Hot pot.
So warming.
So social.
So individual.

The basis of the Hot Pot is a quality broth.
Defined as made in our own kitchens.
There is no workaround.
No substitution.
No canned, no frozen product that comes close.

On my walk arounds, I pass an Asian restaurant on Cambridge Street in Boston, whose name escapes me.
Sorry.
The restaurant is outfitted for Hot Pot, with a burner and controls at every table.

I often see customers, 90% Asian, enjoying their soups, especially noting when they pull the Asian noodles out, long and juicy, and hard to manage even for an experienced chop stick user.
Slurp is so on target for these moments.

I’m much too refined to let is all go.
I twirl, the Italian in me, I set on the soup spoon and suck it off that.
Not from the chopsticks, splashing the people beside me.
But those fat noodles, udon, MmmMM good!

Lately I’ve come t realize how wonderfully simple a meal, with such a high level of satisfaction, of Hot Pot is to make.
Especially for those of us who follow the “Always on Hand” list in the recipes section of the website, and always have Chicken Stock on hand.

I used to own a hot pot to take to the table.
The host cut up all of the ingredients and guests sat down to a boiling pot.
Everyone put their own ingredients into the pot and pulled them out when they finished cooking.
The prep is a lot of work for the host who must also get up continuously to replenish the pot with more hot stock.

I’ve made it twice.
Each time I cooked everything up and served it from the pot.
Easy.
But lacking the ceremony and fun of the traditional way of making Hot Pot.
I’m torn.

____________________________________________
Tagging Today
Saturday, December 1, 2018
My 233rd consecutive posting.
Time is 12.01am.
Boston’s temperature will reach a high of 43 although it will feel like 37*.
Skies will be sunny then turn cloudy.

Dinner is leftover duck.

__________________________
Question of the Day:
What is “The Messiah?”

_______________________________
Love your notes.
Contact me @ domcapossela@hotmail.com

This from the talented writer and organizer of the writers’ group, Room to Write, Colleen Getty.

Oh no and then a chuckling, "So funny!"
Knowing you I could picture how you must have snapped at that man (completely deserved on his part) and how frightened he must have been!

I pity the fool who owes YOU money and hope he doesn't show up to tell you he doesn't have the money yet while riding his bike:) 
Cheers and keep daydreaming no matter the cost!
Colleen:)

Web Meister Responds: Don’t know if you’re pushing me into danger for yur amusement or encouraging creativity. 😊
+++++++++++++++++++++
And she added a second email:

I feel bad I don't know that I fully checked in with you to be sure you were ok, but you left me on a laughing note and so that's what flavored my thoughts when I replied.
Hope you are well!
Body and soul.
Cheers,
Colleen:)
+++++++++++++++++++++
And this puzzle from Jim Pasto:

Jeez. Be careful Dom. I'm glad you are ok. No thought is worth your live; rather live to think another day (if that makes sense?).  

Jim 

Web Meister Responds: Can only make sense of it if I change one or more of the word forms.
Don’t know if that is permissible.
But it does demand that one has a go at it, or several.

_________________________________
Answer to Question of the day:
Handel's reputation in England, where he had lived since 1712, had been established through his compositions of Italian opera.
He turned to English oratorio in the 1730s in response to changes in public taste; Messiah was his sixth work in this genre.

Although its structure resembles that of opera, it is not in dramatic form; there are no impersonations of characters and no direct speech.
Instead, Jennens's text is an extended reflection on Jesus as the Messiah called Christ.
The text begins in Part I with prophecies by Isaiah and others, and moves to the annunciation to the shepherds, the only "scene" taken from the Gospels.

In Part II, Handel concentrates on the Passion and ends with the "Hallelujah" chorus.
In Part III he covers the resurrection of the dead and Christ's glorification in heaven.

Handel wrote Messiah for modest vocal and instrumental forces, with optional settings for many of the individual numbers.
In the years after his death, the work was adapted for performance on a much larger scale, with giant orchestras and choirs.
In other efforts to update it, its orchestration was revised and amplified by (among others) Mozart (Der Messias).
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries the trend has been towards reproducing a greater fidelity to Handel's original intentions, although "big Messiah" productions continue to be mounted.
A near-complete version was issued on 78 rpm discs in 1928; since then the work has been recorded many times.  

The composer George Frideric Handel, born in Halle, Germany in 1685, took up permanent residence in London in 1712, and became a naturalized British subject in 1727.
By 1741 his pre-eminence in British music was evident from the honors he had accumulated, including a pension from the court of King George II, the office of Composer of Musick for the Chapel Royal, and—most unusually for a living person—a statue erected in his honor in Vauxhall Gardens.

Within a large and varied musical output, Handel was a vigorous champion of Italian opera, which he had introduced to London in 1711 with Rinaldo.
He subsequently wrote and presented more than 40 such operas in London's theatres.

By the early 1730s public taste for Italian opera was beginning to fade.
The popular success of John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch's The Beggar's Opera (first performed in 1728) had heralded a spate of English-language ballad-operas that mocked the pretensions of Italian opera.
With box-office receipts falling, Handel's productions were increasingly reliant on private subsidies from the nobility.
Such funding became harder to obtain after the launch in 1730 of the Opera of the Nobility, a rival company to his own.
Handel overcame this challenge, but he spent large sums of his own money in doing so.

Although prospects for Italian opera were declining, Handel remained committed to the genre, but as alternatives to his staged works he began to introduce English-language oratorios.
In Rome in 1707–08 he had written two Italian oratorios at a time when opera performances in the city were temporarily forbidden under papal decree.
His first venture into English oratorio had been Esther, which was written and performed for a private patron in about 1718.
In 1732 Handel brought a revised and expanded version of Esther to the King's Theatre, Haymarket, where members of the royal family attended a glittering premiere on 6 May.
Its success encouraged Handel to write two more oratorios (Deborah and Athalia).
All three oratorios were performed to large and appreciative audiences at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford in mid-1733.
Undergraduates reportedly sold their furniture to raise the money for the five-shilling tickets.

In 1735 Handel received the text for a new oratorio named Saul from its librettist Charles Jennens, a wealthy landowner with musical and literary interests.
Because Handel's main creative concern was still with opera, he did not write the music for Saul until 1738, in preparation for his 1738–39 theatrical season.
The work, after opening at the King's Theatre in January 1739 to a warm reception, was quickly followed by the less successful oratorio Israel in Egypt (which may also have come from Jennens).
Although Handel continued to write operas, the trend towards English-language productions became irresistible as the decade ended.
After three performances of his last Italian opera Deidamia in January and February 1741, he abandoned the genre.

In July 1741 Jennens sent him a new libretto for an oratorio; in a letter dated 10 July to his friend Edward Holdsworth, Jennens wrote: "I hope [Handel] will lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition may excell all his former Compositions, as the Subject excells every other subject. The Subject is Messiah”

__________________________________Good morning on this Saturday, December 1, Christmas now 24 days away.
We talked about Hot Pot, we heard from Colleen and Jim, and we discussed Handel’s “Messiah,” appropriately seasonal.

Che vuoi? Le pocketbook?

See you soon.

Love

Dom