Solution: Hot Pot

After identifying the food items and taking a stab at some of the more straightforward clues, a couple things that start to emerge:

• Hinted by the title, the answers are a rhyming pair of words.
• Hinted by the alignment with the food items that are faded out except for the leftmost part, the answer phrases share their first letters with the corresponding food items.

Next, the graphics at the bottom indicate some sort of grouping into 3 categories, with an icon and a representative dish for each one, as well as an indication of how many items go in. From left to right, these are seafood (8), vegetables (14), and meat (8).

The flavor text indicates things need to be paired again, and we've already used the foods but not the clue answers, so let's take a look at those. If we look at the corresponding answers for the foods in each category, we'll see that:

• All the words in a category have the same number of letters (4, 7, 4).
• These are equal to the numbers of letters in the final blanks (4, 7, 4).
• There are twice as many words as letters-per-word in each category (8, 14, 8).

Putting this all together, we might guess that we can pair up the words again and extract a letter from each pair. But how? The words don't seem to have much in common…except for a single letter. For each category, for each position in that category's word length, there is exactly one pair of answer words that shares a letter in that position:

Authors' Notes

Brainstorming an idea for my first puzzle, I of course overconstrained myself immediately and spent the rest of my time trying to get out of the hole. Hope the rhymes were more fun than bad!

Oh also as a rather inconsequential easter egg, the squares falling into the pots also follow the word pattern – each square shares a rotation with exactly one other square in its pot.