Kim Shook

Resurrecting this thread to show something I noticed when I cleaned my large cast iron skillet the other day. This is the cooking surface. It almost looks like something you could scrub off, but you can't. It's fairly smooth, too.

Began work on a dessert I'm doing for a dinner party this weekend. It is a green apple sorbet. I got the recipe from @Lisa2k at least 10 years ago. The last time that I made it, we had to get the giant whole fruit juicer out of the attic. This time, I just used the Vitamix. Granny Smith juice: Added lemon juice, sugar syrup, and a couple of glugs of this:

I believe that omelet spent some time in a bag.

It's a very common recipe in the American south. If you Google "sweet potatoes with..." the first thing that comes up is "bourbon". Or maybe that's just south of the Mason-Dixon Line 😄.

This could be me. I don't like any of the dark liquors. I've always felt that I don't really fully qualify as a Southern girl because I don't drink bourbon. I always thought I didn't like sweet potatoes until I became an adult and tasted someone's other than my family's. It turns out everyone in my family puts bourbon in their sweet potatoes. I love sweet potatoes - I just don't like bourbon! 😄

Except for the whole beer thing, I believe I have a German soul. Just freaking amazing.

Oh, dear! I'm so sorry and I sympathize completely. I hate all things dental. I'd honestly rather have another gastric bypass or hysterectomy than dental/periodontal surgery. Let Ronnie spoil you and eat what you can. Hugs! When I'm recovering from something and can't eat, I always make grandiose plans of what I plan to cook when I'm recovered. Maybe that will help.

How come you can't eat? ☹️

Dinner out at a favorite neighborhood joint the other night was chili dogs and club sandwiches. I can never finish a club sandwich, so I bring it home and re-purpose it into a salad or another sandwich. Today was sandwich. If you are offended for some bizarre reason by the combination of house roasted turkey and lovely house carved ham, please avoid looking😁:

Not one little bit. 😄

Dinner last night started with some lovely pears and cheese: We are getting gorgeous pears right now. I can’t buy more than two because they are so ripe. The cheese was just the tail end of some Spring Brook Farm Tarentaise that was rattling around the cheese drawer. Great combination. They were offering tastes of White Bean Chicken Chili at Costco the other day. I’ve never much cared for it, but this was very good. Served with leftover green beans & potatoes and sweet corn cake:

I've done something similar. It's a terrifying thing to do to an expensive cut of meat. As a matter of fact, I named the recipe "Scary Prime Rib" on my recipe webpage😄. The directions on my recipe say: Make sure that your stove is fairly clean. Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Turn on your fan and open all your windows. Put the prime rib into an uncovered roasting pan on a rack. Put it in the oven. Cook for 4 minutes per pound for rare, 5 minutes per pound for medium rare and 6 minutes per pound for medium. Then TURN OFF THE OVEN & DO NOT OPEN for 2 hours. My notes say, "It was perfect. Juicy, perfectly cooked and delicious!" No idea if it would work for leg of lamb. It would be worth a try, though.

I loved the article. It was too short, though. That's just the kind of thing I love to read - family, food, memories. Reminds me of things written by @racheld. I miss her words here at eG. Thank you for sharing yours!

I agree with you completely. I will never understand why parents do that. I have a friend who used to tell her kids that they wouldn't like anything she found distasteful - which was almost anything that wasn't meat and potatoes (she's worse than me). This was the person who put my bahn mi sandwiches in the microwave when I was out of the room and then chided me for bringing cold sandwiches to a party. We used to take the girls to ethnic restaurants whenever we had them and they were surprisingly open to trying new things.

I completely get it, but have you ever had ranch dressing? There is a definite 'tang'. And I would certainly never actually drink buttermilk <shiver>. But as an ingredient in baking and some salad dressings/remoulade, I don't think I really taste IT.

Why does buttermilk as an ingredient put you off?

I used these. The ingredients don't list anything sweet.

I didn't find pickled ramps. I used the cocktail onions and the greens of spring onions.

I just got this text from Jessica: "Mom, you need to make more of this dressing (Momofuku ranch). I snagged some out of the fridge this morning to go on my lunch salad. It is my new favorite thing." 😂 Another convert.

We've made one trip to England and fell in love. That trip was London, Cotswolds and a little south and west. Our next planned trip (which was cancelled due to my mother's ill health) was to be to points north - York, the Dales, Hadrian's wall, the Lake District - as much as we could fit in to 2 weeks. We still hope to make the trip and I am looking forward to your posts more than I already was. Any surroundings that you can sneak into the edges of your food pictures would be welcomed by me! And once you are comfortable, a food blog would make me a happy girl!

Well, I guess you can't have everything.

I don't know what it is about it, but it is oddly delicious.

This pizza discussion is reminding me to "never say never". I eat so many things now that I would have bet you I wouldn't eat on a dare. Some very elegant things and some extremely trashy offerings. I have tasted pineapple and ham on a pizza and didn't care for it at all - the combination of canned pineapple and tomato sauce wasn't pleasing to me. But I'm betting if someone made me a white pizza with fresh pineapple and thin sliced country ham, I'd like it just fine. @shain – is that dill in your tzatziki? The last time I made my tzatziki, I thought it needed a little zhushing up. My recipe has no ‘greenery’ other than cucumber. It is an old Martha Rose Shulman recipe that we’ve loved for years, but I found it a little flat last time. Dinner last night was mostly from my toys – 2 Instant Pot things and a sous vide. The sous vide was some huge pork chops that I had rubbed with Penzey’s Bavarian spice. Using the IP, I did pintos with a huge smoked ham hock and green beans & potatoes. The pintos I’d done before – they were fantastic: The green beans took a little longer than the recipe called for to make me happy, but I got there. I made the Momofuku ranch dressing and served it with some veggies. It is weirdly addictive. I don’t have the ramps (I put them on my wishlist and Jessica promises we will find some fresh next year and pickle them ourselves), so I made it with the cocktail onions and green onions. Definitely greater than the sum of its parts: Another side was this sweet corn cake: This was from a package I found at Kroger. It is a Chi-Chi’s product. Nice and moist with lots of corn flavor. Dinner plated: With sauce: I say “sauce”, but I have to confess that it was made with the fond from searing the chops, some cheap white wine, and a few spoonsful of jarred pork gravy. The chops were incredibly tender and moist: What sous vide does for regular old supermarket meat is amazing.

I did some huge pork chops that I rubbed with Penzey’s Bavarian spice (brown mustard, rosemary, garlic, thyme, bay leaf, and sage), put in a vacuum bag and froze last month. I did them at 144F for four hours. Pork chops out of the bag before searing rival hairless cats for ugliness: They were the right temperature, though: Plated: I had to apply some heat to the sides with a torch. The chops were incredibly tender and moist: What sous vide does for regular old supermarket meat is amazing.

@FauxPas - that is just perfect! I wish I had room for that somewhere. My IP lives under my side board in my living room along with Mr. Kim's collection of 2 liter sodas he finds on sale (he says I'll be glad he found them when the holidays come🙄) . Used the IP to make two things for dinner last night. I made pintos and ham hock: I've made this before and thought it needed another few minutes cooking. I was right. I did 55 minutes and they were perfect and creamy. I saved the liquid and will use it and the leftover beans to make soup. I also tried a new recipe for green beans and potatoes. Before cooking: The recipe recommended 5 minutes pressure cook and a quick release. Mine took twice as long. I'm sure that many folks would have been perfectly satisfied with them after 5 minutes, but I was raised on REAL country beans - the kind that have given up the fight. So I did another 5 minutes and they were perfect for me (oddly enough, the potatoes weren't overdone):