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Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot



The weather has taken a turn on the colder side now, with the highs only in the 30's since Nick, Sachiyo and Hana arrived on November 28th.  That means lots of bundling up when taking strolls to the Junction or around the neighborhood. It also means no rain so that's a good thing. (It rarely rains when it gets this cold.) 


 We did get some snow flurries on Monday morning but they didn't stick.  With such cold weather now, we decided it was a good time to go to one of Nick and Sachiyo's favorite restaurants called Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot, a restaurant that they like to go to in Japan.   When Nick and Sachiyo went shopping last week in the International District for our temaki dinner, they noticed there was a Little Sheep restaurant across the street from Uwajimaya.  So, we picked up Lauren at her house and off we went for a hot pot dinner on a freezing cold night.

This was our first night out as a family since their arrival since we've been cooking dinners at home of all of Nick's favorite things; roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, 




game hens with mushroom sauce

crepes that we had for our family brunch of Saturday


 and last night we had chili and corn bread.  I put some meat in the chili from  Peco's Pit Bar B Q that we had leftover from Saturday night when Nick's friends came over for a visit. 


 We got an order of Peco's Bar B Q beef and chicken, along with some cole slaw, baked beans, and fixin's.  

The leftover meat added a nice smokey flavor to the chili last night to give it an added kick that was perfect, along with corn bread with butter and honey.  Hana has loved wearing all her warm clothes in our colder weather now.




It was perfect to go for a warm dinner of hot pot at Little Sheep.  Walking into the restaurant, you see steam coming up from all the tables because everyone has a hot pot in the middle of their table.  Basically, every table has a burner in the middle of the table and with each order you received a big two-sectioned pot of broth to put whatever you order in for stewing. 


 One side has a spicy broth of thirteen different spices including very hot chili oil and the other side is a mild chicken broth.  Both broths have lots of different ingredients floating around in them for added flavor.  Nick and Sachiyo know the menu pretty well so they ordered for us and ordered a variety of things including vegetables 
and meats
and fish.

With each item you order, you put it into the broth to cook. With the vegetables, you tear them up into bite-size pieces before placing into the broth.

It's fun to actively take part in making your dinner of hot pot.  So, not only do you get a great tasting, warm, hardy meal but you also have fun making it.  We also received a side of rice
some pickled cabbage and later we ordered some additional noodles to put into the hot pot.  


 The servers kept coming around and re-filling our broth as it got lower so we always had an abundance of broth to cook our ingredients.  The broth, alone, tasted wonderful.  I liked the mild chicken-flavored broth but the spicy broth was also pretty good, you just couldn't eat a lot of it because it was definitely spicy.  And you had to be sure to dip deep to avoid the hot chili oil floating on top or it would have been really spicy.  Both broths had lots of flavorful items floating around in them that you needed to avoid eating.   I collected a plateful of these items to look at in detail.  


 Some of the items that I know are garlic cloves, star anise, bay leaves and, well, that's about all I know...we had fun poking and prodding all the unusual Asian ingredients.  Even Nick and Sachiyo weren't sure what some of them were. We did some shopping at  Uwajimaya before we went to the restaurant 

because if you buy $22 of groceries, you get free parking for two hours.  That's worth it when trying to park around there, for sure.  Nick and Sachiyo are planning on making a curry dinner for us so there was plenty more items to purchase before we went for our hot pot dinner.  I would definitely recommend Little Sheep Hot Pot and I know we will return of another warm up on a cold night.  




   
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