Kim Shook

Welcome, @VTChef! I love seeing professional chefs come to eGullet. One more brain to pick! 😁

I store my bacon grease in Mason jars in the fridge. I never strain it. But I remember my grandmother having one of these on the stove at all times. It had a built in strainer. Am I doing something unhealthy by not straining the bits out of my bacon grease?

Fixed up some Rao’s spaghetti sauce and salad: Added onions, red wine, ground beef, garlic, Penzey’s Tuscan Sunset herb blend and piled it up with some Mozzarella and Parm. Wish I had some of @Shelby's homemade pasta to go with it. Which is actually a ridiculous thing to say because I have a pasta machine in my closet that I bought at least 8 years ago that has never been out of it's box and now is exactly the right time to get it out and play around with it. Sigh.

Would you maybe be interested in trading freezers? 😁😉

I gasped out loud at the picture! I'm so sorry that happened to you. Best, BEST wishes for a quick recovery!!

We should exchange pictures of our husbands. I suspect they are actually one person leading a double life.

Cornbread leftover from last night and IP eggs.

Is your dad related to @liuzhou?

When I read about the crappy things that some folks are doing during a time when we all should be doing what we can to help and protect each other, I wish for not only a “wow” emoji, but an “angry” one. 😠 @chromedome – I put that very meme on FB about 10 minutes ago. A friend sent it to me, saying her pastor put it on HER FB page today. 😃 @Shelby – I’d go with @kayb's idea for those bananas. I was going to suggest bananas Foster, but hers sounds better. @kayb - good luck with the store today. Like Shelby says, don’t breathe. And I hope the antibiotics do the job, at least until you can get in to the dentist.

Did a large rib eye tonight. Steak cooked to 120F: Seared in ghee in an iron skillet: Bite: Sorry for the crappy picture. I didn’t check it until after the steak was all gone. But even though it’s blurry, you can see the color. It was fantastic. Mr. Kim was generous and let me take the rib cap (my favorite). It was more like prime rib than a steak. Glorious!

@liamsaunt– while the meatballs and sauce look fantastic, the very idea of scallop boats has me dizzy! @Ann_T – I think that being able to get fresh halibut is a good enough reason to move to the Pacific NW. @scamhi – really love the look of your ribs – nice smoke ring and an actual BITE! Last night Jessica came over and made hot dogs. Served with slaw, tots, and salad: Dinner tonight was sous vide rib eye steak, baked potatoes, collards, and cornbread: This completely covered the business portion of a large dinner plate. Mr. Kim and I shared it. Cornbread: Dinner:

I have a MIL and a husband who are extremely literal. I've requested a T-shirt with the following text: NEVER take anything I say LITERALLY!. 😝 This morning: Raisin toast and IP eggs.

It looks gorgeous! And the fungal lumps are big enough that they are easy to avoid. 😄

Needed some serious comfort food the other day. Managed to secure the ingredients for a brisket in gravy including a brisket, dry onion soup mix, and no salt beef broth. I mashed up two recipes that I found and had some really good luck. After 70 minutes of pressure cooking and 15 of natural release, this is what I got: Fully shredded (I might try careful slicing next time – it was just a little too shredded): Incredibly tender and moist. I’m still shocked when the IP works like it is supposed to! I somehow don’t “believe” in it until it proves itself once again. I guess we’re past that pasta and red sauce incident. Plated with the lovely gravy, green beans, mashed potatoes, and some oddly good corn that Mr. Kim picked up at Publix: I also had gotten some of the soft Hawaiian rolls from FL and they mopped up that gravy perfectly. If you would like to try it, here's the recipe.

It looks like it is suspended in air.

I need to make this soon. Having done our freezer inventory, I know I have one whole chicken. I like any and all dumplings - the flat, noodle-like kind, the risen kind, even the whomp biscuit kind which is what my southern, raised on a farm in TN, from scratch daily biscuit baking grandmother confessed to me that she always did. 🥰 I made it for years before writing down a recipe, but this is what I finally came up with.

And that was just the purchased/other people stuff. Usually I have some of Mr. Kim's in there, too!

From what I saw on TV (can't remember the show), that is exactly how Cozy Corner starts theirs. Then it gets sliced thick, slathered in their incomparable sauce, griddled, and slathered again. Good Lord.

@Captain – I’m blaming you for this: Your steak picture was influencing me. 😁 As I said on the lunch thread, 3/20/2020 will be known by us as our Pandemic Anniversary. It was our 38th wedding anniversary. We had 3 sets of plans that got cancelled for one reason or another. So, we ended up taking a long, isolated, drive through Central and Tidewater Virginia. It was lovely, after all. I had left a packet of Argentinian shrimp thawing in the fridge, but on the way home we decided that, if we could procure the fixings, we were in the mood for some true comfort food: really tender, beefy pot roast-type beef with lashings of gravy! So, I looked up a couple of recipes for IP beef with gravy and we went into a Food Lion and grabbed a couple of things including a brisket, dry onion soup mix, and no salt beef broth. It turned out to be exactly what we wanted. Plated with the lovely gravy, green beans, mashed potatoes, and some oddly good corn that Mr. Kim picked up at Publix (he doesn’t pay much attention to the whole “in season” thing. If he sees it and wants it, he buys it.): I also had gotten some of the soft Hawaiian rolls from FL and they mopped up that gravy perfectly. My in laws ran out of TP on Saturday 🙄 and we were the only ones who had extra (everyone else said that they weren’t “hoarding”, so they didn’t have extra – since when is shopping at Costco hoarding?), so I put together some turkey noodle soup to take out to them using the last of the turkey: We needed to use the shrimp that I’d thawed on Friday. Served with a salad and some sourdough bread from Panera: Shrimp and noodles (I just cooked a big batch of noodles – some went in the turkey soup, some went under the shrimp, and some were going in the beef and gravy from Friday to make pot roast soup): Just cooked in ghee, garlic, and parsley. Lovely, plump, perfect shrimp. I will buy these again. Last night dinner was soup made out of the leftover brisket from Friday night: It was truly delicious. I’m so glad that I stumbled onto this. Served with green beans and dressing (it was in the fridge and needed eating): And the rest of the sourdough:

One of the most memorable meals of my life was the BBQ'd bologna at Cozy Corner in Memphis. When I have the luxury of planning the sandwich (instead of it just being a craving I have to address right away) I get it sliced really thick at the deli.

Y’all are posting some incredible lunches lately. I am especially drawn to the grilled sandwiches and the seafood. @blue_dolphin – no need to downplay egg salad and carrots. Various salads – egg, tuna, ham, etc. are a favorite with us and carrot and celery sticks are, too! Lunch a few days ago was trashy all the way – fried bologna and cheese with yellow mustard on white bread and frozen crinkle cuts: It was delicious. Friday will forever be known as our Pandemic Anniversary 😉. This was our 38th wedding anniversary. The original plans included England – the north this time: York, the Lake District, Durham. (Of course it turns out to be a VERY good thing we didn’t go ahead with those plans and tickets and such). But my mother freaked out at the idea of us going. So, we substituted 4 days in Baltimore. Mr. Kim’s work cancelled his leave except for our actual anniversary day. We decided to just spend the day together and have dinner at Lemaire at the Jefferson hotel, since we’d never been to the restaurant. It is considered Richmond’s finest and most elegant restaurant. They called Wednesday (2 days ago) to say they were closing for the duration. Sigh. But we ended up having a wonderful and pretty much isolated and safe anniversary anyway. We decided on a long drive and dinner at home whenever we got there. We ordered box lunches at Sally Bell’s. Sally Bell’s is a Richmond institution. A sandwich shop that has been open since 1924 and won the James Beard Foundation American Classic award in 2015. They may have added a few cupcake flavors over the years, but I know the menu is basically the same as when the shop was located behind my dorm in the late 1970’s. We ate our lunches in our car in a Williamsburg hospital parking lot. All the shopping centers and parks and historical sites were closed. Mr. Kim got the country ham roll, potato salad, and lemon filled cupcake: I got olive and cream cheese on white, macaroni salad, and a toasted almond cupcake: All the box lunches include a deviled egg and a pecan topped cheese wafer. We even did a reenactment: 😁 Lunch yesterday was lazy person’s egg salad: Spread Duke’s and mustard on both sides of the bread, put 2 IP eggs in the egg slicer, pile them up on the bread and add salt and pepper. Delectable.

Dug out some of the fruited bread I made for Xmas gifts out of the freezer on Saturday: French toast, bacon, sage sausage and fruit salad: With a little cinnamon sugar sprinkled on after soaking, this bread makes excellent French toast. Yesterday was scrambled eggs and sausage links: I was glad to see the last of these Kroger Simple Truth sausages. They are tough no matter how carefully I cook them. Along with some frozen croissant from Trader Joe’s: Today: Freezer bagel, a couple of slices of bacon I forgot I had, an egg cooked in a ring and some deli American cheese. I am set for the day!

We have 3 freezers - the bottom of our French door refrigerator in the house, an upright and a chest - both in the shed. We try to keep an inventory up to date, try being the operative word. I am pretty good about adding new items to the list, Mr. Kim less good and both of us are lousy at marking things off when we take things out of them. Since knowing what we have is especially important now, we updated the lists yesterday (ignore the date - I keep forgetting to change it when I update - and the silly names Mr. Kim gives to the outside freezers): I have lots of stuff I need to use!

That is so amazing that you mention these, Mitch. I was raised on these very sausages and haven't seen them in the stores for years. Just recently I looked for them online and found that they are sold on the other side of the river in a couple of stores. Folks here tend NOT to cross to the other side of the river, so I haven't made the trip yet. I found something that I thought was the same - Simple Choice frozen raw sausage links - but were not. At least I hope they weren't - I haven't eaten Jones in years!