KUO KITCHEN -- Holiday Feasting

Whew.  I cannot believe it's the new year already.  As with the rest of the year, the holidays pretty much flew by.  Just wanted to post a quick snippet at my holidays, particularly the foods that came out of the Kuo Kitchen.  (Because, very, very honestly, I ate wayy too much food to possibly document in the month of December.  Especially in Vegas.  I can't even think about the restaurants in Vegas right now.)

We started with hot pot, for Thanksgiving - a very standard Asian holiday meal.  So delicious.  So easy. And so perfect for the cold weather.  There was a slight hiccup in dinner plans when it seemed the hot pot wouldn't work and we were all slightly deflated just envisioning hovering over the stove top with our dipping sauce bowls....but luckily, it was just an issue with the circuit breaker.  My sister brought some pumpkin bread pudding to make it, you know, real Thanksgiving.   

My favorite ingredients have to be the meat balls, cuttle fish balls, meat, watercress, napa, and clear noodles. What are some of yours?

Thanksgiving round 2 was my sister's annual Potluck (there's a Foursquare checkin for it.  It's very official.) My brother and sister-in-law were in town, so we made green bean casserole, easy biscuit chicken pot pie casserole, and pork with pear.  Yum.  

Here's a little bit of that potluck.  Food kept coming so it was impossible to capture everything without something being 3/4 eaten.  

And what's holiday season without desserts?  I was feeling the cupcakes this year, so my go-to cupcakes made an appearance (white cake from a box made with greek yogurt instead of the eggs and oil, topped with crushed pineapple, tapioca pudding, and an almond whipped cream topping), and I also tried some smores cupcakes using the cake recipe found here.  I tried baking them with some peppermint marshmallows that just ended up kind of exploding and creating a nice sugary crust on the top.  

Lastly, my once-in-a-zillion-years kind of feast, Christmas dinner.  I was pretty happy with the way things turned out, and I got to use the cast iron a lot so things were good.  There was -- duck breast, ribeye, grilled GA shrimp, garlic mashed potatoes, cast iron chicken thighs, brussels, and sesame tomato/avocado salad.  Oh, and chocolate berry pie. I used this pie crust (the same used for the apple pie), and for the filling did some frozen mixed berries and some dark chocolate chips.  It was alright.  I was inspired but the movie Waitress, but I decided that I like apple pie better.  A la mode. Mmmm. 

Now I'm thinking about dessert.  Sweet Hut run, anybody?