Friends, family and hot pot

Chongqing sauce.

I still have no idea how to pronounce it, or what it’s really made of — but the Chinese hot pot seasoning mix used to be an essential item on my grocery list back in Vancouver. Today, at a local M2M grocery store on the upper west side, I caught myself hovering near the Asian seasoning aisle, absentmindedly picking up packets of sauce and looking at the labels, which are in Chinese, which I cannot read. 

It’s strange that Chinese hot pot would mean so much to a Korean family, but for us, hot pot meant that everyone was home for dinner. Hot pot dishes are usually made in a stone pot with a variety of ingredients, and for our household that included onions, carrots, bok choi, cabbage, lettuce, fish balls, pork slices, beef slices and, of course, the chongqing sauce. All of those ingredients are tossed into a pot with a pork broth.

I learned the recipe from Sammi, a Chinese friend from high school. Sammi had suddenly gotten into the habit of cooking, and invited me and another close friend, Anita, over for a night of hot pot. She had already bought the ingredients so Anita and I helped her prep them for the pot. After we washed all the vegetables and sliced them in bite-sized portions, we put the pork broth and chongqing sauce in the stone pot and waited for it to heat up.

The three of us sat around the pot and had time to catch up. Sammi had been in China for a trip, I had been in Paris for school and Anita had stayed in Vancouver. As soon as the pot started to boil, each of us put in different vegetables and waited again. We talked about what we were going to do after graduation — Sammi would pursue business in China, Anita was going to apply for nursing school and I had just put in my application for two journalism schools. As soon as the vegetables were ready, we each grabbed chopsticks and dunked small slices of raw meat into the pot, and pulled them out when they were cooked — which took about ten seconds. The freshly cooked meat and the now-soft vegetables in red-hot chongqing seasoning went well together, and it was delicious — but the conversation didn’t stop. By the end of the meal, we had discussed everything from our careers to our love lives.

The next day, I took my mom grocery shopping for all of the ingredients. My whole family had agreed to try my experimental hot pot dish that night. Every hot pot is different, depending on what you have that day. My mom helped me prepare the vegetables, and we made our own version of the hot pot. It tasted a little bit different, but just right.

As soon as the broth was ready and boiling, I called down my younger siblings, Joanne and David, and we all sat around the hot pot. My mom loves vegetables, so she put in a handful of bok choi and cabbage. My sister is a fan of pork, so she immediately started dunking the small slices. My brother didn’t even have time to think, he just dumped a large chunk of beef and started swirling it around.

While everything was cooking, we talked. My mom, who works as a TSA agent in Vancouver, told us a funny story about an incident at work regarding an old lady who tried to bring a bag full of kimchi into the airport. My sister talked about how tough her exams had been. My brother described a new snowboard he had tried out the other day at Whistler, a ski resort near Vancouver. I bragged about how great this meal was and how they should all thank me for bringing it into their lives. In the end, only my mom did.

Every time I come home now, whether it be from a work trip to Korea or school in New York, we dig out the old stone pot and go shopping for vegetables, meat and chongqing sauce. Even if my brother has a big snowboarding competition or my sister has exams around the corner, they would both make time to sit down and eat hot pot with me.

I looked one last time at the chongqing sauce packet at M2M, but then put it back on the rack. I’ll just wait till I get home for the hot pot.

Eunhye Lee