Our Family Eve Steamboat
For as long as I’ve join my husband’s family for their Chinese New Year’s eve reunion dinner, we’ve always had steamboat as our main dish. Although we’d also have dishes such as roast chicken, roast ducks, our family’s spring rolls, mixed vegetables and etc, these are side dishes to the steamboat.
And every year, my mother in law would prepare all the ingredients such as prawns, squids, fishballs, fish cakes, liver, some vegetables and one special ingredient such as abalone or what we had this year, limpets.
As for the soup, there are no special seasoning except fish sauce and some chicken stock because the prawns, squids and all other ingredients that we add inside the steamboat will add its own flavour - and I like to spice up my own soup with some sliced cili padi!
We still used the old-fashioned steamboat which uses charcoal for heat and I was told that, this gives the soup a much nicer smell as compare to using modern gas steamboat.
The only thing about eating steamboat is that it is a very hot affair and even in our air-conditioned dining room, some of the men would be sweating - but since we only do this once a year, nobody minded.
And this year, I thought we had an even more delicious steamboat than before.
