Kim Shook

I’d love the opportunity to taste all of the gorgeous goodies that you all have been posting. I’ve only got a couple and they are not as delectable as all of these! For what has turned into an annual event, Jessica and I spent the Saturday morning before Easter at church dipping strawberries, marshmallows, and pretzels in chocolate for the champagne reception after the Easter Vigil. Marshmallows and pretzels: The stuff in the center is edible (but not tasty) Easter grass. Pretzels: The bunnies are more edible decorations. They tasted for all the world like banana flavored communion wafers 😄. Platters of strawberries: Jessica and I both made desserts for Easter. Her pineapple icebox pie: My roasted strawberry cheesecake: Both of the desserts were served with dollops of Cool Whip. The cheesecake was also sprinkled with pulverized freeze dried strawberries. I made a blueberry breakfast cake for a meeting of the Episcopal Church Women at church one Saturday morning: It was very popular, as always. I was only able to save Mr. Kim and Jessica one piece to share:

@C. sapidus – Thank you! And, no, we didn’t get the lobster roll, but we almost stopped there. We ended up at the ToDo instead, which was great but I love a lobster roll! I’ve had a hard time getting caught up lately and I think I’ll just cut and paste from my breakfast post today to explain: “UPDATE: Well, I had this all ready to post back on 4/29, but I ended up in the hospital that night through yesterday. Sigh. I’m home and doing better now, but I’d better post quickly before something else happens! Once again, I’m having to say sorry that I’ve been absent for so long. I’ve had more health issues. I seem to just be starting to get past my second bout of pneumonia since January and the COPD is still kicking my butt. All three of us have had upper respiratory stuff for the past week or so, but only Jessica and I advanced to pneumonia. Mr. Kim was lucky enough to avoid that. Which meant, of course, that he ended up taking care of us! Poor fellow. Anyway, I haven’t been doing a lot of cooking in the past couple of weeks. If I dated my meals, you’d see that they go back to the beginning of April.” Just a couple of lunches (I’ll put the hospital stuff in that thread). We drove to Cincinnati/Indiana to see the eclipse and brought back our favorite fast food leftovers and some local specialties. One lunch was White Castle and Grippos potato chips: I did a turkey breast one night and had the leftovers for lunch the next day. Split whomp Crescent rolls: Turkey: Dressing: GRAVY!!!! Post church lunch at our favorite local deli: The club was a bit disappointing. Very little bacon and no ham. I guess I haven’t had a club there in a long time because I would have sworn that their club was turkey AND ham.

This is most definitely me. I’m fairly open to “different” things later in the day (within reason), but for breakfast, I want my toast, eggs, and meat (mainly pork) and sometimes something sweet – pancakes, cinnamon rolls, etc. UPDATE: Well, I had this all ready to post back on 4/29, but I ended up in the hospital that night through yesterday. Sigh. I’m home and doing better now, but I’d better post quickly before something else happens 😉! Once again, I’m having to say sorry that I’ve been absent for so long. I’ve had more health issues. I seem to just be starting to get past my second bout of pneumonia since January and the COPD is still kicking my butt. All three of us have had upper respiratory stuff for the past week or so, but only Jessica and I advanced to pneumonia. Mr. Kim was lucky enough to avoid that. Which meant, of course, that he ended up taking care of us! Poor fellow. Anyway, I haven’t been doing a lot of cooking in the past couple of weeks. If I dated my meals, you’d see that they go back to the beginning of April. A few assorted breakfasts – they are a combination of Mr. Kim (bless him) and me when I felt up to it: Eggs and leftover pancakes and ham. Easter eggs, ham, and toast. The eggs were cooked together. One has NO green and the other does 🙄. Toast, scrambled eggs w/ cheese, and the last of the Easter ham. I ended up buying another small ham. We had a LOT of @Tropicalsenior’s fabulous mustard sauce left! Eggs, ham, toast, and Watergate salad. Grilled bacon, egg, and cheese. Grilled ham, egg, and cheese: Ham, egg, and cheese on a croissant. with tots: Campari tomatoes on toast, sliced bananas with raw honey, and fried ham. ET bagel with whipped cream cheese. I love whipped cream cheese, but I’m usually too cheap to buy it 😁. Lidl croissant dug out of the freezer, split and toasted, sage sausage, fried eggs, and a cut up pear.

Just checking in and saw your travels and travails! I'm so sorry that you all had to go through all of that while on the road and so glad that your darling is on the mend. Remember to take care of yourself as you take care of him. Glad to see you got home safe and sound. Hugs from me.

You kindly directed me to the recipe a few years ago and it was a huge success when I served it. SO good! Thanks for the reminder.

Jessica and I have had these at H-Mart in Northern VA. We loved them. They are certainly over the top, but in a fun, quirky way. Koreans have a knack for taking foods, trends, etc. from other cultures and making them even more inviting.

It's hard for me to be objective when he's such a known asshead.

It just occurred to me that the thing I was thinking of using them on is probably a bad idea. I was thinking that they would be great on my KA mixer. It is SO heavy and it sits far back in the only corner of my counter top. That is really the only place for it and it's a pain to pull out to use. But if it has the sliders on it, I'm betting that it would slide right off the counter when I'm mixing something heavy. It already shimmies a bit. LOL. I think I'd better stick to manhandling it. Thank you!

We went for a short (1 overnight) trip to the Northern Neck (a region in Virginia off the east coast) to celebrate our 42nd wedding anniversary. Stopped in Tappahannock for lunch at the To Do Café. I had the “pick two” with oysters and shrimp: Served with hush puppies, butter beans and excellent onion rings: Mr. Kim had the catfish, hush puppies, and housemade potato chips: Everything was great – we just happened upon it online and picked it because it was close to the museum we went to, and we liked the menu! Mr. Kim was out of town judging a BBQ competition, so I was on my own for Sunday brunch. I gave a nearby, but never yet visited Chinese restaurant a try. I’d heard that they had a Sunday buffet and I love buffets, but Mr. Kim doesn’t so it seemed perfect timing. Well, they don’t have a buffet, but I went ahead and had lunch with mixed results. Spring roll and hot and sour soup: The spring roll was fine – nothing special and the soup was incredibly peppery. Even Mr. Kim thought so when he ate the leftovers. The Mongolian beef: The menu said that this was flank steak fried with spring onions and bamboo shoots. It was easily half assorted mushrooms and lotus root. Really vegetable heavy, but the flavor was good – not overly spicy. The side dish of fried rice was a nice surprise: Nowadays when they ask if you want white or fried rice with your meal, I feel like you’re not really getting fried rice when you choose that option. Even at good places, it always just tastes like unseasoned plain brown rice. This was definitely fried in a wok with seasoning and some vegetables. I don’t imagine I’ll ever go back there with Yen Ching (“our place”) around the corner, but I’m glad I tried it after almost 30 years of living within 2 miles of it! Another lunch was leftovers from a dinner out the night before: Half a Sailor and some hard to find Wise salt and vinegar chips – the best! A Sailor is a Richmond VA sandwich tradition. Knockwurst, pastrami, and Swiss on grilled rye bread. It’s probably available all over the place, but if you Google “Sailor sandwich”, the references are all Richmond. I’m trying really hard to get through a bunch of OLD stuff in the freezer and pantry. So weird meals that other people purchased but aren’t eating. These taquitos were yesterday’s lunch, I guess: They were crunchy 🙄😑.

@NadyaDuke – I am extremely judgey about hashbrowns and those Hawaiian ones look amazing. March 20th was our 42nd wedding anniversary. We took a little one night trip out to what’s called the Northern Neck of VA. It’s a lovely little area between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers on the Chesapeake Bay. Tiny, charming riverside towns and villages. Interesting stores, antiquing, and surprisingly good food. We had breakfast on our anniversary at the Kilmarnock Inn where we were staying. These lovely, tender, still-warm little scones were an amuse: I got the eggs Benedict: Probably my all-time favorite breakfast dish. If it is on the menu, I’m almost always going to order it. This was really good. The ham was top quality, the hollandaise the perfect texture and the egg was cooked exactly right: They put it on a biscuit instead of an English muffin, which would have been fine, but the biscuit was a bit tough – like it had spent too long in a steam drawer. Mr. Kim got the scrambled eggs with spinach, bacon, onions, and Swiss cheese: Both breakfasts came with their country style potatoes, which we loved. Went to a great little bakery called Out of the Oven bakery in White Stone and got some goodies, including this pumpernickel loaf: A few meals have featured this including a couple of breakfasts. For this one, I toasted some slices and served it with what was intended to be a cheese omelet: It was a mess, but tasted good. This morning was an orange blossom muffin that I got at Old Farm Truck Market in White Stone last week. It got buried in the breadbasket and I forgot about it. I figured it was stale when I unearthed it this morning, but when I heated it on bake/steam in the CSO, it was fine. Nice crumb and beautifully scented with orange: A little while later – 2nd breakfast: Heavily buttered toast, baked beans, scrambled eggs.

Lunch the other day was a hot chicken sandwich with gravy, dressing, mashed potatoes, and salad greens with Dorothy Lynch dressing (thanks @Shelby!): Without: And WITH 😍: Yesterday being Sunday is considered “little Easter” and we get to eat out (we’ve given up restaurant eating for Lent and will be donating the $$ we save to the food pantry and an Iranian family our church is sponsoring)! We went to a Greek place we hadn’t been to in a long time. We ordered the small mixed grill and shared it. For $24 we got fries: Greek salad: Choban salad, pita, tzatziki, stewed green beans, beefteki, chicken souvlaki, and lamb/beef gyro: Everything was delicious and probably enough food for 4 people.

@Ann_T – I’m still catching up. I hope Moe’s dental surgery went well and that he’s eating more like he likes now. A couple of recent meals: Toasted Lidl baguette and sage sausage. And another… Toasted Lidl baguette, scrambled eggs with catsup, and Jones link sausages. I love these sausage links so much and they are SO hard to find. Everyone has the already cooked ones, but almost no one stocks the raw, frozen ones and the ones that do run out so fast. Today – late breakfast: French toast from the freezer, scrambled eggs with cheese, Benton’s country ham, and a tiny mandarin orange.

@weinoo - I just put a hold on Jubilee at the library. Abebooks.com has a couple copies for $12 free shipping. If I like it, I'll hope they still have them! Thanks for posting that. So, do these count? 😄😄😄 Jessica picked these up for me during one of her thrifting jaunts. The first one is from 1966, the second from 2007, and the third from 1987. I've been watching a fun YouTube channel lately called Cooking the Books. She collects and cooks recipes from cookbooks and pamphlets from mostly the 1940s-1970s. She's in her early 40s, so it's all "retro-new" to her, but to me it represents some memories - of eating these foods from my grandmothers and mother and from my own interest in vintage cookbooks. I'd kind of gone away from that in the past couple of years, but I've gotten more interested again watching this channel. I can't help but think of @David Ross and how much he would have enjoyed her.

That lime and Ritz cracker pie is fantastic. Perfect for hot weather and I've never had anyone not like it. I meant to try other versions - lemon, orange, grapefruit - but I've never gotten around to it. Maybe this summer!

On Sunday, we had a disappointing brunch after church at a place we hadn’t ever tried before. It wasn’t terrible, just really ordinary. My hot pastrami and Swiss on marble rye and fries: Mr. Kim’s Rueben and potato salad: I asked when we ordered if the sandwiches were grilled and was told they were. Pretty sure that the fillings were heated up and then put on toasted bread. My pastrami tasted good, though it was pretty dry and sliced paper thin (personal preference – I like a thicker slice). Mr. Kim’s sandwich was salty almost to the point of being inedible. The meat was stringy and very dry. My fries were fine, for battered fries, but the potato salad was tasteless. One other thing that had nothing to do with the food, but was odd and irritating was that the menu indicated that all sandwiches came with a side, potato chips, and a pickle. The list of sides included, among other things, both fries and potato salad. But we were charged an upcharge for the fries, but not for the potato salad. With our favorite area deli a couple of miles away from us, I can’t imagine that we’d ever go back there. Today: Sausage, egg, and cheese on a toasted baguette and some store bought mandarin orange congealed salad.