Third Mom Hot Pot

For diner we went to a small "hole in the wall" hot pot restaurant about 15 min drive away.  The place really doesn't look like much, and it's a bit grungy but you can't argue with the price and the food :)  First of all, the kitchen is at the front of the restaurant facing the street, and then the dinning area is at the back (this is actually quite typical).  The kitchen area had an "L" shape of burners with small individual sized metal woks containing a myriad of different ingredients which were boiling in their respective broths.

When we entered the dinning area to sit down, I noticed all the tables and chairs were mini!  It felt like we were giants sitting down for diner with our knees above the top edge of the table.

Johan ordered the House Special Stinky Tofu Hot Pot for himself and me, while Nikki had the Kimchi Hot Pot, and I didn't catch what Ali had, but it looked similar to our hot pot.  Before the hot pot came, we could self-serve ourselves with a few different drinks, and different sauces to dip our food in.  The favorite sauce seems to be the satay sauce (oriental bbq sauce) mixed with a spicy garlic sauce.

When the food arrived, they placed these metal holders down in front of us and filled a small chamber inside with this clear gel, which they then lit on fire to keep our hotpots boiling.

Starting from 9 o'clock and moving clockwise here is what I can remember as being the ingredients:  Green onions, clams, 3 types of bean curd, cocktail weiner, beef ball, beef slices, mushrooms, cabbage, pig blood, pig blood/rice mixture (the black cubes near the bottom).  There's also 2 large pieces of firm stinky tofu underneath the whole thing.  The whole meal came to $3 per person!  Now that's value :)

Now you may be wondering where "Stinky Tofu" gets it's name from (I was wondering as we were eating) so I thought I'd look it up.  According to Wikipedia:

"Stinky tofu is a form of fermented tofu that has a strong odor. It is a popular snack in East and Southeast Asia, particularly Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Mainland China, where it is usually found at night markets or roadside stands, or as a side dish in lunch bars."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinky_tofu

The smell is a bit hard to describe, but it smells like... sweaty/wet socks that have been left under the sink for a month and then put in the microwave.  lol.  K i'm not sure if that's the exact smell, but the smell is very pungent and probably something most westerners would not want to even get close to.  The taste is definitely acquired and it tastes much better than it smells.  To get an idea for how bad it smells, they had a challenge on the 3rd season of The Amazing Race Asia to eat a bowl of Stinky Tofu :P