Kim Shook

petit cochon – lovely sounding pot pies! dcarch – love the looks of your wild rice dish and the skull is hilarious! Prawn – lovely meals, as always and I hope you are feeling better! Dinner the other night: Chicken in cheddar sauce, green beans, roasted cauliflower and long grain and wild rice. I’ve got some tough old beef from the freezer braising, teeny little potatoes ready to roast, yellow squash sautéed with onions and some Brussels sprouts ready to sauté in butter. Mr. Kim is working late doing evaluations that are due Monday morning and we’ll eat as soon as he comes home.

We are handing out the standard good kid candy. Chocolate with... I try NOT to buy my favorites, but I think Mr. Kim has purchased Reeses Cups. My MIL hands out small packs of microwave popcorn. I dunno. Is popcorn all that special anymore?

Dinner tonight was exactly what I said I was planning, plus some leftover layered salad from yesterday’s tailgate meal: Plus a MUCH more interesting salad than our usual: romaine, arugula, chèvre, pears, toasted almonds and corn muffin croutons. Just a couple of additions, but what a difference!

Thanks all for the pork compliments. We really got lucky with that – it’s just supermarket pork (which I hardly ever buy anymore – mostly butcher shop pork), but it was really moist and flavorful. And I’m thrilled that no one mocked my sweet potato ! menuinprogress – what lovely beets! Mr. Kim would love those! Le Master – I am SO making those onion chips soon!! robirdstix – that tart is gorgeous and I don’t even like asparagus! Kay – yep, I grew up with a mom who, God bless her, cooked pork to DEATH. We used to joke that her sausage patties were cooked so long that they ended up the size and texture of silver dollars! I still won’t make pork for her because she thinks I’m going to kill everyone . We finished up the pork loin the other night – I just brushed it with BBQ sauce and served it with salad, creamed corn and corn muffins: Another night was spaghetti carbonara w/ spinach – this was a Food & Wine recipe. We liked it and it was very easy, but thought it needed a little adjustment. I added garlic, which it lacked. Also, the way they suggest doing the spinach is odd. You dump all the spinach on the pasta at the end of the boiling and then drain it all. We ended up with a very few clumps of spinach that didn’t distribute itself among the pasta at all. Next time, I’ll roughly chop the spinach and sprinkle it on just before serving. I’m sure that it will wilt plenty. The recipe calls for spinach pasta, which I didn’t have, so I just used regular: Served with garlic bread and salad. Friday night was shrimp tacos with this gorgeous and delicious slaw: It included pickled red onion, cabbage and mango. Tacos: The shrimp preparation called for sautéing the shrimp and then adding BBQ sauce and Monterey Jack cheese at the end. This sounded really peculiar to me, but I went with it and they were really, really good – definitely a keeper. And that slaw would be wonderful on a LOT of things. For our tailgate meal in Charlottesville yesterday I decided to try pressed sandwiches. I’d never done them before, but always thought they’d make good tailgating fare. I googled a Julia recipe and a Martha recipe and kind of put them together, adding my own ideas. They turned out great! Layering: bread, anchovy paste, tapenade, chèvre and sliced marinated artichoke hearts. Black Forest ham and sopressata Dijon vinaigrette and arugula sandwich the next day They were very, very good and so easy that I’m sure this will go into our regular tailgate rotation. I served them with a layered salad: lettuce, cauliflower, red onion, bacon and cheese Our dinner tonight (in front of the Sunday night football game on TV) will be Sloppy Joes on onion rolls, fries and a salad (I think that I’ll try to add a little oomph to the salad!). Pictures later.

merstar – thank you for the tip! We have a very good chocolate store in town and I’ll try to find the el rey there – I just can’t justify the shipping charges (almost as much as the cocoa itself!). ET – lovely cake, and I especially love the accents! Just beautiful work. dreamgirl – that is adorable and sounds truly delicious! The Story and a Half Cake: Mr. Kim wanted me to make a birthday cake for one of the guys who works for him. Turns out that the guy really preferred pumpkin pie, but requested chocolate cake because the other people in the section liked it. I suggested a pumpkin pound cake with orange cream cheese icing. Mr. Kim went back to the guy who said, “No, a chocolate cake would be fine”. So I stop and get all the stuff on the way home to make the cake. At 7pm, when I had my mise all done and my dark chocolate melted for the cake, Mr. Kim texts me saying that the fellow had just told him, BTW he’s lactose intolerant. I freak and race around looking up lactose free cake and icing recipes that won’t take too long and will use easy ingredients. Jessica calls a lactose intolerant friend who likes to bake and gets more info from him. I end up making the cake from a recipe on the cocoa tin. It works fine and the crumbs taste good. The cake isn’t due to the office until tomorrow, so I plan on making the icing tonight. Mr.Kim calls me from work, as I’m finishing the icing tonight and says, “Taste the icing before you frost the cake and if it tastes bad, you can just make your regular icing.” I say, “??????????????????”. Turns out that the guy is not really lactose intolerant, just slightly lactose sensitive. A regular chocolate cake made the way that I would have done it would have been fine. He can eat a chocolate bar, it was the cream cheese frosting that would have been a problem. So….I’m thinking….arsenic is lactose free, right?

Blether – love the look of your seafood and cauliflower – I love when creamy things get those little scorchy sections! Dinner tonight was a roast pork loin glazed with orange marmalade: (that little spitty looking bit at the top is where the thermometer probe was) With Italian green beans, sweet potatoes and corn muffins: My potato: cuz I only like them if they taste like dessert !

fairfranco – what a lovely little soufflé! I love that you treated yourself to something nice! Made another try at a yellow cake. It was recommended by oli and I have to say thank you so much! I think this may be the one. I definitely overbaked it, though – got distracted and neglected to reset the timer after checking it. So I’ll have to try it again to be sure, but I really liked the flavor and texture – it was just a little dry. I was a bit disappointed in the icing, though. It was so easy – cooked in the microwave and butter added at the end. Foolproof! It was super glossy and had a gorgeous texture, but the flavor was blah. I used Hershey’s Special Dark cocoa – can anyone recommend a really, really good cocoa and I’ll give it one more try. It certainly was especially dark, though: Slice:

Breakfast this morning: Caramelized banana pancakes w/ orange-maple syrup and Benton’s bacon. The pancakes are from the newest issue of Food & Wine. They have ground hazelnuts (I used almonds – what I had) in the batter. You also separate the eggs and whip the whites before folding into the batter. I’m not sure that the pancakes are that much better than my regular ones and therefore worth the extra effort, but caramelizing the bananas is fantastic!

I am enjoying the smoked oyster love! They are the quintessential 60's tidbit! My parents and I love them, but Mr. Kim and Jessica have a DEEP disgust for them. When I was a little girl Santa always left a tin of them in each of our stockings and he still leaves them for me nowadays. I eat the entire tin while alone in the house and take the can out to the trash before everyone else comes home. The cats have always cleaned up the plate for me, though!

Teddy – absolutely GORGEOUS burgers. I could eat one right now (2 hours from dinner) Dinner tonight was a weeknight, eat from the pantry/fridge/freezer special. Nothing exciting, but very good: Salad (of course) Crab and cocktail sauce Beef stick w/ mustard and shrachi Assorted pickles Mini croissants Watermelon and mandarin oranges

Have you tried this one? http://www.cheftalk.com/forum/thread/45372/finally-that-perfect-homemade-yellow-cake Wow - that sounds perfect. I'm printing this out and will try it as soon as I can! Thank you so much, oli! Just amazingly gorgeous! I am in awe!

Blether - the salmon cakes sound fantastic! Salmon cakes from fresh salmon is one of those things that I've never done and keep meaning to.

The is only for me personally - I know that this is a popular combination, but I don't care for fish/shellfish with a tomato sauce (except for cocktail sauce). I agree on the yogurt and chocolate. I'll add that I don't usually care for chocolate cheesecake, either. Something about the tangy taste of cheesecake or yogurt just doesn't go with chocolate to me.

Bruce – I wouldn’t dare, but I did find out that leftover in French is: n'ayant pas été mange kayb – thanks for the help. I’ve printed it out and will try your method next time I do French toast. Sunday breakfast: strawberry and banana smoothies Grilled bacon, egg and Swiss sandwiches and cantaloupe:

Bella and kayb - thanks for the interest in the pot roast. The recipe is here. I really need to revise it, because I do some things differently now. I usually bake it at 300 degrees rather than cook on top of the stove and I almost always double everything except the meat so that I have lots of sauce for making the soup. dcarch – love the look of the figgy pig dish. I really enjoy them together. Borgstrom – that is some seriously beautiful and delicious looking food! Welcome! Made a batch of Rachel’s chicken salad this weekend to have for lunches this week: It’s is my favorite version of chicken salad. Sunday night dinner: Easy chicken parm on angel hair pasta, roasted broccoli and onion rolls. The rolls and the sauce were purchased. Mr. Kim really liked the broccoli, but I didn’t care for it much. By the time the stalks were tender the tops were overdone. I found it really dry. But I did like the flavor of garlic, olive oil and toasted panko on the broccoli. Last night’s dinner: Smothered cube steak and onions, mashed potatoes, butterbeans and onion rolls

dhardy - thanks for the link and by the way, I think that yours looked better than theirs. I love all the Halloween stuff and that gorgeous toffee! Somewhere here, someone asked for a recipe for a cake with the texture of a cake mix cake. I have looked and looked and can NOT find the thread – I refer to it as ‘the cake mixes thread’ in my notes and the post I refer to is dated 9/7/2010. Anyway, someone else offered a recipe for making your own cake mix that you can then freeze or refrigerate and add ingredients and bake off later. The first time I tried it the results were NOT good – the butter that you added at baking time just wouldn’t incorporate. So this time, I decided to try oil instead of butter. Got a little better texture, but still I couldn’t call this cake a success. It has a very coarse crumb – very bready and sodden. The flavor was ok, but I wouldn’t serve this cake. Frosted: slice: So I’m still looking for a go-to recipe for yellow cake. I want the flavor of homemade with the texture of a cake mix.

I'm with Kerry. This is what I thought before I even opened the thread and really read the question. I remember my mother cramming a piece of toasted cheese into my hand as I was leaving the house in the morning - it was almost the breakfast thing that my tummy could take as a child.

percyn – lovely Saucisse de Canard al'Armagnac! kayb – I’d love some French toast pointers. Yours looks exactly like I like mine! Simple breakfast this morning:

djyee – you just inspired me! That chicken salad looks great! We are starting the pre-holiday culling the freezers season and I have 2 bags of chicken breasts in the freezer. I’m making some chicken salad tomorrow. Dinner last night was pot roast soup and biscuits: Just leftover pot roast, sauce and noodles – I add peas and thin it down with beef stock. We love this soup so much that I’d make pot roast just to have the soup!

percyn – that is one gorgeous scallop and I really love the idea of pumpkin and walnut risotto! Bruce – love the look of that fried rice! Last night: Ronald Johnson’s Italian pot roast (our favorite), Brussels sprouts, egg noodles Honey-Butter biscuits (just a fix up of some frozen biscuits)

I gasped with delight when I saw you here, Rachel - in fact, I startled Mr. Kim! Thank you - we did a lot of finger sneaks when my BIL wasn't looking (he's a germophobe) and I barely managed to get a slice to take home for Jessica. So it went down well! dhardy123 - any chance of you giving out that recipe? Both Nutella and rice bars are favorites around here and my family would adore me forever if I made these!

You're very welcome, Kim. These are so delicious - forget breakfast - I eat them for dessert! They're really in between a muffin and a cupcake. I often omit the chocolate chips inside, and frost with some melted semi-sweet chocolate. One tip: Use the weight measurements instead of the volume measurements - I tried them both ways as an experiment (for the volume, I did spoon and sweep), and the ones I did by weight came out lighter, fluffier, and more moist. Either way, they're great, but the ones by weight are superior. Oh, also, their timing is off. It takes much less baking time than indicated, around 18 minutes. Thank you! I've added your notes to my copy. Can't wait to try these. They sound like they would be good for a brunch - muffin for those who want bread and cake for those who want dessert - all in one thing!

Darienne – thank you so much for such sweet words! It’s not totally unselfish, though. It’s what I love doing and the thanks and praise ain’t bad, either ! merstar – oooh! Thanks for posting the link to those muffins. They look wonderful. I’ve printed it out and it’s going in my ‘to try’ file!

I know that I say this a lot, but I am just astounded by the beauty and creativity that I see on this thread. My humble offerings include a chocolate angel food cake that I made for a coworker's birthday: PB & J cupcakes for my niece's wedding rehearsal dinner: And a coconut cake that I did for my FIL’s birthday on Friday:

I haven't made Keller's yet (haven't got the ring), but I've seen other folks' examples of it and that looks right to me. A local restaurant makes a perfect one that is probably 2 1/2 inches tall. I really like a high,light, custardy filling and crisp, flaky crust. This place makes their crust fairly thick - 1/2 cm or so and while the bottom gets a little less crisp, the sides and the 'frill' is fantastic. Wish I could recreate it at home.