Throw it in…

After a drearily dreadful year, I really did not feel like celebrating to ring out the old and ring in the new. We decided we would just have a simple steamboat dinner on New Year’s Eve that day, mostly using what we have in the fridge unlike in the past, when I would go out to the wet market and shops here and there to pick up some special things like those giant freshwater prawns (udang galah) , sea cucumber, beef tendon, the whole works to throw in.

This was our individual table setting…

…that evening, just the 4 of us, including my sister at a table for 8, ample space for physical distancing.

My missus did pick up two packs of the pek hay (white seawater prawns) from that neighbourhood shop and we picked out the bigger ones and we also had these New Zealand mussels with shell in the freezer, can’t remember when we bought them, and we took out a few…

No, we did not take all of them out as we would not be able to finish eating all of them.

I did stop by a meat shop to pick up those packs of pre-sliced pork belly and beef…

…specially for hot pots and steamboats. That sure saved us the trouble of having to slice the meat ourselves and they really do it very very thinly – I think they have the machine to do that.

While I was at the meat shop, I saw they had (Ligo) sweet corn at the grocery store two doors away so I bought three at RM1.00 each. It was a good thing I did that as there wasn’t any at our neighbourhood shop that morning, New Year’s Eve. My missus peeled them and cut them into manageable chunks and boiled them with the bone stock soup…

…and yes, they were very nice. Really sweet, really true to its name.

I also managed to get hold of some baby corn (my missus said she could not find any when she went out a few days earlier) and enoki mushroom from the aforementioned shop and that morning, I went to our neighbourhood shop and grabbed all the lettuce…

…that they had. Word has it that there is a shortage of vegetables these days because of the incessant rain so some may not be available and of course, the prices of the rest are shooting up like nobody’s business.

My missus bought some quail eggs, my girl loves them, and made some meat balls and fish balls…

…for our steamboat and we also had some tofu cakes in the fridge that my missus pre-fried and some leftover tofu skin as well. That morning, I also managed to grab a pack of pre-fried hu phio (fish maw), just soak to soften and use…

– RM12.00 for quite a lot at the Chinese medical cum grocery store in the same block as our regular neighbourhood shop and yes, we did get ready a packet of tang hoon (glass noodles) too.

When the time came, we just threw everything into the bone stock soup…

…and the instant it started boiling, we could dig in and start enjoying all that we had that night.

My sister did ask me if I was inviting anybody else but I said no. At a time like this, I felt it would be best to keep everything low key, all to ourselves only. We’d probably do that again, like in the past, when things get better.