Hot Pot In Hotham

I went on a ski trip the past weekend with friends. You can read about it here. This post will be dedicated to what we ate at Hotham.

For the first morning, we ate breakfast at the cafe next to Hoys ski rental in Marrietville, which is the closest suburb to Hotham. Lunch on the first day was also just pies and stuff in AJ's Cafe Bar in Hotham Central.

The first night's dinner was something you would never guess, hot pot. Peter had brought this massive electric wok thing. You can see it below with the corn in it. He also bought heaps of fish balls, beef balls, pork balls, beef slices, lamb slices, vegetables and noodles.


We even had restaurant quality XO sauce, made by Peter's uncle who works in Dragon Boat, not the city one though which I have criticised quite a few times in various posts.


Jo did all the hard work of getting things ready while us guys were playing computer games. Shame on us.


So despite being all the way in Mount Hotham, here we were eating a full on hot pot. We even had chopsticks. It was quite good but there was way too much food. Despite Peter's orders for everyone to keep eating, there's only so many fish balls one can eat.


The second day's breakfast was scrambled eggs, toast, cooked mushrooms and bacon. It all tasted really good, especially when the cold makes you so much hungrier.


For lunch on the second day, we had toasted wraps and sandwich. My salami, roast chicken, avocado, cheese and mayo grilled Turkish bread sandwich was really yummy. I washed it down with some of David R's home brew beer, which was really good.

For dinner on the second night, it was (oh no moaned everyone) hot pot again. This time, everyone was less enthusiastic about it. There was still heaps of food left and again there were fish balls everywhere. I think everyone had nightmares of fish balls that night. So again we dutifully ate our hot pot. There was less enthusiasm compared to the first night and everyone didn't eat quite as much.

We had some white and red wine with our dinner. The Jacob's Creek Chardonnay 2006 was quite nice, but the definite surprise for me was the Jacob's Creek Shiraz 2004 that I brought which was fantastic. It was such a nice drop. Having finishe both bottles, David R, David M, Kin and myself went to the bar near our apartment and drank some more cocktails. They didn't really do cocktails so they weren't too good.

For the final days breakfast, it was sausages and mushroom for breakfast. The sausages tasted ok, but were spoilt a little since they got a little frozen in the fridge. We tried to eat everything left in the fridge so we ate the remaining salami and toast. There was even talk to frying the fish balls for breakfast by Peter, but overwhelming consensus was we should take those back home. No more fish balls for anyone on this trip.

Lunch was a simple wrap with whatever meats and vegetables we had left. It was random combinations of avocado, chicken, lettuce, tomato, cheese and salami. However, those were prepared the previous night by Jo who left them in the fridge. Little was she to know that Peter would crank the temperature down in the fridge just so that his Coke's were colder. This meant we had frozen wraps with ice chunks for lunch. I ate half of mine and then got some dim sims from the cafe.

I think we did surprisingly well with the food situation and covered most situations. We had lots of juice and soft drinks as well. The only thing we did forget was to bring salt and pepper. The rental apartment had everything, including things such as a electric whisk and ironing board, but not salt, sugar, coffee or tea. We eventually bought those things from the mountain supermarket.

It was a great ski trip and I had heaps of fun. The quality of the food was also ok. Good job done by Peter and David R for buying all the food and Jo for cooking most of it. I only contributed to the food by washing the dishes and glasses. My cooking skills aren't so great. I only like to bake desserts as you probably know from reading my other entries.