Very steam steamboat!

I just come back from dinner. As you may know, we in Malaysia celebrate the Hari Raya Aidilfitri 13 and 14 of this month. It is the Muslim festival to celebrate end of fasting month. So because we are a multiracial country who love food, this few weeks we have been invited to many open house.

To people not from Malaysia, maybe you are not familiar wiht open house concept. Basically it mean party with food, and it is usually during festive period. So in Malaysia, it is usual to have open house during Aidilfitri, Chinese New Year and Deepavali. Thats mean that during that time, your friends who celebrating the festival will invite you visit their homes. And there, they will prepared all the lovely foods which is according to the festival.

So for Aidilfitri, you can taste many local favourites like rendang, laksa, lemang, ketupat, satay, and a lot more. Most of the foods is very fattening and use a lot of oils and coconut milk. Many flogs have write about about this kind of thing, so I don't do the same. Instead I can tell you that for a break, I have a very plain dinner tonight - steamboat.

Steamboat is actually like a hotpot. The restaurant give you a hot pot of soup and some raw foods- meats, fish, vege etc and you just cook the food in the soup. It is very light and tasty. Tonight I eat steamboat with different. Instead of soup, inside the hotpot is porridge. In Malaysia when we say porridge it is not oats, but rice porridge (congee). This is a very delicious way of cooking the food and I enjoy very much.

There is 3 of us eating, so we order only a little bit. We have the standard order for 2 people:

and we add some meat tendon balls:

fish ball with oyster and "fatt choi" (like a thin seaweed which look a bit like pubic hair):

mussles:

slice mutton - it has many fats in it, but it taste more nicer this way:

slice pork neck which the restaurant say is imported, but not say import from where:

pumpkin (which you can see is the yellow thing in the porridge):

pig kidney and some vege. The sauce they give is 2 types - chilli sauce (red colour)and very hot chilli sauce (green colour):

When you are cooking the foods, the porridge is becoming tastier. Also because the restaurant put some MSG into the foods or it is already there in the so-called balls and other process foods. But all in all, it is a very delicious meal, and it is a different thing from the normal steamboat.

Like we like to say in Malaysia - very steam lah!! (meaning "it's great" or "it's hot" or "it's cool").