Hotpot: Silencing the sliced lamb

Hotpot is a tradition in our household as in many Chinese families. Ok, I might be white as snow, but marrying in a chinese family makes for quick conversion. You eat hotpot with big time events like New Year's when the whole family is gathered around.
Center stage a pot filled with boiling water, lightly seasoned and ready to receive the main event: thinly sliced meats like pork, beef or lamb, an array of seafoods and various vegatables. Each item is introduced to the boiling water, swirled around a couple times and quickly rescued from the scaling heat. That's the idea.
As with most simple cooking methods, it's about quality and freshness of ingredients to make a difference.
Today we had hotpot in Beijing. In a famous Beijing style hot pot restaurant located in a department store of all places. The type with the hot coals in the bottom to which a bowl is attached where the boiling water cooks the main ingredients. A true kitchen marvel.
But the true star of the meal was the meat. When we do hotpot at home, we need a lot of sauce to cover the not so good taste of the meat. It comes pre-sliced, deep frozen and I do not know the process from living beast to sliced meat. In other words: it's the company that makes the dinner.

Here you can come with stangers, do not say a word the entire meal and still leave happy. The lamb we ate was how that meat should taste like, tender, slightly fatty and overall succulent. Also on the table were lamb skewers: lamb meat on a metal pin, grilled to perfection and topped with cumin seeds. Lamb and cumin; a combination I should remember as it completely works. Even my wife, the lamb unafficionado, commented that she could eat lamb like this.

That's something I will remember, as I really like lamb meat. I will find us some New Zealand imported lamb and cook it up with cumin. Garantueed to satisfy even the lamb uneaters in my family.