Mongolian Cooking

We went to a newly-opened Mongolian restaurant while in San Diego – I think it was newly-opened, it was looking kind of bare.  Or maybe that’s the in-trend decor for restaurants – high, bare ceilings, and minimal decor all around.

It wasn’t the usual buffet-style Mongolian meals that we usually see, where you pick your ingredients from the display and the chef puts it all together to cook for you.  We had to choose the ingredients from a menu, and then they bring everything to the table, and you cook.  lol  For some reason, choosing ingredients from the menu confused us, and so we asked the server to help us out.

This is what we apparently chose – vegetables, shrimp, noodles ….

… slices of beef and pork … and a big pot of broth to cook everything in.

I liked the “ying-yang” pot.  I suppose that if there were two diners eating, each would have their own side to cook.  In our case, since there were three of us, one side was a regular broth, and the other side was the spicy broth.  So the guys cooked their meal in the spicy broth, and I had the other one all to myself 🙂

The meal was filling enough, with the noodles all mixed in.  I think too that slowing down and waiting for the meats to cook helped slow down the urge to eat fast and fill up quickly.

And now that we’ve experienced this, maybe next time we won’t look like total clueless klutzes when we order and cook at the table! 🙂