Kim Shook

Lunch yesterday was a piece of some fresh blackberry cake that I made:

Dinner last night was pretty much all leftovers and of the pick-up variety since the two of us got hungry at different times: Questionable slaw, pimento cheese on pumpernickel, and mac and cheese.

I am selfishly glad that they didn't shelve my favorite Crunchwrap Supreme.

@rotuts - that Dinty Moore reminds me of my mother and stepdad❤️. They always kept a supply of Dinty Moore onboard their sailboat for when the fish didn't bite! They both liked it enough that when they moved to Chicago from Annapolis (and didn't have a boat anymore) they took the Dinty Moore with them! I actually like canned hash - both corned beef and roast beef - quite a lot. Like @gfweb says, crust is KEY!

Just toast from bread made in my new bread machine: I'm very happy with this loaf. It tastes good, has a great texture and toasts beautifully. I seriously wonder how folks who make their own really good bread don't just sit around all day eating toast. Even with my ordinary efforts, I am eating WAY too much bread.

Yep. Strange, but true. They aren't as good as I could make. But they are surprisingly good and take 40 minutes. It is good quality chicken and the breading is not too thick. I remember buying frozen fried chicken in college in the late 1970's (probably Banquet). I was a typical poor student and when i had a craving, I couldn't just go to KFC. So, I bought boxes of the stuff and cooked one piece when the need hit. I remember it being kind of funky tasting. These are different - no funk. But they are definitely a guilty pleasure short cut. 😁

I used my new toastie maker for breakfast this morning: Ham, egg, and cheese. Done: You are supposed to brush/spray the appliance with oil, but I tried buttering the bread. I like that better – flavor/crunch/toastiness were all better than oiling. Inside: Not sure that I’ll be using this a lot in the years to come, but it’s fun right now and it was $14.

@heidih – I got the same feeling. The combination of cheese and pineapple just doesn’t sound right to me. There is a popular (here, at least) pineapple casserole that some folks add shredded cheese to. I don’t. But I’ve had it when I didn’t know that it was made with cheese and liked it just fine. So, like you, I’m going to hold judgement.😁 Last night – the same old salad: Mr. Kim wanted chicken parm, so I short-cutted a bit and used the Aldi Red Bag chicken (frozen prepared boneless fried chicken breasts). Sides were green beans and a new recipe for baked spaghetti: I’ve honestly never used a recipe for baked spaghetti before. I just tipped leftover pasta and sauce into a casserole dish, added some cheese on top, and baked until everything was hot and melty. That was always pretty good, but this time I followed (to some extent) a recipe. It called for layering the ingredients and for treating the pasta in an interesting way: you tossed the cooked pasta with Parm, melted butter, and an egg. I did make one change – I left out the cottage cheese. I don’t have any objection to it, I just didn’t notice it in the ingredients and neglected to put it on my shopping list. We really liked it a lot and the balance of ingredients was certainly better than my previous dump method. Plated:

Fresh blackberry cake from a recipe recommended on the British expat FB group I belong to (I am not a British expat, I just like the food and humor): Close up: Slice: Some custard would have been lovely, but I didn’t make it this time. This was so good – tender and moist and not overly sweet. The actual recipe calls for strawberries, but the original poster uses all kinds of fruit. She did a lovely pear and raspberry one that I’d like to try next. I cooked it in the CSO, which I'm not at all sure was a good idea. It collapsed a bit.

I love this. I remember my daughter (now 36) would come up with elaborate meals that she wanted to prepare. Mostly she just wanted to talk about them, but occasionally we'd have a kitchen-day and I'd try to gently steer her towards something actually doable and edible! Her reach still exceeds her grasp sometimes. 😁❤️ PS - I for one, would love to see some of YOUR part of the journal. I'm fascinated by that. I even go back and peruse my own - both handwritten and digital.

The hilarity continues. I asked at Amazon if the display light was supposed to go off or stay on WHILE THE APPLIANCE WAS MAKING BREAD. The response informed me that the bread machine had to be plugged in for the display light to come on. 😳😄

Oh, dear. That sounds like something James Lileks would have collected! LOL

Thank you! We are really staying safe. No one has been using the church kitchen since the beginning of all of this. And we set the bags of packed lunches and drinks down outside the doors and the volunteers pick them up. No contact for us. And we combine the shopping with our own shopping so that we limit the number of exposures.

@weinoo – beautiful salads and salmon!! I really wish I were putting that plate on my table tonight. @Shelby – I hope you are feeling better! When Jessica had her oral surgery, she ate the heck out of mac and cheese! @FauxPas – more salmon. I believe that some is in my near future! @Duvel – that pork sandwich is one of the best looking and sounding things I’ve seen in a very long time. And that chips, eggs, and sausage dinner is perfect! Saturday we basically ate all day between eating the extra bananas while making 100 lunches at our church for shelters, lunch at our favorite burger stand, and a shared desserts and cookies from a favorite bakery. Dinner was very late and just a pick-up meal. Mr. Kim warmed up some spaghetti and I had two sandwich halves – ham and pimento cheese: 😁

Saturday was making and delivering 100 lunches to the shelters again. We stopped at our favoirte hamburger stand for lunch afterwards. Mr. Kim had the burger and I had the bologna burger. We shared their fantastic fries: We picked up dessert at a favorite bakery, Paocakes Bake Shop. We shared a PB cooky: With a smashed Reeses Cup on top. I am not usually a big fan of most bakery cookies. This place makes some of the best cookies I’ve ever tasted. Jessica had their very good cheesecake: Mr. Kim had a Napoleon: And I got a Tres Leches: Not as soaked as the one that we had from the arepa place awhile back, but very good.

@Shelby? Would you? I would try.

LOL! I managed to pass a bag to my MIL today. She is one of those people who physically suffers at the idea of wasted food. You just hint that you might just toss it and she agrees to give it a home. 🤣

Every recipe I see for French onion soup calls for chicken stock. I have always used beef stock (or at least half beef stock) - sometimes homemade and sometimes from a carton. What am I missing in not using (all) chicken stock?

I do have a panini press and I love it. This was just a little cheap ($14?) gadget that I thought might be fun. I'll get back to you on that. 😉 Lunch today ( @Shelby, you'll appreciate this😁😞 Couldn't make up my mind on the bread, so I did both.

It drives me bonkers. The craziest ones are when they are very precise about the weight of an ingredient and then say "half an onion".

Made @Darienne’s Margarita Pie to take to a friend for her birthday. Well, sort of. I made the crust (GF so her wife could share) – pretzels, sugar, and butter: The pie: Except I forgot to add the booze. The phone rang as I was walking over to get the bottles and I didn’t think of it again until we were on the way to their house. She said it was delicious anyway, but I couldn’t believe I did that. 🙄😖

I made a loaf of what the directions call “Soft Bread” in my new bread machine: 7/16/2020 Bread machine slice toasted for breakfast: I am happy with how this loaf turned out, but there are a couple of issues so far with the machine/directions. For one thing, the display light doesn’t stay on for the full time that the machine is running. In order to find out how much time you have, you have to QUICKLY push the “start/stop/pause” button. If you push it for 2 seconds, it pauses. If you push it for 3 seconds, it stops. And you are screwed, I guess. It has an automatic fruit/nut dispenser, but I’m doubting that it is big enough for the way I would want to use it. At Xmas I make about a dozen loaves of fruited bread with about a cup of mixed candied fruit and nuts added to the dough. My dear, departed machine had a beep at the time that you were supposed to do the add-ins. I’ve read the directions multiple times and can’t see that this beep happens in my new machine. But, like Mr. Kim says, by and large a bread machine is a bread machine is a bread machine. I used my old directions to determine the temperatures of various ingredients and it turned out well. I guess I’ll use it to time add-ins, too. Really glad I kept those. The directions continue to be somewhat impenetrable. Reading them is an exercise in frustration. They make me feel stupid. I feel like I should be able to figure them out!

I could swear I’d posted some of this a day or so ago. I specifically remember typing a message to that his spaghetti and meat sauce lunch looked so good that Mr. Kim looked at it and announced that he was making his meat sauce and that happened for dinner today. (I have no idea why these lines are underlined and can't do manage to stop it). On Friday, my lunch was a leftover crab cake, cold from the fridge, slapped on a bun, and slathered with my Old Bay cocktail sauce: Delicious! Monday was lunch in the car from our favorite hot dog joint. Nice snappy, charred dog with kraut and mustard:(This one, too): Carolina dog with mustard, chili, and slaw: On a whim, I bought one of those electric toastie makers at Lidl. Did a recommended trial first run with just bread slices: Not too sure about this. It took twice as long as the recommended cook time to get them that toasty looking and they seemed awfully hard when I got them out. We’ll see. Yesterday we picked up lunch from a local place that has been getting national attention - ZZQ, and which we had never tried before: We got the pulled pork and the brisket and made sandwiches with them when we got home. The pulled pork and sauce: So good. Really tender and not the slightest bit mushy. The brisket packet: The brisket: It was, without a doubt, the best brisket that either of us has ever tasted. We brought all of it home and made this weird looking sandwich with the brisket: And this more normal looking one with the pork: The meal was one of those where you keep telling each other how good it is.

@kayb - I think that I missed wishing you a HAPPY BIRTHDAY! @RWood – thank you for the link for the potatoes. I will be making those. I would love to have them with @Duvel's roulade! @shain – the khachapuri looks insanely good. I know that I’ve had one somewhere, but can’t imagine where. @Norm Matthews – Happy Birthday! (We seem to have LOTS of July birthdays at eG) Leftover meatloaf means sandwiches. Toasted cheese bread, BBQ sauce, Cheddar, and Durkee onions: Along with yellow squash, broccoli salad, and the last of Mr. Kim’s gazpacho: @Duvelshowed a picture of some really good looking spaghetti and meat sauce the other day in the lunch thread, I think. I was swooning over it and Mr. Kim said he’d make some today: It was so good and exactly what I wanted. Salad and garlic bread made with cheese bread: And Jessica brought over some home made ice cream that she bought from someone she knows: On the left is peaches and cream and on the right is smoked bourbon and peaches. The peaches came from a friend who was driving up from Georgia. The flavors were divine, but there was a bit of iciness like there almost always is in the homemade stuff.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that you really do preheat on the bread setting. The direction manual says to go ahead and put the food in the oven while it preheats because the time is so minimal.