I decided to challenge myself and see how many different types of dishes I could make with a rice cooker. Actually, this challenge came about because I was too cheap to buy pricey infrared stovetop friendly cookware. Details, schmetails.
After challenging the Steamed Meat Cake, I decided to go for something that’s super popular in Hong Kong: Hotpot, which is basically a boiling cauldron of savory broth that you cook loads of stuff in. A quick search online shows that everyone’s got a particular mix for their broth, ingredients, and dipping sauces, and that it is a very “anything goes” dish -- so me like. I headed off to the supermarket with a hazy idea of needing meat, vegetables and some sort of soup base.
As HK is hotpot-friendly, the supermarket has a section dedicated to hotpot, with pre-chopped vegetables, thinly sliced meat and cleaned seafood, and other things, like mushrooms, fish balls, and fried tofu cubes in neatly saran-wrapped in trays. I opted for pork, which is uber cheap here, and the tofu cubes. I decided to get unchopped veggies, since it was cheaper and gave me more variety to choose from.
I chose baby napa cabbage, which is called wah wah choi, scallions, and enoki mushrooms from Korea, which were half the cost of enoki from Japan. Go figure.
For soup base, I went with a carton of good ol’ Swanson chicken broth. I also bought a couple of packs of Lee Kum Kee concentrated hotpot soup base (pork bone and satay) that you dissolve in boiling water just in case the broth wasn’t enough. I also picked up a bottle of sukiyaki sauce, which you can use to flavor the hotpot broth, or also use as a dipping sauce. In total, I think my hotpot ingredients cost about US$10.
Upon return home, I poured all the chicken broth into the rice cooker, pressed "Cook", and then started adding ingredients. I chopped up half the scallions, cabbage, and mushrooms and tossed them into the pot. Once that came to a boil (about 10 minutes or so), I added half of the tofu cubes and let them absorb the yummy liquid. After a couple of minutes, I started dropping in the meat. Now, you’re supposed to swish-swish, then extract, shabu-shabu style, but I am a paranoid obsessive hypochondriac deathly afraid of salmonella and other germies, so I let the meat cook until the broth came back up to a mad boil. So yes, the meat was a wee bit overcooked. But still quite excellent, especially when dipped in the sweet sukiyaki sauce.
My hotpot experience was quite good. One pot lasts me about three meals (when served with rice or noodles), and the ingredients I bought were enough to cook two hotpots, which translates to six meals. So $10 for six meals is a bargain...and it was a cinch to make, even for a non-cook such as myself. My beloved rice cooker boiled up the pot in record time, and kept things hot for as long as I wanted. My only complaint? You can’t cook rice and hotpot at the same time in a rice cooker! But you can cook noodles and hotpot at the same time...so it’s all good. And it was.
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