Spicy ‘Hot Pot’ Soup

Our first ever hot pot!! Don’t know why we’ve never done this before as it was one of the easiest soups to create and a very fun – interactive eating – meal. For ours, we used firm tofu, rice cakes, enoki and portabello mushrooms, cabbage, kale, onions, carrots, and broccoli with our purchased broth starter pack, but you could also easily use thin cut beef or other meat of choice if you prefer.

Ingredients for Hot Pot Soup including Mushrooms, tofu, carrots, broccoli, kale, cabbage, water, rice cakes, and 'hot pot' soup mix
Ingredients that we used for our Spicy Hot Pot soup included: Tofu, Carrot, Broccoli, Onions, Kale, Cabbage, Mushrooms, and Rice cakes.

Traditionally for ‘Hot Pot’, each person puts just a few of their own ingredients in at a time, but since it was just the two of us, we just put a bunch of stuff in right off and made it as soup. We used our fondue pot as a warmer and served it on the table. The result was not only one of the most amazing soups we had all year, but easily the simplest one to make.   A delicious new adventure!   😊

Fondue ‘Hot Pot’ Soup

I hesitate to give a full formal recipe here as it will only serve to limit your creativity. Most Asian groceries will sell some version of hot pot starter. You could make the broth all yourself, but if you’ve never done it before (as we had not), we recommend experimenting with a few different commercial packets to start out. At home – just cut a bunch of things that you like to eat, then put them in the broth and let them soak in the central pot until mindbogglingly delicious!

For those that aren’t sure what to look for, this is the specific hot pot starter pack that we used. It was SOOOO delicious!