I recently had my Birthday. David had the day off work and the kids were on school holidays, so I was fortunate to have a whole day of Birthday celebrations. I started the morning opening presents in bed. Then David took the kids out to the kitchen for breakfast while I stayed in bed!
For lunch we headed to a hot pot restaurant in the city. David and I had eaten hot pot before, but it was a first for the kids.
You start with a broth (we picked a chicken-soup type of broth because every other option is spicy). In our case we had one big communal hot pot in the middle of the table, but in other restaurants there are individual hot pots. We didn't want the kids to have bowls of boiling hot liquid sitting directly in front of them. You pick your raw ingredients from a menu (this time we picked beef, pork, broccoli, lotus root, a chinese vegetable I have forgotten the name of, egg dumplings, other dumplings and hand-made noodles). You cook the raw ingredients yourself in the broth. When the ingredients are ready you fish them out with your chopsticks (or the ladle our waitress kindly gave us because those dumplings are slippery little suckers) and place them on your plate. You then mix in a sauce (we had satay sauce and sesame sauce) and other add-ons (such as peanuts, shallots, coriander etc).
At the end of our meal. A bit of a mess. We are definitely not the tidiest hot-potters around. Ethan loved hot pot. Clara loved the dumplings and noodles. Erica refused to eat anything other than broccoli. She made up for it later when we picked up some warm cream puffs from a Chinese bakery - she definitely didn't starve.
When we came home it was time for Clara to have a nap and the rest of us watched a movie called Million Dollar Arm. It is worth watching, we really enjoyed it. It is on Netflix.
For dinner David picked up some Indian food and we had cheesecake and ice-cream for dessert. I think we all ate enough kilojoules to cover us for a few days. It was a great Birthday.
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