The Homemade Steamboat

Sorry for the lack of proper posts. Been relatively busy. Thankfully, I've cleared up one backlog and with my training this week, it meant less daytime stress and more quality time for myself. However, I dread going back to work next week =(

Communal cooking is always fun when you have good company.
But it is not so fun when your company has deplorable eating habits.
One that I enjoy much is steamboat. Thanks to ViralCham, my MoMo post garnered quite a lot of visits. Given how much they actually promoted the place, I wonder if my readers are disappointed with my review.

Anyway, jl decided to host a steamboat party dinner at her place. She likes the concept but finds the restaurants provide crappy or MSG-laden soup. Anything home cooked is good in my books except when it is my own cooking.

She cooked the soup for few hours using the pork bone/marrow and radish. Simple and maybe bland but that's where the other ingredients come in. We headed over to NSK in Kuchai Lama. Supposedly dirt cheap, the place was rather packed and because there is a wet market inside as well, things can get rather slippery and dirty. My last visit to a wet market was in Seremban, even that wasn't a proper marketing visit.

While I can't say about the local wet markets, NSK certainly isn't that cheaper than hypermarkets e.g. Tesco and AEON. In terms of freshness, I find Jaya Grocer is better. But, NSK has the advantage for wholesalers looking to buy in bulk. There is also quite a variety of products and different brands.

A simple home cooked steamboat setup. A good chilli sauce is a must for steamboats. Or if you can't take the heat, soy sauce will do too.

Napa cabbage is quite the quintessential steamboat ingredient which I don't really like because they take a while to soften. Oyster and golden mushroom are awesome as well with the hot soup.
On the top left is pan fried bacon roll with golden mushroom. Initially, mel wanted to cook it with kimchi (oh god, why) but luckily jl said no. mel's love for all things Korean certainly knows no bound.

We She bought quite a lot of stuff and that was also after I repeated told her to go easy. That's the problem with us Malaysians. We can never have too much to eat. 

To add more flavor, deep fried shallots were added into the soup. As the dinner progressed, the soup became more delicious from the various meat and vegetables. There isn't so much of a need for those ready made stock cubes if you put in enough effort of getting the stock right. The dinner ended up being quite plentiful for our party of five. So much so that we couldn't finish all the food :"| So, remember folks, have proper resource planning when purchasing and capacity planning to enjoy them all.