Kim Shook

Matthew K – gorgeous cake! Can I ask about the buttercream type and what tip you used? Shelby – peanut and pistachio pie sounds wonderful. RWood – everything looks delicious, but I keep coming back to the caramel popcorn picture! Ann – I’ve never had a butter tart, being down here in the Southern US, but from the recipes I’ve seen, I know that I’d like them. You have more than one butter tart recipe on your blog – which one do you thing I should try first? Snow day yesterday, so of course I had to bake: Brooke’s Banana Bread – a recipe a friend gave me some time ago and still my favorite banana bread.

Shelby – why blah on the chicken and dressing dinner? The chicken looks perfect – nice, crispy skin. Dressing = good. And the sprouts look perfectly done. So why blah? Is it because there was no gravy ? Started dinner last night with a little nibble: Bleu cheese, apples, pears and Triscuits. Should have stopped there . I made a frittata with potatoes, Cheddar and ham: WAY over-cooked. Hard and dry and tasteless. Mr. Kim managed to finish his blanketed with Sriacha: But we both agreed that it was not a successful effort. Served beside green beans with a ginger-sesame dressing. Sigh.

So sorry to hear of this. I always loved her posts. Please pass on my condolences and tell the family that they are in my prayers.

We left all of our Pot Roast leftovers with our friends last week so we decided to have it again Friday night – on noodles: With rolls and green beans: Bite: Sometimes I think that this is why I make Pot Roast – tonight’s dinner: Pot Roast soup – made with all the leftovers and added peas. Served with a packaged salad/slaw mix – kale and cabbage with a creamy onion/citrus dressing and bacon and sunflower seeds: We are really liking these things. They taste good and last for a couple of days when dressed.

Shelby – that cracklin’ cornbread had my jaw hitting the keyboard . I haven’t seen cracklins since pork became “the other white meat”! CP – Don’t worry about coming up to standards. I used to worry about that myself, but others here assured me that the kinds of foods that I cooked were welcome and interesting and ‘worthy’. I have wondered whether I shouldn’t start a “Boring food that I make all the time” thread! I really like seeing both types of cooking. The regular, everyday is interesting to me because WHAT PEOPLE EAT ON A REGULAR BASIS is fascinating, I think. We have such a diverse group here that it makes for really interesting viewing. And the out of this world dishes and techniques that I will probably never attempt are interesting on a different level. I'm impressed with the skill involved and thrilled that folks will make a home meal that surpasses many restaurant meals I've had. Last night was doctored up canned Brunswick stew and tunafish sandwiches:

Darienne and Emmalish – thank you so much for the nice comments! Dave – is your morning bun recipe from Cook’s Country? That’s the one that I’ve tried and I didn’t get the beautiful rise that you got. Those are gorgeous! Ruth – Happy Birthday to you!

Beautiful meal, dcarch! I posted my Valentine's meal on the dinner thread, but it was 'fish-centric' - a NOLA salad with crab and shrimp and rockfish for the main course.

CP – I had to Google “Ants on a Stick” and most of what came up was the American classic “Ants on a Log” (peanut butter on celery – sorry rotuts – with raisins). I finally found the Chinese dish and it sounds really good. On the 13th, we took dinner over to some friends and played cards. Pot roast: With gravy: And green beans: They provided salad and bread. The pot roast was my regular recipe, Ronald Johnson’s Italian Pot Roast, but it was probably the best rendition I’ve ever done. Even their daughter who doesn’t usually like beef in any form except hamburgers was scarfing it up. Valentine’s dinner at home. Place setting: We started off with Galatoire’s (NOLA) Godchaux salad: Iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, NC shrimp, Gulf jumbo lump crab, chopped HB eggs and Cajun mustard vinaigrette. So good and incredibly simple. Main course was rockfish: Just oven roasted with butter, lemon juice, parsley and S&P. With dinner we drank Francis Ford Coppola’s Sofia Reisling: We are not knowledgeable wine drinkers, but we liked it a lot with all the fish. Dessert was a throw together. We’d just come from breakfast when we did the shopping for our dinner and nothing looked appetizing. So we got chocolate croissants, blackberries (even when I’m full, fruit always looks good) and whipped cream: Last night’s dinner was leftover crab and shrimp made into salad, stuffed into some Chicago hot dog buns: Minimalist salad – just a little mayo, lemon juice, parsley and S&P.

I have been wanting to try out the King Arthur No-Knead Harvest Bread since Anna did it last month and tried it last Friday. The recipe calls for a 14-15-inch long lidded stonewear baker, a 9x12-inch oval deep casserole dish with lid or a 9-10-inch round lidded baking crock. I only had a 7x10-inch Schlemmertopf and thought it would be too small. My mother ended up having the larger one and I used that. Turns out it would have been better to use my smaller one. The bread rose properly because it had great texture and flavor, but it was only 2-inches high: Inside: It makes really great toast: Breakfast this morning: Eggs (from a friend’s hens) on wilted spinach, Harvest bread and sausage.

Franci – your cakes are absolutely lovely! I did Valentine’s cupcakes to share with family, friends and neighbors: The yellow ones are from a sugar-free mix for the diabetics in my life.

The fish plate is gorgeous. I would have bought it, too. Even if I never used it, I’d want to have it!

Okanagancook – your Brussels sprouts comment made me laugh, because your feelings about sprouts are my feelings about most vegetables. The list of the vegetables that I don’t like is so long that I mostly don’t bother to tell folks, I just eat what I’m given and wrap something I like around it. And of all the vegetables to like, I like sprouts! Every kids detested veg enemy! Stir fry tonight: Beef, snow peas, water chestnuts and onions with a purchased “Korean” stir fry sauce. Served with an Asian chopped salad kit from Fresh Express. Someone at our church pot luck brought it and it was very good – Savoy cabbage, carrots, cilantro, sesame ginger dressing, fried noodles and slice almonds among other stuff:

The recipe that Mr. Kim cooked last night (the feta and bacon stuffed chicken) turned out well. But in putting it on my recipe site, it got me thinking. As I said, the directions were a little wonky, as they sometimes are at unvetted sites. Some of it could be put down to differences in taste – it called for 1 tablespoon of dried oregano to season 4 chicken breast halves. To me, that seems quite excessive. But, again, that is taste. Other things bother me more – like the fact that she never explains what to do to a chicken breast in order to stuff it. And the original directions call for placing the chicken into the baking dish, pouring the sauce on it and THEN stuffing the breasts with the cheese and bacon. She also says to stuff the chicken with slices of feta and bacon. I decided that crumbled was a better way to go – I figured by the time you’d stuffed a slice of feta into a pocket in a chicken breast, it would be crumbled anyway. I knew all of this stuff and was helping him, but would a novice cook? All of those things are exactly why I would never send a newish cook to a place like allrecipes to find something. If an experienced cook never looks at the recipe, there are a million things that can go wrong. Who’s to say that the recipes are even safe? I know that there really isn’t a solution to this issue, but it is something I hadn’t really thought about until I was cooking this recipe side-by-side with Mr. Kim. ETA: I am quite sure that I have committed the same kinds of errors at my own recipe webpage, so I'm living in a glass house here. Some of those recipes date back many years - long before I was a mediumly accomplished home cook.

Unusually for me, I felt like breakfast this morning: The sausage is Jimmy Dean fully cooked patties. CI rated them as the best – over any of the uncooked tubes, but only if you pan-fry them – no microwaving. I had a coupon and decided to give them a try. They are very good, better than any national brand I’ve ever tasted. But pretty expensive. Without a coupon, I think I’ll stick to the tubes.

I think that if I did it right away, the pre-scoring would just melt back together, but your idea of cooling and pre-scoring just the chocolate layer would work. I could do all that before refrigerating. Thank you! I'll try it next time I make these. They are always going to be a bit of a mess with gooey marshmallow creme and (normally) the peanuts, but I'd like them as neat as I can get them.

Mr. Kim came home from work last night with a recipe that he wanted to try for feta and bacon stuffed chicken breasts. It turned out very well. He served it with Brussels sprouts and rice pilaf: It was from allrecipes.com and was oddly written as a lot of them are at that site. The first step was to make a sort of marinade/cooking sauce. The second was to place the chicken breasts in the baking dish and cover with the sauce. The third step was stuffing the breasts. Lucky for him, he had me to interpret . Mr. Kim has a great palate and is actually better than me at figuring out ingredients in a restaurant dish. But he is also a very literal cook. He follows directions precisely. If a recipe says something will take 30 minutes to cook, out it comes at 30 minutes on the dot! We’d have eaten raw chicken if it were up to him, because it said that the breasts would be done in 30 minutes. So we checked the temp at 45 and it was perfect. Bite: Definitely a keeper!

Franci – that cake is tremendous! What impresses me the most is how lovely and even your layers are – all SEVEN of them (if I’m counting correctly). It looks utterly delicious and beautiful. Modified Tin Roof Brownies for a co-worker of Mr. Kim’s birthday: He always requests them without the peanuts, which is a shame since the salt help balance out the otherwise extreme sweetness. I did make them with dark chocolate this time, which was a bit better. I need a little assistance here. These are made by baking a pan of brownies, taking them out and spreading with marshmallow crème. Chopped chocolate is sprinkled over the top and they are put back in the oven for a couple of minutes for that to melt. That is spread to cover and they are cooled. I always refrigerate brownies to make the cut neater. Every time that I make these, the tops break apart when I cut them. They seem to be impossible to cut neatly – you can see how only on one of them is the top chocolate layer in one piece. I do use a knife that’s been heated in hot water. Any advice?

JoNorvelleWalker – I’ve failed at lima beans before. Even frozen ones. I’ve burnt them, cooked them to complete mush and cooked them forever and had the skins never get tender. The fault was in the beans, not you! Lima beans are one of the few vegetables that I like. Shelby – I adore this baked spaghetti. This particular friend does NOT share recipes. She’s given me exactly ONE recipe in the 25 years we’ve known each other . rotuts – I loved your meatloaf that wouldn’t ‘loaf’ story! For years my ‘meatloaf’ inevitably became Bolognese because it crumbled and wouldn’t ‘loaf’! Benton’s – always! We had a potluck at our church today. I made Taffy Apple Salad: A recipe from my MIL. Sort of a trashy version of Waldorf with Cool Whip instead of mayo. You do make a nice custard with the canned pineapple juice, cornstarch, sugar, vinegar and eggs, though. ET Bacon Crescent Rolls: My version of something I found at another website. Crescent roll dough spread with a mixture of cream cheese, green onions and Worcestershire sauce and sprinkled with bacon. Rolled up, brushed with an egg wash and topped with dried onion bits, roasted garlic and poppy seeds. Both things were very popular – I took three 2-quart containers of the salad and 24 of the rolls to church. I came home with 1 quart of salad and 2 rolls. Leftovers for dinner tonight, so I’m posting this here!

Ann – churro waffles sound like heaven! Thanks for the link. dcarch – your pork and poultry SB feast looked splendid! huiray – Oh, how I miss Skyline! I do my own and it’s good, but I miss being able to sit down to a counter and order it whenever I like. The little Indiana town we lived in had its own branch and it was within walking distance of our house. Dinner on Wednesday started with a salad: Mr. Kim had some grilled chicken w/ hot sauce left over from SB Sunday with sautéed mushrooms: A friend brought us some baked spaghetti, which became my dinner: Mr. Kim was out last night playing poker, so I had an old favorite – a hybrid which will please no one but me and my mother: Beans on toast. American’s won’t like it because…well, it’s beans on toast, which they find an anathema. And Brits won’t like it because it’s made with pork & beans, not vegetarian. No matter – it was delicious! Mr. Kim is off gallivanting again tonight, so I just had eggs and sausage (no picture).

This morning’s breakfast from the freezer: I still have a few sausage rolls from Christmas. If only we hadn’t finished the little quiches, this would have been the perfect breakfast!

Thanks! Here's the recipe: http://www.recipecircus.com/recipes/Kimberlyn/DIPSSPREADS/Buffalo_Chicken_Dip.html One time, I mixed it all up and made it into wontons! That was possibly my most successful dish I've ever made.

Thanks to everyone for the Rice Krispie Treats compliments. For some family event awhile back, I made a few different cereal treats (Cocoa Krispies, Cap’n Krunch PB and Lucky Charms) for the kids and another, most ‘sophisticated’ dessert for the adults. The grownups swarmed the ‘Treats’ and ignored the other one! One of my favorite ‘Treats’ versions is the Momofuku Sesame-Ginger ones recommended to me by deensiebat. Very ‘grownup’ and still fun. Chocomom – I’m doing your version next time with the Cocoa Krispies and PB morsels. My belief is that if God made any better combination than chocolate and PB, He kept it to Himself! I made a lemon icebox pie for Super Bowl dessert: Pretty much ersatz – lemonade concentrate, cream cheese, Cool Whip and sweetened condensed milk in a ready-made Graham cracker crust – but awfully good! Slice:

Ann – hot chicken sandwiches with gravy are perhaps my favorite food in the world! Super Bowl noshes – Mr. Kim’s Chili: Buffalo Chicken Dip: Ooey, gooey insides: This stuff comes out of the oven nuclear hot and people were blistering their mouths to get to it. It is just the perfect football food – hot, rich, cheesy, spicy and you pile it on tortilla chips! I also made a lemon icebox pie for dessert:

BonVivant – gorgeous pork belly. I prefer them to be less fatty than I usually see and yours looks perfect! Steve – genius Potatoes Anna/Shepherd’s Pie combination. Dinner tonight started with salad: And finished with an unintentionally orange meal: Kielbasa & onions w/ sweet potato.

Hilarious food related tweets regarding the blizzard: http://twitchy.com/2015/01/26/free-range-cannibalism-hearty-mockery-as-blizzard-fearing-nyc-hipsters-storm-whole-foods-photos/