Happy Lunar New Year!

Happy Lunar New Year everyone! (Okay, it's actually still new year's eve)

Apparently, it's the year of the Dog.

No red envelope packets yet, and I doubt I'd get any more. In fact, you're suppose to be giving them out if you're married. I'm married. I should have given one to my sister and my younger cousin when I saw them today for dinner. I've yet to give one out to anyone, and I've been married 3.5 years. What can I say, I'm greedy and tight-fisted.

So as I mentioned, we had a family dinner tonight. Hot pot. For those of you who don't know what hot pot is, it's essentially what's in the picture. You boil food. The soup can be anything you like, from water to animal stock to something more exotic. It's actually more flavourful than you would imagine, the food that is, as everything is boiled together at the same time, so whatever flavours are in the soup, get absorbed by the food stuff you put in. What do you put in? Anything that can be chopped up into small-ish bits to go into the pot.

This is also the second hot-pot I've had this month. The other one was our annual Christmas hot pot (that got pushed to last week because of poor planning, partly on my part). There were 10 of us, and my friend who usually buys the food spent $80. That's $8 per person. We couldn't finish the food, and trust me, we have at least 3 or 4 really big eaters at the table. Imagine being stuffed on $8 worth of food.

I've noted in the past that a lot of Western non-Asian people have problems imagining boiled food as anything tasty. If you've never tried hot pot before, do give it a go. You may end up to be pleasantly surprised.

Tomorrow, my family decided to be non-traditional and go to a Western food at one of the Dine Out Vancouver restaurants.