Me and my friend having a Chinese hotpot Yesterday, my friend dropped in on me unannounced. Actually I was glad she did so. Who doesn’t need a big surprise in this difficult time. Seeing an old friend is an absolute remedy for healing the scars of the quarantine where I live. Apart from a surprise, she also brought some updates on her life and work. It had been a while since we last gathered together. We always planned to meet up again, but what with this and that, it was hard to make it happen as we planned. It’s sad but we have moved onto different phases of our lives. I was happy to see her successful in her career and become a new mom, though. She didn’t bring her baby. In her words, she needed some time of not taking care of her baby to know that she thought of and loved the baby. I just burst into laughter the moment the words came out of her mouth. We had hotpot for lunch. Hotpot is best for winter time and having it in spring is a little bit inappropriate, but since we are big fans of this traditional food and having hotpot is a group thing, we had millions of reasons to have it. We could have take shortcuts to grab some hotpot base and dipping sauces at a grocery store, but making a hotpot from scratch was more fulfilling. It was also a great activity to kill the time. She didn’t like it hot, but I did. Since we didn’t have a pot with a divider in the middle, with which man can have 2 different hotpot base, one must compromise. I was glad I did. It’s important to make your guests feel at home in our culture. First, I filled about 2/3 of the pot with some chicken stock, turned it on, and added some dates, green onions, black peppercorns and fennel seeds. While the soup was boiling, we made our dips with some sesame butter mixed with salt. Personally I prefer to add one raw egg to my dips whenever I have my hotpot. I never regret it when the smoothy texture of the egg runs free on the tip of my tongue. It’s a Japanese thing but I quite like it. We had some vegetables like rape plants, lettuce leaves, mushrooms and enoki mushrooms. Normally I like to boil some seafood like crabmeat and shrimps and some bean curd sticks, but this time we were out of these ingredients, so we used some sliced pork. Preparation can be fun and necessary. Digging in is definitely the highlight. We were furiously happy to have a nice conversation over a traditional hotpot. Most of the time, I’m just a listener, and of course, a good one.