The Food Site

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.

First of all, my apologies to those who may have checked here daily for any latest post. I’ve been quite remiss in posting as regularly as I used to due to one reason:

I am way in over my head with a new project I am undertaking, thus I hardly have time for this blog and my personal blog.

In these few weeks, my postings have been irregular and though I did cook up a storm and bake loads of stuff and pigged out at restaurants, I hardly have time to put it all up. Sigh. I am really, really overwhelmed and I can only wish I have 36 hours a day to do everything!

Anyway, I sorta won a gift over at The Life and Loves of Grumpy’s Honeybunch when I left a comment at her Pay It Forward post. SO. It is now my turn to pay it forward.

Pay It Forward

Okay, for those of you who don’t understand how it works or have not seen the movie ‘Pay it Forward’, let me explain the nitty gritty of this in one simple sentence:

I go out of my way to help three strangers and each of these strangers will in turn help three strangers respectively and on it goes.

Now, in blogland, it is slightly different. You just leave a comment here and I will use one of those online number randomizer to pick three people who commented and I will send them each a homemade gift. And yes, you can be from anywhere in the world and I will send the gift to you within the next 365 days. Honest. No tricks.But if nobody commented here…I guess, I will have to beg you nicely to let me pay it forward. So, please, can you please, pretty, pretty please leave a comment here? There, I did ask very nicely. I promise I will send over very nice handmade gift for the three chosen ones.

Now for the catch. The catch is for these three people to have blogs and to do the same. They will have to pick three people each and send the gifts to those people. That’s what we call Pay It Forward.

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Now, on to an award I received from Gera of Sweets Foods. Let me proudly present to you my latest award….

Thank you so much to Gera for thinking so highly of my humble little blog. Makes me even more guilty for my lack of regular posts in recent times.

Anyway, here are the details of this award:

The deserved Uber Amazing Blog Award is a blog award given to sites who:

* inspires you
* makes you smile and laugh
* or maybe gives amazing information
* a great read
* has an amazing design
* and any other reasons you can think of that makes them uber amazing!

The rules of this award are:

* Put the logo on your blog or post.
* Nominate at least 5 blogs (can be more) that for you are Uber Amazing!
* Let them know that they have received this Uber Amazing award by commenting on their blog.
* Share the love and link to this post and to the person you received your award from.

So, now, I have to find five Uber Amazing Blogs to pass this award to (why do I have this strange inkling as if it is an e-chain letter? lol..don’t mind me, I love passing on links to great blogs out there…)

Now, the 5 blogs deserving this award are…..*insert drumroll*…

1.  Nick, The Peanut Butter Boy (heck, who doesn’t love peanut butter and a blog exclusively on peanut butter?!?! Enaf said.)

2. Gretchen from Wasabi Bratwurst (her pictures are so beautiful and yes, her recipes are great too)

3. Foongpc from My Very First Blog (okay, so his blog is not exactly a food blog but I love his blog because he always post up quite interesting stuffs and informative too.)

4. Tartelette (I am a silent stalker of her blog. I simply LOVE, LOVE, LOVE her pictures! Go check her blog out and you will see what I mean)

5. Peanut Butter and Julie (I also silently stalk her blog. Like I said, who doesn’t love peanut butter? And Julie sure do have loads of PB posts too!)

So, there. Some blogs I think deserve the Uber Amazing Blog award.