Kim Shook

Those Costco ones were probably the same ones that I bought there earlier in the year. If you remember when I did the Toad in the Hole dish, those were the ones I used. No idea if they are any where NEAR authentic (I suspect they are all meat), but they were certainly tasty.

Welcome to eG! My husband is a smoker, too, so I have some familiarity with that, but I'm truly fascinated with the idea of hearing about Russian food!

@liamsaunt – all of your food is beautifully prepared, plated, and photographed. But the scallop rolls that you make just make me crave scallops. @weinoo – a lamb, rice, and Caesar dinner just sounds so perfect. I make many brown plates – Mr. Kim always notices and announces them. @scamhi – Happy Birthday. I think an assortment of King crab legs is the perfect celebratory meal! @Dejah – HI! So glad to see you. @Shelby – those loaves of bread! That BLT! Those fries! Wow. @RWood– do you possibly have a link that is NOT CI website recipe for those potato cakes? They look outstanding. If not, could you give us the actual name of the recipe? Thanks so much. @Katie Meadow- <<hugs>> this is a bitch of a year. Last week was my first birthday without my mom in the world. I was doing ok, but suddenly I’m feeling everything that has been missing from our lives in the past few months. Thanks so much for expressing what you did. @Ann_T– escargot!!! I do not eat mushrooms, but when that is the only way the escargot comes, I go ahead and order and eat the snails. Mr. Kim and Jessica are always ready to relieve me of the fungus! Along with various seafood, escargot are among my top five. Should I feel guilty that ALL of my favorite foods are living creatures? @robirdstx – that salad is right up my alley! Visibly crunchy lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, shredded cheese, and creamy dressing! Perfection. July 9th was my birthday. Mr. Kim brought dinner home from a place called Hobnob. Pimento cheese with housemade chips (I cut up the bread so Jessica could eat it – she had dental surgery the day before): The pimento cheese tasted good, but was a little dry. It needed more mayo. Crab hush puppies with remoulade: These were kind of a fail. The crabmeat was a very small part of the hush puppies and the puppies themselves weren’t really good hush puppies. Mr. Kim got the Fried Chicken Cobb Salad: Fried chicken breast, mixed greens, avocado, sweet corn, tomato, applewood smoked bacon, sliced egg, bleu cheese crumbles, buttermilk ranch dressing. These was very good. Made us want to try the family fried chicken sometime. Jessica and I got the crabcakes for two: With potato salad (too much dill) and slaw (too much celery seed). The crabcakes were perfect. Bite: That morning, my MIL brought over what is pretty much my favorite cake – chocolate with 7-minute frosting: It was delicious! I have a sketchy history with meatloaf. I couldn’t make them for years. Then, suddenly, I started having success. That lasted a few years. Then in 2019, I made one using a tried and true recipe and it was back to failure. The loaf basically spread all over the pan and fell apart. So, I tried this recipe with some trepidation. I baked it shaped into a loaf on a baking sheet as instructed (I don’t care for loafs that cook soaking in the grease that results) and it did spread some. But after a 15-minute rest it cut fine and tasted great. Going in the oven: Out of the oven: I don’t know if you can see how much it has spread. A lot of the stuff at the edges is that inedible (at least to me) beef goo that leaches out of a burger sometimes. I don’t know what it is, but it has the texture of pudding and feel icky. Slice after sitting for 15 minutes: Plate: Meatloaf with broccoli salad, mac and cheese, and extra sauce. Also corn:

I did eventually find some, but when I'm ready for more I'll get some of this. I've bookmarked it. Thank you so much.

@weinoo – that was an awfully nice looking egg sitting on top of the rice. Was it basted? @liamsaunt – the egg croissant sandwich made me commit the sin of envy! Just gorgeous. And the BLT on the soft white is also delightful looking. @Shelby– oh, MY. That lovely, lovely tomato sandwich. Confession time: sometimes when we have really good tomatoes I’ve been known to make 2 halves of a tomato sandwich – one with toast and one with soft bread. It’s so hard to decide between the two. Re: the dyed hair. I’ve never done an unconventional color. Unless you count the time in college that I was playing a Mexican lady. I am a glow-in-the dark white girl with reddish/light brown/blondish hair. I accidentally dyed my hair with permanent dye instead of washout and chose “midnight black”. 😳 Anyway, Jessica DID dye her hair blue in HS. She was an acolyte at church and when some of the more staid members of our congregation expressed disapproval to the priest he said, “I’ve got a teenager who shows up every week, excited to serve her church and her faith. I’m not saying a word to her and neither should you.” 🥰 Some recent breakfasts: Toast, some lovely peaches from Charlottesville VA area orchards and scrambled eggs. My birthday was the 9th and Mr. Kim went out early for bagels: Egg and bacon ET bagel. Yesterday: Good tomatoes on toast for breakfast brings back my childhood. Except back then it was Miracle Whip instead of Dukes. Momma never liked mayonnaise. And that GREEN RINGED egg looks awful, but it tasted good. Too much natural release in the IP. Today: A hot crusty roll filled with too much butter is another childhood favorite. This was from Wegman’s bakery, but Momma used to get the Pepperidge Farm ones in the bread aisle. They still make them, but now they are called Artisan French rolls and are frozen. Not the same to me.

I know that everyone knows about the wonderful tomato-peeling properties of the CSO, but have you tried peaches? I did the other day when I needed to prep about 8 for freezing before they went south. Worked perfectly. I carved a little "X" in the bottom of each peach, put them in the pan "X" up, and super steamed them at 400F. for a few minutes (I think it ended up being 7). What a joy not to have to deal with the pot of boiling water and pull the peaches out only to find that they haven't been in long enough.

Happy Belated Birthday, @kayb! The garden “gifts” have begun – zucchini from my SIL: 10 cups total. Another SIL brought us some Charlottesville VA peaches – prepared for freezing:

For my birthday, Mr. Kim got me a bread machine. He told me ages ago that he was going to, but I completely forgot: A KBS MBF-010 Bread machine. It seems to have a lot more functions than my old one and is intimidating me a little. The directions are obviously translated and are a little odd: For instance, I have NO clue what this all means: 😳😳😳 I thought it would be a good idea to make one of the recipes that come with the machine before setting out to experiment with my old recipes. Almost all of the recipes call for powdered milk and it took us 4 grocery stores to find some in stock. Apparently powdered milk is the new TP. I am planning to make a simple loaf this afternoon. I’ll update later.

Very quick question. I'm making @Darienne's Margarita Pie and the recipe calls for gold tequila. I only have silver. We are not big tequila drinkers, so would it be alright to use the silver? Thanks!

🤣🤣🤣As I used to say to my English stepdad when he offered me some of the sausages that his mum smuggled over to the US, "No, thank you. I prefer my toast on the side, not IN the sausage". 😉

Welcome to eGullet, Louis! If you were intrigued by Modernist Cuisine, you should find a lot here to interest you. We will also love to hear about your daily food and what you are learning.

I will keep an eye out at Big Lots, Aldi, Lidl, etc. for a Belgian waffle maker. I have tried the hashbrowns on my regular waffle maker. I did it back in 2016 and these were my thoughts: "Not sure I’m enthralled like everyone else seems to be. They got too dark no matter what I did. It doesn’t come out in a nice, one piece ‘waffle’ really – much looser than that. And in the end, you have a hard-to-clean waffle iron to wash instead of a simple-to-clean sauté pan." I only tried it once, though - YMMV.

This is the first time I've seen @Toliver's old post about the waffle iron tot thingy. I only have a regular waffle iron. Looks like I my need a Belgian waffle iron. They ought to make an iron that does both!

Oh, man, we really need a "Wow" button!

Welcome, @Ronald N. Tan! Lots of folks here who love Indian food, so you should be in good company.

I just wish that they would come out with one that disassembles, so that I could blend gooey things in it and get them out. I've given up using it for anything sticky and thick.

@liamsaunt – what an incredible fried meal! That is my favorite shore meal! I’ve only ever had whole belly clams twice – both times in a restaurant in Jacksonville FL. We went two times in the week we were there, and they were so good that they were the only thing I ordered both nights! And those onion rings look absolutely perfect. It’s hard to get anything but batter dipped rings anymore, but much prefer the crumb coated. Dinner last night included the wonderful gazpacho that Mr. Kim made from a lot of our produce stand haul: Rice flour/beer batter fried shrimp, beets (for Mr. Kim), naan, and cocktail sauce flavored with this stuff: Mr. Kim was able to order two bottles of this limited edition of hot sauce. It is perfect with seafood. Also tomatoes and corn:

The great thing about REAL Tres Leches is that it isn't overly sweet. The whipped cream on top was barely sweetened at all.

I hadn't thought about that. Maybe we can toss candies out of the second floor windows - like a stationary parade. 😟

@MokaPot - sorry! I do them every year and forgot that some folks might not have seen them yet. Just pickling cucumbers, onions, apple cider vinegar, LOTS of pepper, and sugar (I use Splenda as we are diabetics). The liquid is ALL vinegar at this point. They will sit in the refrigerator all summer - I'll be adding more cukes, onions, seasonings, and vinegar as needed. They do lose a lot of liquid as time goes by, so I have to keep topping up with vinegar. @heidih - yep! Those are the ones. I couldn't find that thread! Thank you!

Did a couple of things in the CSO today and yesterday with mixed results: Beets – There are multiple directions for beets. I tried 40 minutes at 400F super steam – still crunchy. Another 10 minutes – still crunchy. Tried 450F bake/steam for 15 minutes – finally done. I’m thinking that the fault was in the beets and not the CSO. I’m guessing that beets in July are somewhat elderly vegetables. They all had the greens cut off and my MIL says that indicates they are older. Sorry for the lousy picture! Between the blur and the glare I think I've triggered a migraine 😉 ! Skinning tomatoes – there are two different directions for skinning tomatoes in the CSO PDF – one says steam at 210F for 5+ minutes. I tried that and got up to 10 minutes with no looseness at all. The other says super steam at 400F for 9 minutes. I did this for 5 minutes and it was perfect. I have a suggestion, though. The directions that call for super steam are at the beginning of the vegetable section instead of down with the tomato directions. I just happened to catch sight of the word “tomato”. Could someone move this down to the other tomato directions?

Cucumbers started: (I'm not at all sure that this is where these belong. If not, I apologize!)

Our produce stand haul from this weekend: Mr. Kim has plans for gazpacho later today. The corn is from Florida, but was incredibly crunchy and fresh tasting. I always check the stem ends and they were very damp. This corn was shipped properly.

@BonVivant - I don't know whether to thank you or curse you for those fabulous bread pictures! 😁 Tried a new place for lunch on Sunday - Bocata Arepa Bar. Jessica had a carne asada arepa with cheese, and coleslaw: And a cheese Capacha: A corn cake stuffed with and topped with 2 kinds of cheese. Mr. Kim had the Pepito – a sub with steak, avocado, tomatoes, guasacaca cheese, something called Pink Sauce (ketchup and mayo), potato sticks and ham: It was a monster – that’s a very large dinner plate. I had a shredded beef empanada and a chicken and cheese arepa: We shared a very large order of fries: Sauces – hot sauce and garlic sauce and one single packet of ketchup 😂: It was fine – we had plenty of ketchup at home, but we had to laugh. For dessert the three of us shared a slice of tres leches: Everything was so fresh tasting and delicious. Even better than the place that Mr. Kim and I ate at on Saturday and it is just around the corner from us instead of 20 minutes away across the river. And an actual home made lunch from today: Aldi Pane Torano bread, toasted with Dukes and tomatoes.

No excuse for that. Such an easy thing - really good sausage (they don't even have to house make it) and decent all butter pastry (again, they could purchase it). Breakfast this morning: Fried egg on a buttered and toasted Hawaiian roll and a mandarin orange cup.