Tonight's Dinner: March 23, 2014

Tonight we went out to dinner with my in-laws at a hot pot chain, but new to the area, Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot.  We had sooooo much food.  This type of post is better to show as pictures.

We ordered two types of lamb.  This lamb pictured is lamb shoulder, but we also ordered New Zealand lamb.  We actually enjoyed the texture of the lamb shoulder than the fancy New Zealand variety.  

Pre-cooked dumplings that we dipped in the spicy for extra flavor. 

From left: Lettuce, rice noodles, Napa cabbage, spinach, and taro root.

Since we were hungry we ordered a "meat pie" that was similar to a crepe.  It was basically a seasoned ground beef pancake. 

Beef.  Not sure what kind of beef cut this is, but clearly it's very marbled and it was extremely tender after dunking into the pot for three to four seconds. I know it wasn't wagyu, but I would guess that it was a thinly cut chuck.

Lamb kabob

This is a lot of goodness.  Not sure what was on the far left, but from the left top: fish balls stuffed with seasoned tobiko, various meatballs, cuddle fish balls, squid, tripe, tendons.  Holy moly, everything on this tray was extremely delicious.   I loved that the meatballs were all made by hand and you could tell.  They were extremely delicious.  I know,  I've been trying to get more descriptive, but from the nature of family-style hot pot, it's difficult to taste everything.  My favorite, however, was the fish balls stuffed with tobiko.  When people describe Umami, I'm not sure exactly what they mean.  I'm probably wrong, but in my head that's what I think. In my head though, the flavor added to the tobiko is what I imagine is that 6th-sense/flavor Umami.

We ordered so much that we got some complementary pot stickers, which were delicious, by the way.

The center of the stuffed tobiko.