Making the soup based for steamboat

We are going to have steamboat for dinner tonight, and because we wanted to avoid using clear water as soup based for the steamboat, so we bought some chicken "shell" (??) to brew the soup based.

All along, I just assume that you can just throw everything in the cookpot and let it brew for 1-2 hours and voila, your soup will be ready. Little did I know that there are procedures to be followed even for this seemingly easy step.

You have to fry the anchovies first with some oil, cook it a little to get rid of the "sengit" smell, then add water, put to boil, THEN only add the chicken in. Sigh... so much effort for the soup. Then we left it to boil for 1.5 hours. Abi's mum also added corn and carrot to further add taste to the soup.

I am guessing that the soup will be tasty because it smelled great.
But I was ridiculed for not knowing how to do this, not knowing the proper "procedure".. blah blah blah... sigh.. what to do?

Next time, I will leave it to all to him to cook lah, or choose clear water soup as based. Choose!