Cold nights, hot pot.

I hope everyone's settling in nicely to the new year (read: going back to work wasn't so hard today compared to yesterday).

A couple times while home over the holidays, we cooked up a traditional Chinese "hot pot" -- a boiling pot of broth at the center of the table and plenty of meat, veggies, and noodles to cook in little baskets with your family. Oddly enough, I had never done hot pot with my family growing up. When I started working for my current team, they took me to Uncle Liu's in Falls Church, but until then, I had never participated.

Here's how hot pot works:

Light a fire in the middle of a table (we used a little butane burner).

Bring stock of choice to a rolling boil (we made chicken stock and ladled out a pot).

Provide each diner with a plate, bowl, soup spoon, pair of plastic chopsticks (for eating cooked meat), pair of wooden chopsticks (for cooking/handling raw meat), and a special mini basket (to hold food as it cooks in the broth).

Thinly slice raw meat onto plates with mini tongs. Assemble vegetables and noodles for cooking. Dish up a variety of savory, sour, and spicy dipping sauces.

Every person has his own "cooking" utensils; because the meat is so thinly sliced, you can cook it quickly in the boiling soup, a piece or two at a time. Pick up meat slices and drop into the baskets; submerge baskets and cook for 10-30 seconds, depending on what you're cooking (careful, sometimes if the soup is boiling rapidly enough, the meat gets away!)

Enjoy piping hot, dipped in delicious sauces.

After you've cooked all the meat, keep soup boiling and add vegetables to soup. Once the veggies are cooked, serve into individual bowls and add noodles to boiling broth. Serve noodles and soup with veggies, and enjoy!

 

Our menu: (we were spoiled with fresh seafood flown in from L.A.)

• Conch
• Razor clam
• Halibut
• Sole
• Mussels
• Beef
• Choy sum
• Enoki mushrooms
• Tofu
• Cellophane noodles
• Rice cake noodles

There's something spectacular about an already-tasty broth that has been cooking and boiling seafood and beef and vegetables and noodles (a natural thickening agent). With a little purring fire at the center of the table, hot pot is a truly cozy event.