh! Old age is certainly catching up fast and my memory is no longer as good as it used to be, it seems.

Of course, there must be some vegetables – and I had some local lettuce and cabbage for the steamboat that night…

…and I had to chop the garnishing – spring onions and daun sup (Chinese celery)…

…and my missus made this out-of-this-world chili dip to eat everything with…

So that was what we had that night at my parents’ house…

…for Chap Goh Meh – just a simple steamboat dinner, no doubt, but at least, we got to preserve the age-old tradition that is steeped in meaning and significance…and the members of the family who are around here had the chance to sit and eat together during this auspicious occasion and that was what mattered most.