Fly Wang, one of my colleagues at Kaplan China in Chengdu, took me to a hotpot restaurant and Jingli Street.  Here she is at dinner.

On the table next to her, you can see the ordering sheet for the hotpot, which is a big bowl that cooks at the center of the table.  It’s divided into three compartments, each with a different broth: one spicy with numbing peppers and red hot ones too, one milder, based on mushrooms, and another a white rice porridge.  We ordered trays of beef strips, seasoned pork rolls, little fish-stuffed turnovers, tiny mushrooms with long tails, some kind of crunchy green vegetable, tofu strips, slices of potato, and (my favorite) slices of lotus root.  We obviously had a wonderfully massive feast.

You pour some of the ingredients into whichever part of the hotpot you prefer, let them cook, and then fish them out with chopsticks (I’m ok with chopsticks but not great).  Then, you dip the pork roll, lets say, in a bowl of sesame oil seasoned with greens, some kind of diced white vegetable, and salt (you can tell I only picked up so much info along the way).  That bowl of sauce both flavors the food and cools it down from the steaming hotpot.  Then you eat and enjoy!

By the time we finished, I was gloriously full and also burning up.  Hotpot is a traditional Chengdu food, and here they eat it year-round, but — between the boiling broth and the plentiful hot peppers — it deserves its name.

On that point, Fly claims that Sichaun food and women are both famous for being “spicy.”