Heartwarming dinner parties and hot pot

Two weeks ago, I invited my Chinese gal friends to come over and have a home-cooked meal made by yours truly. They really liked the meal of winter melon soup, stir-fried shrimp, stir-fried veggies, and slow-cooked pear soup for dessert. I am by no means a great cook (my father often refuses to eat what I cook because he thinks the lentils and curry dishes I cook look too much like poo), so I was very happy that they kept singing praises of my amateur efforts.

This week, these same friends invited me to hot pot. It just so happened that today was one of the coldest days in Tianjin so far, so it's perfect for hot pot! I love to eat this super easy, super delicious, and super healthy type of meal. My friend Berber bought a spicy soup base, mixed it with water, and added green onion and ginger for the broth. Apparently, that's the Tianjin way of eating it; in America, our hot pots at home usually just start out with a plain chicken broth, no spices or other ingredients. Here's a pic of my friends preparing the hot pot in their dorm room. Isn't it so cute and cozy, dorm room hot pot? :)

Then we ate boiled fish balls, seaweed, lamb slices, beef slices, mushrooms, tofu, crab sticks, and veggies for two hours. In TJ, they like to use a sesame paste dipping sauce, and I have to say, it's a quite sweet and tasty accompaniment to the meat, tofu and veggies.




After stuffing ourselves with hot pot, we had the pineapple meringue cake I'd made with the little toaster oven in our shared kitchen. That little oven has gotten a lot of use from me lately. I'm amazed how much I can make with a toaster oven: cookies, banana bread, pineapple cake, baked meringue. Granted, the quality isn't on par with the bigger ovens in America, but it's still quite good, and gives me a nice taste of home. I didn't photograph the cake b/c 1)I forgot, and 2)it really didn't look that photogenic. I initially made the pineapple cake, and it came out a little too brown to look very nice as it was, so I decided to frost it. I initially meant to make a butter cream-egg white frosting, but after unwrapping the stick of butter I bought two or three weeks ago, I saw a small moldy dot on one side, a red blob on another side, and I smelled a cheesy smell. Knowing the whole milk fiasco here, I decided to toss the whole thing away and just make a pure meringue frosting. I was nervous about the meringue b/c I don't have cream of tartar here, and most recipes call for it to help stabilize the egg whites. I found a recipe that used salt as a stabilizer, so I whipped and whipped with a fork (b/c I don't have a whisk here) until my arms got sore. Finally the egg whites formed soft peaks, and I added the sugar syrup and whipped over a double boiler, half cooking the frosting. Then I put some banana slices on the pineapple cake and frosted the whole thing with my frosting. Then baked the entire cake loaf. I garnished with some superfine grated coconut. If I had some chocolate, I would have melted it and drizzled it over for decoration. That would have been beautiful.

I was surprised and glad that my friends liked the cake so much. It was moist, and the soft meringue added a nice richness, but definitely not what I would consider a terrific dessert in American terms. Yet to Chinese, it's novel and yummy. The three girls managed to eat all of it (granted it was a small cake) and still raved about it even while washing the crumbs from the plate.