Kim Shook

It was a LONG time ago. Maybe 20-25 years ago? I looked and they have some (including the large platter and a cocktail rimmer) at ebay and other sites. Here's the back of the plates:

Here you go: They are part of what originally was an appetizer set with a large platter (since broken) and six plates (2 broken). They were a gift from friends many years ago. They have cycled around to being out of style and now back in style in the time that we've had them.

@MaryIsobel – I haven’t checked in in a long time and hope you are feeling better by now! I’ve had a lot going on health-wise for some time now (nothing serious) and the most recent is an injury to my foot week before last that has kept me mostly on the couch with my foot elevated. So, there’s been a LOT more restaurant food. Last week Jessica and I drove over to an apple orchard near Charlottesville to pick up apples, doughnuts, and cider. Since we were so close, we went a little farther to Staunton for lunch at Wright’s – the best old-school hamburger joint I know of in the area. It’s the same place that we went to back in July for my birthday. Burgers and their incomparable onion rings: SO good. Thursday I was out at a doctor’s appointment and stopped at one of my favorite diners for lunch. and had a really disappointing meal. I had the “Hangover” plus one pancake: Every single thing was either overcooked or obviously leftover from earlier. The gravy was lumpy, the biscuits (under the gravy) were hard and stale (I guess they thought that the gravy would disguise that fact, but it didn’t), the corned beef was overcooked as was the scrambled egg. The pancake seemed to have been saved for a bit and then microwaved at service. The thing is, I’ve had this exact meal before, and it was great. We’ve noticed that they were slipping during our last couple of visits, but this was more than slipping. The next day, I had yet another disappointing lunch (I think the universe is telling me to get up and COOK!). Mr. Kim was working from home and we ran out at midday and picked up lunch at the Greek festival. Run by Greek people 😑. Held at the Greek church 🙄. Mine was pastichio: The beans, rice and apps were fine. The actual MAIN part of the meal was exceedingly dry: The top was so dry you could hardly cut through it and the meat layer just crumbled everywhere. Mr. Kim got pork souvlaki: Same problem – very dry. Jessica got the gyro and it tasted ok, but the meat and tzatziki was skimpy and the meat was obviously purchased already sliced: On Monday, we met Mr. Kim at our favorite pizza place. Pizza: We also shared a cheese steak sub: This looks like a giant lettuce sub, but it’s just a bad photo. There’s a lot of beef and cheese and grilled onions on it. On Wednesday, Jessica and I went with a friend from church to deliver Meals on Wheels lunches (Jessica went along to do the actual deliveries and I was ensconsed in the back of my friend’s minivan with my foot up). We stopped for lunch afterwards at a wonderful “ladies who lunch” place in the back of a small antique store. I didn’t get pictures, but I had the leftover half of my sandwich the next day: Roasted turkey, fig jam, Granny Smith apples, and Brie. My favorite. The turkey is actual turkey.

No leavening.

To my British family a pancake is a thin pan fried cake - more what we'd call a crepe. They always sprinkle them with lemon juice and sugar and roll them up. The roots of that family were from London and Lancashire. I don't know if that is true for the rest of the country. I'm pretty sure that a flapjack is more like what we'd call a granola bar.

@CookBot – thanks so much for the crème brûlée advice. I will note that on my recipe for next time! I had a bunch of egg whites on hand, so I made Michael Ruhlman’s angel food cake: I subbed a touch of Fiori di Sicilia for some of the vanilla. Mr. Kim said it was the best I’ve ever made. This is such a dependable recipe. I’ve made it over and over again and it has never failed me.

I had a friend who threatened to put Xanax in the cornbread one year that it was his turn to have the family gathering. 😁

@Anna N – cheese toasties! They fix anything 😍. A few recent breakfasts - onion bagel from a new bakery near us: I added the cream cheese and bacon at home. I posted back in October when we tried their muffins and weren’t impressed. Still aren’t. The bagel seemed stale. Too bad because they are very close to us. We went to Charlottesville recently and picked up a lot of apples at the orchard near Monticello. Breakfast the day after that was a couple of apple cider doughnuts from our trip to the apple orchard: Yesterdaay’s breakfast was boring: Sausage on a roll. I was feeling lazy. Today was somewhat better (more butter, at least 😁😞

Welcome to eGullet! I'm glad you've found us and I'm looking forward to your contributions! What kinds of food are you mainly interested in?

I like @heidih's idea of soup in a Crock Pot. You could serve it as an appetizer in cups with handles before people sit and it doesn’t need to be on the stove or in the oven. @blue_dolphin – re: cranberry sauce – I will sometimes add a cup of mixed dried fruit to the pan when I’m cooking my cranberries for sauce. It makes a nice change from just orange. @liamsaunt – I cannot get my head around blueberries and blueberry cheese in dressing. It reminds me of Rachel’s meat trifle on Friends 🙂. @scubadoo97 – thanks for sharing that picture and your amazing story. I love that your large family maintains their relationships as well as that! @Katie Meadow – I feel the same way about egg nog. Mr. Kim haunts the stores starting in late September looking for it. The only kind I’ve ever liked was a local brand that we stocked at The Fresh Market when I worked there. It was like you melted the best vanilla ice cream ever made. It could have easily substituted for crème anglaise. I’m pretty much of a traditionalist when it comes to most holiday meals – especially Thanksgiving. One of my old FB posts came up in my memories today and, while somewhat tongue in cheek, it pretty much describes my attitude: “It’s time for the annual foodie lament about Thanksgiving. While they can have their crunchy obscure vegetables and dabs of near-raw meat with foam that looks like cat yak on top 364 days a year, they have to whine about eating boring turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, etc. ONE day. Watch out for them. They’ll try to steal your joy. But, on the plus side, they’ll leave plenty of gravy and marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes for the rest of us!” 😝 My MIL is hosting Thanksgiving this year and Jessica and I have been almost completely edged out of contributing over the years. I used to make a really good pumpkin cheesecake that seemed to go over well, but she finally asked me not to bring it anymore because she felt like the pies that she and my nieces made were sufficient. Then Jessica and I started bringing appetizers that everyone loved, but we were asked to not do that anymore. She said, “My family” doesn’t really care for appetizers. They fill you up and then you don’t want dinner. She’s a great cook, so it’s definitely not jealousy. And she has her daughter make a few side dishes, so it’s not that she just wants to control everything. Anyway, this year when he asked, she told Mr. Kim that I could bring an appetizer, but it should be very low calorie and not at all filling. I’m going to go to Kroger and get a vegetable tray from the produce department and flip that out onto a platter. Et voila! I admit my feelings are hurt and I’m tempted to be childish.

I SV'd a couple of pork chops today, but Mr. Kim wanted to go out after work tonight, so I took the bag out of the water and put it in the refrigerator unopened. They were completely cooked and just needed to be seared in a pan. What should I do to bring it up to temperature tomorrow when we want to eat it? I did them at 145F for 3 1/2 hours.

And if the restaurant serves Mt. Dew, I'm even cheaper! Our Chinese place serves Mt. Dew. Mr. Kim says that I asked for it so often they just started carrying it.

Honestly, I don't know for sure. The only caviar I've ever had was cheap, grocery store caviar. I've always wondered if I'd like the good stuff. The descriptions of it that I've read sound good.

Truffles (the fungal variety). I can't bear the stink of them. If someone at my table has them on a dish, I have a very hard time eating my meal. I heard about truffles LONG before I tasted/smelled them. I assumed I would love them based on how prized they seemed to be. I was wrong.

Have you tried Chewy's bagels in Cary Town? Not sure how authentic they are (they are sourdough), but they are extremely good.

@liamsaunt – I’m so sorry for the loss of your mom. Such a hard time with the holidays coming. Please know I’ll be thinking about you. Thanks for all the help with the gravy information and recommendations! If you want to make my gravy, you’ll need to put together the links that @heidih and @Anna N posted and kind of cobble them together. I could swear that I did a thorough tutorial somewhere, but I cannot find it anywhere. Not here, not an old blog post, nowhere 😟. The recipe from my webpage needs updating and I’ll try to do it the next time I made the gravy. I no longer use the slow cooker to make my stock – I do it in the IP, like in the linked eG post. Go here if you want to see the finished product. Please feel free to ask any questions that occur. I’ve actually walked someone through making this gravy long distance – BEFORE Face-Timing was a thing 😁.

@TicTac – that fish sandwich looks fantastic. I’ve been craving fried fish for a couple of weeks. What is that crispy looking thing just under the top of the bun? It looks too thin to be another fish filet. @Steve Irby – absolutely gorgeous oyster meal. Talk to me about pecorino romano cheese on grilled oysters, please! I am absolutely NOT an anti-cheese on fish person, but the only time I’ve had cheese (parmesan) on oysters it didn’t work at all. It totally overwhelmed the sweetness of the oysters and added an odd saltiness to them. Maybe they just used too much? We had Mr. Kim’s mom over for dinner Friday night. The table: I love setting a pretty table, but I’m pretty rusty at this multi-course entertaining business. I really have a hard time getting into a rhythm. And, as everyone knows, our kitchen is VERY small, so when Jessica comes in at the last minute to make her contribution and my MIL decides I’m not stirring my stir fry enough, I get a little crazed 🤪! Pre-dinner nibbles were cheese straws, corn nuts (from nuts.com – , and Smokehouse almonds. Boston lettuce with blood orange segments, marinated red onions, candied pecans, and a blood orange vinaigrette: Monkfish with miso-mustard cream sauce on olive oil dressed watercress, stir fried snow peas and bean sprouts, and Jessica’s miso potatoes: Everything turned out pretty well. I think that the fish was slightly over cooked. It seemed to jump up in the last minute. But it all tasted great. Jessica’s potatoes were excellent: Dessert was caramel apple crème brûlée: The top looks burnt, but it wasn’t.

If y’all could just come here and make me breakfast, I’d eat every day! Was out running errands Friday and picked up a blueberry muffin at Whole Foods for breakfast. It was awfully good – lots of blueberries: I discovered these arancini at their hot bar: I guess they count as the second course of breakfast. They were lukewarm, so the cheese was not melty and the rice was a little mushy, but they tasted good. I’m betting they were very good when they were fresh. I can’t find these at any Italian place in Richmond, so I was hoping they would be great.

We had Mr. Kim’s mom over for dinner Friday night. Dessert was caramel apple crème brûlée: The top looks burnt, but it wasn’t. These were definitely overcooked. You can see from the video that they didn’t have that soft, velvety custard like they should have: They were made in 10 oz. ramekins and are just too large. I need to look at 6 and 8 oz. ones and see which size is better. The flavor was spot on, though.

I'm sorry to hear you are back in the hospital, @liuzhou! I join everyone in wishing for a quick recovery!

Yes. Southern US food has always be heavily influenced by African-American cooks. It is sometimes an unacknowledged debt, of course. I'm betting that it is a tradition rooted in economic need. I know with my white, southern family macaroni was always used to make things go further. They started out as poor Italian immigrants in the early 1900s in Mississippi and even when the financial need was no longer a factor, they still added macaroni to chili and served macaroni and cheese as a main course. And, of course, it's delicious.

I've always called them "whomp biscuits". Because you used to have to whomp them on the counter to open them. 😁 I confess to using the biscuit dough to make shortcut dumplings for chicken and dumplings.

We recently tried this for the first time: and we were very happy with the results: You can add an egg and some melted butter, if you like, but you can also just add water, so they are suitable for home or camping. And they have them at Amazon two 2-lb. bags for $19.

I agree with you, Katie. Should hospitals offer good quality meals? Yes, of course. Will they? Probably not -at least in the US. It's too bad. Good food can do so much for one's health. Bad food is depressing. And being depressed can lengthen recovery times. It would actually benefit the patient, the healthcare facility and even the insurance companies.

@CookBot – YES! I noticed how the ratio of rice to beans was really off. I’m not supposed to be eating those sorts of beans right now, so it was ok, but Mr. Kim was disappointed. @Duvel – your bread is spectacular and I’m envious of your available cheeses. @Shelby – everything looks so good. I, too, was impressed with my output in the past rather than what I’ve been making lately. The stuffed chicken looks fantastic and, of course, those gorgeous potatoes. And then I get to the next post and I’m craving chicken pot pie and Snickers Salad (which may be the most hilarious name in the culinary world)! @rotuts – I agree with you completely re: lasagna pans. They are usually much too shallow. I like a nice, deep lasagna. Friday night dinner was a Costco broccoli and Cheddar quiche, salad, and bakery yeast rolls: Like the artichoke and spinach one, this was surprisingly good. The broccoli was NOT skunky. I got a head of iceberg (which I’m allowed to have) and I’ve been indulging in BIG salads all week. On Sunday Mr. Kim had dinner with some HS friends, so Jessica and I went to Bonchon, the Korean chain. Potstickers: Bulgogi soft tacos: Seasoned fries: And their soy garlic wings that taste very similar to @Norm Matthews’ Korean-style wings: After all the trick or treaters were gone Halloween night, dinner was soup and salad. Geoffrey Zakarian’s Caesar salad and fabulous torn and fried croutons: And the soup was @Ann_T’s wonderful French onion soup: Served with some crusty bread from Lidl: Tuesday’s protein was not terribly successful: The sweet potatoes and beans were fine, but the pork chops weren’t very good. I did them in the IP with some Dale’s Seasoning. They were dry and tough. I hadn’t had Dale’s in years and, while I still liked the flavor it was much stronger than I remembered (maybe my mom diluted it?). Served with the last of my MIL’s Hot Cross Buns from the freezer: Last night Jessica suggested that I take the leftover onion soup and make French dip sandwiches. She added some mushrooms that she made. I marinated a London Broil in favorite marinade: oil, Dijon, soy, lemon juice, onions, garlic, Worcestershire, and pepper and broiled it in the CSO: I used some Michael Ruhlman buttermilk rolls I made to make the sandwiches and added the onions from the soup and some Muenster. The soup, thickened with a little Onion Bisto, was the “dip”. Served with rice and green beans: Jessica preferred a hoagie roll: Mr. Kim is fasting for a blood test in the morning and Jessica was in late, so this was dinner for me tonight: Rice, bacon sandwich, and boiled eggs. Very satisfying.