Kim Shook

Thanks so much, Norm. I have a 9-inch silicone springform pan with a glass bottom. I might try it in that.

@MaryIsobel – we are so lucky in our city to have the variety and the quality of restaurants and food stores that we do. In a metro area of just over 1million people we have almost every ethnic restaurant. We have Beard nominated chefs, chefs who have competed on various cooking shows, a lady butcher who won “Chopped” and nationally recognized bakers. It’s just a blessing. That Holy Falafel place looks wonderful and that food is my usual go-to. We are also lucky enough to have a wonderful assortment of Greek and middle eastern places here – from take out joints with a few rickety booths to fine dining. @rotuts – as soon as I saw that pork belly, I took out my phone and added that to my Trader Joe’s shopping list. Fingers crossed mine is stocking it. @Dejah – I assume the pictures that you posted were of YOUR egg rolls and not the nasty ones? I wish I could get the wrappers you’ve used, but I’m betting that would be impossible. I love how thin and bubbly they are. @kayb and @Tropicalsenior – re: goopy lasagna. My lasagna is always overly juicy, too. And I think I’ve figured out why. I went to a pasta cooking class last weekend and one of the things that we made was a lasagna. The layers were: pasta sheets, a thick ricotta/parm/egg sauce, shredded mozzarella, and a very thick meaty Bolognese. My Bolognese is much saucier. If yours is also, I’m guessing that this is what makes ours sloppier than some others, even after it sits for a bit. I usually make extra sauce and serve it on the side at the table when I have lasagna and I think what I’ll do is continue to do that, but cook down some of it to actually go into the lasagna itself. @Norm Matthews – I saw that cake and went right to your blog for the recipe. I can’t wait to make it! Is it really just the height of a 9-inch cake pan? It looks higher than that. @gfweb – your pork schnitzel meal is gorgeous and one of my favorites. And I just discovered that I can have pretty much all the red cabbage I want! Before Ash Wednesday (since we knew we were giving up eating in restaurants for Lent) we went to a Chinese place that Jessica and I had been to recently. Mr. Kim hadn’t been there in years, so he ordered his usual “test meal” for his first visit to a Chinese restaurant – hot & sour soup and Moo shu pork. It passed with flying colors. His moo shu: Jessica had orange beef: I had beef chow fun, which is hard to find around here: It was great – crisp vegetables, tender beef, and meltingly tender noodles. SO much better than my attempts. I think I try to add too many vegetables. This was just onions, mung bean sprouts and some leafy green stuff. For dinner Sunday night, I had the other half of my cheesesteak leftover from lunch and some Progresso vegetable soup: Last night Mr. Kim picked up a pizza from Costco for dinner: And I made a salad: We debated whether this went against our Lenten sacrifice and decided that it didn’t. He went intending to buy an uncooked, refrigerated pizza for us to top and bake and they don’t sell them anymore. This was still very inexpensive, so he felt like it was still in keeping.

@Pete Fred – that is exactly the kind of Croque Monsieur that I love in restaurants and would love to make myself. Would you share your recipe/method, please! Mr. Kim gave me a pasta making class at the cooking school attached to Publix. It was a lot of fun and gave me some confidence that I might possibly be able to make a stab at trying to make it again. Some of you may remember my abysmal attempt at pasta making back in April of 2020. Their recipe for pasta was very different from the one I tried to make back then – it was so easy to put through the pasta machine. The second pasta he made was just semolina and water and he said that it works best extruded or rolled and pressed which is what we did with it – we made cavatelli: Which was paired with an arrabbiata sauce: This was very good, though a little too spicy for me. Because this was only a 3-hour class, the instructor made the sauces ahead of time, but he took us through the process verbally and gave us all the recipes. With the regular pasta (which we all got to work on making – I was glad to get a “feel” of properly made pasta) we made lasagna, pappardelle, and agnolotti. The lasagna: This was delicious, but a tad dry to my taste, but I always serve lasagna with a side of marinara. It was made with a good, meaty and creamy Bolognese. Its secret ingredient was chicken liver – a trick that @David Ross ❤️ taught me many years ago. No béchamel -instead an eggy ricotta-Parm mixture. The agnolotti was filled with what was basically creamy mushroom duxelles: It was sauced with a creamy mushroom Marsala cream sauce: The sauce was incredible, and I even tasted the agnolotti. I don’t like mushrooms at all, but even I could tell it was good. And, in fact, most of the other students said it was their favorite of the entire meal. My favorite was the pappardelle and a creamy leek and pancetta sauce: Such a perfect combination of creamy and salty and sweet. So as not to waste anything we took the leftover pappardelle, the Bolognese we didn’t use in the lasagna and the cream and made a VERY creamy Bolognese sauce to go over the pasta: My messy and delicious plate: Mr. Kim’s lunch one day that he worked from home: The sausages are these that I picked up at the European market I discovered recently: They are Polish in origin but these are produced in Illinois. For the 4th or 5th year in a row we’ve given up restaurant going for Lent – Mr. Kim estimates what we would have spent and we give a donation of that amount to our local food pantry. Sundays are considered “little Easters” and you can indulge in what you’ve given up (you should have been around here the year I gave up cussing). So, right after church, we hied ourselves to our favorite deli for lunch. It was damp and cold, so soup was in order: Their matzoh balls are fantastic – about the size of a tennis ball, but light and fluffy all the way through. And they taste great. Mr. Kim had the pastrami, corned beef, and slaw with Russian dressing on rye: I had the cheesesteak, which I’d never tried here before: It was good, but not as good as their deli sandwiches 😄. Yesterday: A small ET bagel, a small apple and a simply enormous radish.

@rotuts – those B&M baked beans gave me the stares. They are something that I’m having to avoid due to my potassium issues and I miss them so much. I am not a big vegetable lover and have come to realize how much I used canned beans and raw vegetables (carrots, tomatoes) as my daily go-to vegetables in the past. @Ann_T – my best friend was downsizing from a big family home outside of Boston to a smaller beach house on Cape Cod and she gifted me two Royal Worcester egg coddlers. Your eggs look perfect to me – jammy yolk and cooked whites. How do you cook yours? And that leftover Yorkie and roast and gravy dish???? OMG – that is exactly what I want to eat most days. Incredible. A couple of recent meals: The sausages were leftovers from the Shrove Tuesday pancake supper at church. they were so good – the brand is Swaggerty’s and I’ll be buying those on my next Sam’s trip. For Xmas we received 12 days of jam made by a local company, “Daym Jam”: Every one that we’ve tasted has been very good and some are really unusual flavors. Nice warm spices in this one. On a muffin for breakfast: Along with some surprisingly good link sausage that we took a chance on from Lidl. Pumpernickel bagel with smoked salmon cream cheese and more of those Lidl sausage links. Yesterday my best friend texted me before I had breakfast to brainstorm about some Virginia nibbles to serve her book club when they meet at her house. I got so hungry with everything we discussed that I came downstairs and grabbed the quickest thing I could find: It wasn’t quite as satisfying as pimento cheese ham biscuits, but it was filling.😄

@Katie Meadow – thanks for the post on the Snacking Cakes book. I’ve placed a hold on it at my library! For many years one of Mr. Kim’s staff has requested Tin Roof Brownies for his birthday “cake”. They are supposed to be a layered bar of brownie (I use the Ghirardelli mix because I’ve never made a better brownie from scratch), marshmallow crème, salted peanuts, and chocolate. He always requests no peanuts (no allergy, he just prefers them without). I can’t fathom eating these without the salted peanuts – much too sweet for even me – but that’s what he likes. When I make these for us, I include the layer of peanuts and use dark chocolate.

Could be. I mean if a real Louisianian (??) is showing culinary restraint, there must be a good reason. 😄

Poster on the wall of our favorite deli: My favorite:

This cannot be said enough. Jessica went to a dietician/nutritionist recently. She was asked to prepare a list of likes/dislikes. The woman never even so much as glanced at it and rattled off the “eat lots of fruits and vegetables” and “exercise more”. Good, if elementary, advice, but she was supposed to tailor her advice to Jessica. I think in the US the quality of the food at hospitals probably depends on the surrounding area or the hospital system. At the two large groups that operate in the Richmond VA area (Bon Secours and HCA), the food is not great, but it’s perfectly fine. You order your meals and snacks from something similar to this every day. One of the locations has a weekly fried chicken day and it is so good that people who live in the neighborhood place orders for pick up (this particular campus specializes in cardiac rehab 🤪 – I know, what can I say? It’s the south.). @Anna N and @Maison Rustique – I’m so sorry that y’all have been ill and so glad you are home now.

I don't think that "authentic" NOLA recipes usually use cheese. We had ours at Galatoire's and there was no cheese. A couple of years later we had our anniversary dinner at a lovely restaurant in Norfolk VA and were told they were going to make us "the best oysters Rockefeller we'd ever had". They were fine, but not the best and one of the reasons was the overabundance of Parm. The cheese really overwhelmed the flavor of the oysters and the spinach.

Many people, including my in laws say "almondeene". I grit my teeth when I hear that. I know WHY they do it - it seems logical, but it's not right.

@OlyveOyl – too bad those pancakes were so much trouble! They are gorgeous and look delicious. @Shelby – love muffulettas! Perfect Fat Tuesday meal! Well, we had a HORDE of people at church for the pancake supper. I was flipping pancakes from 5:00 until almost 7:00. I managed to snag a sausage patty and a pancake out of the holding pans and eat them standing up between flips! I discovered a new favorite sausage. Swaggerty's brand from Sam’s is what they bought for us to use. They were excellent and at $14.48 for 42 patties, very affordable.

One of my favorite Yiddish words is fakakta. I have made plenty of fakakta meals in my life! LOL

I remember hearing somewhere that that in Italian you pronounce all the vowels. Not sure if that's strictly true, but it would help in trying to pronounce "mascarpone".

i don't remember anyone but this person saying it that way. I went to a pasta making class yesterday (it was a great class and you'll all be glad to hear that I'm thinking of trying again after my spell of pouting after my last try) and everyone, including the two instructors was says maR-sca-pone. 🙄🤐

Pee Cans are what long haul truckers use. I don't want none of that in my pie.

I'm sure that others will chime in, but here are some general directions for my version. I do not like a wet egg salad, so if you want a less dry one, someone else's will suit you better. The "recipe" doesn't call for any relish or chopped sweet pickles, but I usually add them - well drained, of course. Hope you like it! I found a local source for leberkasa, which @Duvel has had me craving. It was breakfast for the last two days. Yesterday: with eggs and German bread. This morning was redneck meets Deutschland. Fried in butter: and slapped between two pieces of toast with Gulden's brown mustard: just like thick sliced bologna! And, uncharacteristically, Mr. Kim loved it!

The Shooks are flipping pancakes at church for our annual Shrove Tuesday pancake supper. Mr. Shook and I haven't ever cooked for it before, but Jessica has. I'm hoping we also get to eat since pancakes are a favorite with me.

The "L" in salmon bugs me, too. As does a friend's pronunciation of "almond" - she says the "al" as in the man's name "Al' and then "mond".

Thank you! Do you know if there is some way to search by criteria? There are thousands on that list and I'm seeing only a few that mention being spicy, and nothing that specifically says NOT spicy. I'm thinking that it might be a good site to check recommendations, but hard to use the way I need to.

Actually, that's the issue. He's not a bologna fan. But he loves pate! 😄

I'd love some advice. We have some good Asian markets in my area - whole aisles of flavored noodle packages. I'd love to branch out to something better tasting than the Soy flavored Top Ramen that I've been eating for years. And, honestly, I like it just fine. But, yes, it's a little too salty and a little plain. I would like to try something tastier, but flavor doesn't equal spicy to me. I detest any mushroomy flavors, curry and seaweed. But I love chicken, beef, pork, seafood, etc. So, if you can think of somethingh that would work for me, I'd love to hear about it! Thank you!

Other than the pimento, they look great. Sorry, I grew up going to the Eastern Shore of Delmarva and I'm a purist.

My plan is to fry it up with eggs for breakfast. I've got some good German bread in the freezer, so if I can dig that out, I'll add that to the menu.

Crap. I’m ready to un-alive myself (as they say on the Instagram 😄). I am SO incredibly far behind on this thread due to health and other issues and in the last couple of days, I got within FIVE PAGES of being all caught up. I took a break last night to cook dinner and have a nice evening with my Valentine and woke up this morning to find that my *&**&& computer closed down WORD on me. It auto-saved my notes, but not up to the point I quit. Oddly, it saved them only up to day before yesterday. Grrrrr. Being so far behind and having such a LONG recitation of meals, I won’t comment on much, but please know I’ve loved perusing all of y’all’s wonderful meals. @Shelby – I will have to look for that boudin brand at Walmart – less spicy sounds really good to me. And brava on those roast potatoes. They look absolutely perfect! @Raamo – sorry to hear about that second infection just as you’re exiting COVID! Hope you are now completely better. @RWood – those baby blooming onions! Wow. I love cippolini onions and those look amazing. @Dejah – your SIL sounds like me some years ago – I only wanted the crispy stuff. Now I love it all – rice noodle crepes are a favorite. Going WAY back – January 27th was Jessica’s Birthday. We were supposed to have a big shrimp themed dinner that night with her closest cousin and then go up to Washington for a food and museum weekend. I ended up not being able to walk due to cartilage problems in one knee and I also was starting a terrible head cold or upper respiratory something. They wouldn’t go without me, so we are postponing the dinner and the trip until I’m better. We still needed a somewhat celebratory dinner and Jessica chose pho at a new favorite place. Pork wontons: Shrimp spring rolls: Banh Khot: My seafood fried rice: Jessica’s seafood pho: Mr. Kim’s pho tai chin (steak and brisket): I was still feeling awful at the end of January, but I was trying to put something decent on the table. I pulled some stuff out that I’d stocked in the freezer to try out. It was a mixed bag. Lidl orange chicken: The chicken was ok, but the orange sauce was tasteless. Also from Lidl, fried rice: This was actually pretty good and very easy to make – just tossed in a sauté pan frozen and cooked until hot. I added some soy and white pepper and some leftover protein wouldn’t have gone amiss. I will buy more of this to have on hand. Bibigo frozen mandu: Trader Joe’s green onion pancakes and some shrimp spring rolls that Mr. Kim picked up on his way home: Plate: A few nights later was breakfast for dinner: Buckwheat pancakes, mandarin oranges, mini quiche (frozen), and sage sausage. Jessica made dinner a couple of nights. This one was soup: Corn chowder w/ paprika oil, garlic toast, and crudité. The soup was wonderful. One of my efforts: Salad, grilled cheese, and leftover rice mix. Another one of Jessica’s meals. She made the entire thing and did a great job. Hoisin glazed pork loin: This was amazingly tender. She actually made this last night, but it ended up being so late that we decided to put this dinner off until tonight. This was cooked to 140F last night and reheated at 250F for about 45 minutes until it reached 120F. This is a Cook’s Illustrated method that I found for reheating whole roasts and it worked amazingly well. She also served Blistered Soy Miso Sugar Snaps: They look a little floppy in the picture but were actually nicely crisp and a bit charred. Brussel sprout and broccoli slaw: Slaw is a bit of a misnomer – this was more of a stir fry with a soy-based sauce. Honey Garlic potatoes: These are a work-in-progress. She got the recipe from some youtuber she follows. They are supposed to be crisp with a sticky glaze, but they were just swimming in liquid, as you can see. They tasted very good, though so she’s going to make some adjustments and try again. Napa salad topped with toasted almonds and ramen noodles and dressed with a garlic vinaigrette: Everything was very, very good. The meal was a little soy heavy, though. Almost every dish had the same flavor elements of soy, garlic, honey. And, of course, you ended up with a bit of a salt overload. But the bottom line is that each dish was pretty much successful. A few nights ago (I’m definitely much better): Honey-mustard chicken, rice, and miso sugar snaps. With a pita: The chicken was really good cut up and stuffed into the pita! On Sunday dinner was Super Bowl goodies. Sweet Piggies: Little pigs in a blanket cooked in a brown sugar and honey butter sauce. Jessica’s pork and shrimp egg rolls: She did an amazing job – especially considering these were her first try at them. She used the leftover Brussels sprout and broccoli “slaw” from the other night. Crudité and green onion dip: A very wet, but very tasty Buffalo chicken dip: Jessica’s Crab Rangoon dip/casserole with egg roll wrapper chips: Plate: There were also slow cooker meatballs which I forgot until we were too full to eat any! @racheld says that with any major meal there is always one “forgotten thing”. This time it was the meatballs. Valentine’s dinner was SV filet mignon w/ a pan sauce and béarnaise, chili-glazed shrimp(made with sweet chili sauce), roasted cauliflower, baked potatoes, crusty bread, and salad. There was also a purchased crème brûlée cheesecake, but we were too full to even think about that. Steaks were SV at 130.5 for 2 hours. Out of the water bath: Seared: Perfect doneness for us. Plate: Salad and bread: I discovered a new (to me) market and went yesterday to shop for Mr. Kim’s Valentine’s day gifts. It’s called Europa Market & Deli and it stocks lots of German and eastern European goods. Fully stocked deli, flown-in NY bagels and delicious sounding sandwiches and soups. They also had leberkase which @Duvel has me obsessed with. For Mr. Kim, I got D’Amour salami (heart shaped!!), cocktail pork sticks, cook cheese (from what I could discover it’s just a cheese sauce that you can dip things in), eucalyptus candy, and some ginger-strawberry tea: The leberkase is most likely just for me – unless I can convince Mr. Kim its pate 😄.

This morning: Pumpernickel bagel with smoked salmon cream cheese.