The traditional Chinese New Year Reunion Steamboat Dinner

By Foong, on January 29th, 2009

Having a steamboat meal for the Chinese New Year reunion dinner has been one of the age-old traditions in most Chinese families. As far as I know, each and every one of our reunion dinner involved a lavish steamboat dinner complete with loads of fishballs, chicken, fish and seafood.

So, this year, it is no different in my house where we coordinated a lavish seafood steamboat dinner good enough to choke our arteries and have a steamy time. Heheh. Team the steamy steamboat with our hot and humid weather, we have our regular steam bath right in my living room!

Here’s my steamboat soup recipe:

Seafood Steamboat Base Soup Recipe

Ingredients

4 pc dried scallops (as pictured below)

1 medium sized turnip (as pictured below)

1 medium sized burdock root (as pictured below)

2 carrots

3 tbsp kei chee (dried wolfberries)

2 – 3 garlic pods

water

Instructions

1. Clean and skin the burdock and turnip, then cut into large chunks like below.

2. Boil a pot of water

3. Dump all the ingredients in and let it simmer over low heat for about an hour and the soup is ready to use!

Now, the reason that I didn’t add any kinds of meat is because we preferred a clearer and milder soup so that after putting all the other steamboat ingredients in, we won’t get an overly cloying soup. For the raw ingredients we have loads of salmon, cod fish, fish balls, sui kow (chinese dumplings), tiger prawns, crabs, mushrooms, Japanese tofu, chicken breast meat, green vegetables and squid.

Since we have salmon, naturally, we also have some salmon sashimi:

And here’s our steamboat spread…

Steamboat is probably one of the easiest meals to have but don’t be fooled as the preparation time takes up to two hours since I have to slice the fish and chicken, open the cans (for the mushrooms), wash the vegetables, crack the crab shells, etc, etc, and then arrange it all on large plates.

It being a reunion dinner, of course, it also takes hours to enjoy a steamboat meal since it involved dumping the ingredients into the soup and sitting around chatting and waiting for it to boil.