For those of you who read me regularly, you might want to know what happened to my hot pot. I forgot the essential element: heat. The Chinese or Mongolian hot pot needs real, consistent heat in order to cook the meat or whatever in a broth at table. So the container used for cooking the raw ingredients has to maintain a high heat; that requires an electrical source of heat. Nope. I didn't have that. I checked Epicurious to figure out a way to present the product I had purchased as a viable, i.e.. edible, dinner for my friend. Does everyone use Epicurious as I do? I usually read several different versions of uses of the item I want to incorporate and then I improvise from that. Since I couldn't cook the meat at table, I prepared a pot of Udon noodles with thinly sliced, blanched carrots, snow peas and spinach ready in some of the seasoned broth in which I cooked the raw ingredients. and t them on to of the Udon pot. Well, they were good ingredients and I did a lot of prep, and it was "good" sort of. My friend said she liked it and I did too but it wasn't as good as it should have been. I think the fault was with the basic ingredients: : the thawed meat that went into the pot was too thin and not fresh enough.Now I have leftovers to cope with.

Story of my life.