Hinabe

Cocoya has been talking about this Chinese-style hot pot whose Japanese name is hinabe. This dish is one of the famous Sichuan HOT dishes. He would explain how amazing the combination of the super spicy soup and the regular one is whenever we talk about food. I wanted to try it but I never had a chance. Yesterday, I was working late to make a phone call to a Japanese person and was gonna leave right after. Luckily, this guy in the office asked if I wanted to come along with the economic journalists and have some Chinese. I was kinda hungry so I was super happy to be invited. Yeah, free food is always good. I was a bit nervous about talking with those supposedly experts over dinner at first though. Despite my concerns, it turned out to be a great night! I tell you this hinabe can be crazily spicy. We sorta let the waitor pick ingredients for us and without the proper knowledge of hinabe, we put literally tons of seafood and vegetables in the pot. Not surprisingly, the soups soon overflew and got mixed up. It was ok at first but as we kept adding too much of food in each soup, the regular soup turned RED like the other one... My favorite toppings were firm tofu, shrimps, thinly sliced beef and oysters! Mmm, as you can imagine I was stuffed at the end of the night. The good thing was we were also drinking Qingdao beer, a Chinese hard liquor with sugar and white wine! Man, those guys were awesome. One of them turned out to be a big food lover like me and I am definitely going to get his email address and talk about food with him! Other guys told me how some young people quit work too soon and other work-related stuff. But the whole time, I could tell how nice each person was to each other. The funny thing is that one of them told me they were not typical journalists. He said normal journalists at their company (I assume people in Japan) are really up-tight and somehow like yakuza, LOL. I am not exactly sure about what he meant by that but it seemed funny at that time.