Kim Shook

@Shelby – your broccoli beef looks gorgeous! Would you share the recipe (I don’t have an IP, though)? @liamsaunt – I am NOT allergic to seafood and I’d devour and adore every single thing on that pupu platter (one of my MANY guilty pleasures).

I admit to a secret love for those patties. I buy the mild ones when I can find them. 7-11 often has them already warmed up (blush-blush). Even the mild ones are a little spicy for me - I have to also buy an apple or banana and alternate bites!

A few nights ago dinner was Brunswick stew from the freezer: Brunswick stew never photographs well! With asparagus and Dorie’s brioche buns: Valentine’s dinner. Started with spiced almonds, petit toasts, crab spread and Gorgonzola Dolce – both from Wegman’s. We’ve become addicted to this Gorgonzola – it’s like a mixture of Gorgonzola and Brie: Dinner was Cider Braised Pork Chops (a Cook’s Country recipe). Thick chops are browned and oven braised in a sauce of onions, garlic, thyme and apple butter. The chops: After the braise the sauce is strained and more apple butter and a bit of apple cider vinegar is added. The sauce: I served it with a butter lettuce salad: Honey-Balsamic Roasted Brussels Sprouts and Long Grain and Wild Rice with Cranberries and Orange (without sauce): With sauce: Absolutely delicious pork. The prep was really easy, but very elegant – I’d definitely serve this to company! Dessert was all purchased at Wegman’s – Mini Chocolate Amaretto Mousse Cake and Mini Opera cake: And a couple of strawberries that they were dipping as I walked by – I couldn’t resist them:

@Kay – I found this re: chocolate and paraffin – 12 oz. chocolate to 2 oz. paraffin. I remember this method and using it years ago because I’ve always felt that truly tempering chocolate was beyond me and I can’t afford the machines. What I do now is to melt the chocolate VERY slowly in the microwave – trying to keep the temperature under 94F. I then set a heating pad to medium, put it in a bowl and put the chocolate bowl on top of it. It stays nice and ‘dip-able’ and as ‘in temper’ as I’ve ever been able to achieve! @shain – that Knafeh looks and sounds so wonderful! I did a project with a batch of @Dorie Greenspan's Bubble-Top Brioche. Though they turned out fine, I had some trouble with the brioche. It started with the kneading. The dough never would come together in a ball and pull away from the sides of the mixing bowl like it is supposed to. I didn’t have this problem when I made them before. They didn’t rise very well, either: They were flat and oozed over the sides of the baking cups: I just tucked it all back into the cups and went ahead with the baking. They turned out a little flat, but otherwise fine: The bottoms were a bit pale: This DID happen last time and I just flipped them and toasted them lightly under the broiler. The crumb and texture were great: Toasted: The project idea started with some show I saw on The Cooking Channel – Unique Sweets, I think. One of the bakeries did a bun of some sort, split and spread with lashings of whipped butter and lightly toasted. Then they were spread with sweetened condensed milk and toasted until it caramelized. Then topped with a sprinkling of sea salt. The result: These were amazing. Not overly sweet, but just exactly enough. The sea salt was perfect! I would like to know what I did wrong with the brioche, though!

I'll try to address your question, @Kay, but I am a hit and miss soft boiled egg chef, at best! First, THIS is how I make them - it is a method from Cook's Illustrated and is the most dependable method I've ever found. Once they are done, you have two choices - you can either put them (unpeeled) in egg cups and snip off the top with a sharp knife (you first tap around the top 1/4 of the egg to break the shell) or use one of These nifty little things (I want one!). You then eat them with wee spoons and toast fingers. OR - say you want to serve them on toast - you hold them in a towel in your hand and using a teaspoon gently crack them all over and peel. I slip the tip of the spoon up between the egg and the shell and assist the peeling this way. This is all probably needlessly complicated and someone else may have a better way of explaining.

Just wouldn't work for me. I don't like fresh tuna - rare fish gives me the shivers and tuna that is cooked through feels 'tough' to me. Plus, I hate mushrooms. I am difficult to feed. I eat almost all meats/fish known to man, every breadstuff I can think of, most fruits found in US stores - but VERY few vegetables.

Ann, everything you make looks wonderful. But your bread is truly amazing. Whenever you post it, I just want to sit down with a plate of hot, buttered toast and eat 'til I fall over.

But, but...I HATE Dr. P and raw onions! Dinner last night started with salad and pickly stuff: With a ham slice coated with orange marmalade and ginger and some fixed-up canned beans:

Well, since we ARE discussing tuna and I have a tunafish salad sandwich probably once a week for lunch, I should also say that I utterly detest hot canned tuna. Like tuna casserole. I had never tasted it until I was an adult and in the early, poor years of our marriage I tried making it. Mr. Kim said that it tasted like every one he'd ever eaten. I was appalled that anyone could stomach it. Years ago, Mr. Kim's mom served us a lunch of curried tuna casserole (her invention). The suspiciously reddish color of the tuna reminded me of nothing more than 9 Lives. She is very frugal and frequents the kinds of stores that sell de-labled canned goods for almost nothing and to this day, I believe that we ate cat food casserole.

rotuts - do you know I have never tried scrapple? I have no objection to it in theory, but I've never had the opportunity. I understand that the quality can vary wildly based on the brand. Down here in the South, we have livermush, which I refused to taste as a child, but would like to try now.

LOL! Not to mention the fact that the catsup is NOT on the hot dog.

Mr. Kim had a poker game tonight and I had to go out to my mother’s to do her meds, so it ended up being a Wawa night: I dare anyone to post a trashier meal.

I am an oddity, I think. I love canned tuna. Oil or water. Albacore or regular. I can eat it right out of the can. And I detest fresh tuna. <blush>

Breakfast this morning: Egg and ham on toast.

Anna – I really like wedge salads, but you are right – you have to chop them up on the plate to get the dressing properly mixed in and then do you really have a wedge salad? I guess that they are really just an attractive way to serve a truly simple salad – you can add what you like, but at bottom it is a two ingredient dish. Dinner last night was Ina Garten’s shrimp salad roll and green beans: I roasted the shrimp instead of boiling or steaming. I always do this now when I want cooked shrimp for a dish. I think it is a great improvement. I happened to have some of the top slice hot dog buns and, for the first time, tried buttering and toasting the sides. Great little trick. Even Mr. Kim, who isn’t a bread fiend like me, noticed the difference it made to the roll. With chicken noodle soup: Homemade, but from the freezer. Funny thing about those crackers. I have 3 tins of smoked oysters in the pantry. Mr. Kim said he would be gone tonight, so I should eat some (he detests the odor). I didn’t have any saltines (absolutely required for smoked oysters), so bought some at the store yesterday. When I opened them they looked odd and I realized that I’d bought WHEAT. So I said “shit”. But when I tasted them, they tasted EXACTLY the same as the regular ones. One of those little marketing tricks – of course, I know that ALL saltines are made from ‘wheat flour’, but I’m guessing the color came from caramel!

For tonight’s dinner, I found some super thick and super cheap grocery store pork chops in the freezer and dug out a Tyler Florence recipe I’d been wanting to try. It was for Thick Pork Chops with Spiced Apples and Raisins. Turned out very well. Chops after browning and roasting: Big pot of green beans that cooked for a few hours: Wish I’d had some tiny new potatoes to put in them! Plated with sautéed squash and onions for Mr. Kim (I had rice, as I detest squash):

Brined the pork chops according to the recipe yesterday - 2 hours. Dried and refrigerated. Then cooked them tonight. They were VERY thick and just cheapo grocery store pork. Turned out very moist and tender! Thanks for giving me 'permission'!

Thank you! I will be trying this on Sunday, to cook Monday. Will report back!

What I mean is: Can I brine my pork chops for 4 hours today, remove them from the brine, rinse and refrigerate. Then proceed to cooking tomorrow night? Will the brine still be effective? Thanks!

Blush. Nope - just this stuff: Rice noodles. A crunchy alternative to croutons. I've been putting Chinese restaurant-style fried noodles on my salads for years. Don't know where I first got the idea from.

Host's note: this topic has grown too large for our servers to handle efficiently, so it's been split up. Click here for the previous segment. Well, this was lunch with my husband, but there were lots of ladies there! We stopped for lunch after delivering 100 packed lunches to three local homeless shelters at the Starlite Lounge in Richmond. Mr. Kim had a cheeseburger and fries: I had the Country Bennie with sausage in place of country ham and hash browns: Country ham just didn’t seem to go with sausage gravy. It was all really good.

A recent breakfast: Scrambled eggs w/ cheese, tots and sausage rolls.

We celebrated our daughter’s birthday on Saturday. We ended up with 3 desserts. Jessica wanted Bananas Foster Cheesecake. I figured that not everyone likes cheesecake or bananas, so I decided to make a “cream” filled chocolate Angel food cake. And then one of her friends made a carrot cake for her. The cheesecake: Slice with sauce: The angel food cake: With sloppy ganache. Tasted great, though. Slice showing filling: Other than the ganache (which I’ve made before) this was a total gamble. I had an idea what I wanted to do, so I found the cake recipe on Tasteofhome.com and then searched for a non-dairy ‘cream’ filling, since I didn’t want to refrigerate the cake. The recipe came from topsecretrecipes.com and consisted of marshmallow crème, shortening, 10X, vanilla and salt. I put the filling in a pastry bag fitted with a large star tip and just started piping it in the top and sides. Every slice came out with a nice blob, so I guess I did fine! The carrot cake was a bit of a mess to look at, but very good: It was her very first cake ever. Her boyfriend is a local line cook and said he gave her only basic hints. We were all impressed!

shain – your cauliflower au gratin is gorgeous! I love the even browning on the topping. I never can get that! And, Anna, yours was lovely, too! Scuba – I love the idea of tahini broccoli! I almost always have a half a jar in the fridge and will use it next time we have broccoli! Regarding the dairy with seafood thing: I don’t mind dairy, but I’m not at all crazy about seafood and tomatoes. Odd, I know. Bruce posted a recipe some time back for Pink Shrimp Sauce that I adore, but the tomato flavor isn’t at all pronounced. And, Tic Tac, the way you feel about cheese overpowering shellfish is the way I feel about bell peppers with shellfish. Once the peppers are added, I feel you might as well have used “Krab”. Dinner was the other night was Oklahoma Fried Onion burgers: This was a “Cook’s Country” recipe that I’ve been wanting to make for a long time. The onions are sliced very thin and salted and drained. They are then divided into 4 “patties” and the burger meat is smooshed down on top of them. They are griddle cooked until the onions are browned and then flipped and finished cooking. These were every bit as good as I anticipated! Great onion/beef flavor. Served on brioche buns with green beans and fries. The fries were done in my new electric skillet – I’m really loving that thing. They were perfect. Also a simple wedge salad: The 27th was our daughter’s birthday. She chose the restaurant Graffiato – fairly new to Richmond, but one of the better Washington restaurants. It is small plates that are shared. Wonderful meal! We had charred Brussels sprouts with pancetta, maple yogurt and hardboiled egg – one of the best things on the table: Veal Saltimbocca w/ prosciutto, sage, capers and Marsala: Herb Tagliatelle (house made pasta) w/ Wagu beef Bolognaise and Parmesan: Butternut squash agnolotti w/ sage, fall mushrooms, saba and hazelnuts: Saba was a new ingredient to me. I did some research and it is cooked down and reduced grape must - and must (which was also new to me) is freshly pressed fruit juice containing the skins, seeds and stems of the fruit. This was incredible. Despite it having mushrooms on top that I had to scrape off and not really caring for squash, it was the most delicious thing we had. The pasta was wonderfully tender and the sauce so good. I need to find some of that saba – I’m convinced that that was what made the sauce so amazing. White pizza with figs, cheeses (can’t remember which) and toasted hazelnuts: We tried bone marrow for the first time. It was prepared with bacon, preserved lemon and pistachios: It was…fine. If you had a mother who used to overcook thin steaks under a broiler in the 1960’s, you’ve tasted this when you gnawed the resulting fat and bone. Fatty and beefy. I’m not a big fan of gobs of fat (the reason that I’m leery of ordering pork belly at restaurants – some of them are just too fatty for me), so even though the flavor was good, the texture wasn’t my favorite. Obviously, my dinner companions disagreed: Tonight started with salad: Chicken Kiev and rice: The chicken was frozen. I used to make Kiev a lot, but I haven’t done it in years and can’t imagine I’d ever bother with it again. I never did a very good job of closing up the chicken and my butter would just ooze out the whole time it cooked. This particular brand is actually raw chicken and very good.

I have the BAE and I love it. I make poached eggs much more often now. I do spray it with a little Pam before putting the egg in (don't remember if Michael suggests that or not). I 'drain' the egg, as he suggests, nestle the spoon in the water for a couple of seconds and slip the egg out. Much less frustration than using a cup and a much more consistent product!