Hot Pot or Fire Pot

This is Fondue Chinoise (according the French and the Swiss) or Chinese Hot Pot or Mongolian Fire Pot. A meal of small food items to be cooked in a simmering broth. The Europeans tend to use a small fork color coded to each diner. The Asians usually use small wire mesh baskets. At my house, both tend to get involved.

Traditional charcoal fired fire pot (from redcook.net) I'm a little concerned about carbon monoxide and such to use one of these in the home.

Divided hot pots (from diytrade.com) so you can have different flavors of broth, often one spicy and one milder. These look a little small for feeding more than 4 very polite diners. Maybe two serious food lovers could get along in one of these. 

I usually make a hot pot in either an electric fondue pot (the New Years Hot Pot at the end of this post) or on my induction burner (Birthday Hot Pot below) that can keep a bigger volume of liquid hot even when there are lots of baskets and forks in the pot. 

Select a mix of meats and vegetables that cook well simmered or boiled. The list of possibilities is long. As I usually make this for a celebratory meal, my examples below are heavier on the meat than you might want. 

Here's some other people's versions for you to use for ideas:

Noobcook

Wikihow

Redcook.net

AsiaDish

ChinaSichuanFood with some interesting ideas for a "dry hot pot" and an Ice hot pot. 

I tend to use a more strongly seasoned asian stock for my broth, but there are many possibilities if you look through the above links. 

Birthday Hot Pot for my son (induction burner and larger pan)

Thinly sliced pork and chicken, shrimp, tilapia filet, tofu, asparagus, spinach, zucchini.

If you're using loin chops for the pork, it helps to slice off the fat rind. lay the pork chop on edge and cut along the fat rind, with the knife horizontal to the cutting board. 

An array of baskets and forks cooking items in the broth.

When you're slowing down, the broth has reduced and concentrated, finish cooking the rest of the ingredients and ladle the resulting soup into bowls of noodles. For this batch, I used egg noodles. Alternatively, you can cook little baskets of noodles along the way.

A fresh plate would be more formal, but here, I'm enjoying my soup on top of the plate I worked from for the meal. So there's a little bit of shrimp tails and such about.

Lunar New Year Hot Pot 2014 (electric fondue pot)

Scallops, fishballs, squid, tofu, bean sprouts, pork, zucchini, spinach, small bok choy leaves.

This soup used rice noodles.

It's nice to have some different sauces for dipping the cooked items. And also the standard array of Chinese condiments for seasoning the final soup. 

I tend to favor a Black Vinegar and Ginger dip as well as a Sesame-Soy Vinaigrette. Use any of your favorites if you wish of course. 

Black Vinegar and Ginger Dip

1 teaspoon finely minced ginger

2 tablespoons black vinegar

2 tablespoons soy sauce

2 teaspoons sweet chile sauce

1 teaspoon dark soy sauce

Optional--a flavored oil: chili oil, chive oil, sesame oil. Don't repeat an oil you're using in another dip. Keep them different. 

Mix, and let stand at least 30 minutes for the ginger flavor to penetrate the sauce. This is also very  good with pot stickers. 

The ratios here make this sauce scale easily. 

Sesame-Soy Vinaigrette

3 tablespoons soy sauce

3 tablespoons rice vinegar

2 tablespoons sesame oil

1 1/2 tablespoons sugar

1 tablespoon dark soy

Combine and stir to dissolve the sugar. Shake or stir vigorously before using to mix in the oil.  I use this one a lot on salads and slaws.