Kim Shook

Good looking dishes, EVERYONE!! Mr. Kim’s BD dinner last night(everything by request): salad with our favorite bottled dressing – it’s called ‘Garlic Expressions’ and it is really, really good. I use it for marinating chicken, too. oven roasted rib eyes, baked potatoes and butterbeans Mr. Kim and Jessica’s steaks had a mushroom sauce – crimini, shiitake and oyster mushrooms with shallots, garlic, thyme and Malbec

So many beautiful desserts, so many talented eGulleteers! I am just in awe and want to taste EVERYTHING! In particular: Genkinaonna - your pink pearled cupcakes are adorable! Richard – loved your strawberry dessert – especially cute was the pink amoeba! Rick – loved the gooeyness of the cinnamon rolls! CanadianBakin’ – what a beautiful, beautiful cake! Lucky friend! Rwood – lovely!! I adore individual desserts. For Mr. Kim’s birthday celebration, he requested Key Lime Cheesecake: messy, but good This is served with a sauce of pureed strawberries, butter, 10X and lime zest. I forgot to take a picture of it, but it is nice with the key lime.

Phaz – that looks and sounds fantastic percyn – that is a beautiful biscuit! Was it just a drop biscuit or was there something in it? kayb – yay on the homemade corned beef! Both of those omelets look wonderful – I especially like the idea of an unrolled one, since I am not to great at rolling! Mr. Kim’s birthday breakfast this morning: French toast, sage sausage and scrambled eggs w/ goat cheese and chives

We saw this tonight in a local Indian-Pakastani market.

We just went in the spring and had a fantastic trip. If you go here , you can read my food-centric report and then at the end is a link to the more general report on my blog. Have a wonderful trip - it sounds like you have some good plans.

Potato chip and Duke mayo sandwiches on white bread is a Southern classic. Add a thick slice of fried bologna and I'm in heaven!

Ditto on the plastic gloves and assorted sized dishers. I use dishers for all sorts of things - cookies, cupcakes, scooping soft cheese onto vegetables, etc., etc. Good knives, of course. NOT a matched set and not even a lot of them. Just 3 good knives. Oven safe saute pans. Until I got a couple, I had no idea how convenient they would be.

Thank you, ma'am! I'll ask next time we get a shoulder!

kayb – beautiful tortilla and quiche! And I’m going to be trying that broiled egg salad, too. What a great idea! I often eat a sliced hard boiled egg sandwich made with still hot eggs and cheese that gets squooshy from the hot eggs. Same principle, I guess. Breakfast yesterday morning: The French toast was made with the wonderful crusty loaf that we got in Friday’s CSA box. Perfect. Also Benton bacon and cantaloupe.

robirdstx – You’re on. Where shall we meet for the exchange? And your pork steaks look fabulous. I wish we could find those here – we used to get them all the time in Indiana. Dinner last night: Mr. Kim made a big salad with some of our CSA bounty Scrambled eggs w/ chives and cheese and garlic toast with some fabulous bread from our CSA box.

keri - If you'd like to try the tomatoes, the recipe is here at my recipe site. robirdstx - Great, now I have bun envy !

Deliciously Lekker – beautiful cheesecake! You’ve seen almost this exact same cake before: It was chocolate with 7 Minute frosting and Ho Ho’s. Special request for a work birthday.

Soba – your gnocchi is lovely! keri – that cauliflower sounds great! Welcome to the dinner thread. It’s an inspiring place! Your pad thai looks wonderful. I also have issues with cooking the rice noodles – let us know how you progress on them. djyee – I am SO making those noodles!!! Wow. Am I the only one who can’t see dcarch’s pictures? All I see is a little square from photobucket that says “Bandwidth exceeded”. Dinner the last couple of nights: Tuna macaroni salad (thanks for the inspiration, Suzi!), fresh butterbeans, fried green tomatoes, amazing corn on the cob and onion rolls – we picked up the corn, butterbeans and tomatoes at a farm stand on the way back from NC Sunday. The corn was truly wonderful. It reminded me of the corn we used to get at stands when I was a kid. Tonight we started with the cucumbers and some ripe tomatoes from the same stand: We also had grilled chicken, butterbeans, corn and fried green tomatoes. The chicken was marinated with Wildtree Asian ginger plum dressing. Wildtree is a direct sales company (like Avon) that sells food items – ingredients, spices, sauces, mixes, etc. Someone at work sells it and this stuff is NOT cheap! I think the 12 oz. bottle (which I used almost all of) was $10 !!! It tasted really good, but I think that I can find something similar for a LOT less:

Two day old rice wine marinated radishes. Ick. I am very careful to only make enough for one meal now.

Soba – that tomato and cantaloupe salad is just stunning and sounds perfect for summer. dcarch – those tomatoes are killing me!!! Just gorgeous. Ruhlman’s Ratio Zucchini Fritters: With goat cheese. These were great – even I liked them (NOT a zucchini fan). Tomatoes and marinated cucumbers: We also had scrambled eggs for a little protein and croissants.

For breakfast this morning, Mr. Kim had a lamb hash redo and I had fried egg, bacon, hash browns w/ onion, tomato (CSA box heirloom) and toasted baguette: That was at 9:30 – I didn’t get hungry again until 3pm!

The lamb hash recipe is here.

Ahh, I see now. I wasn't paying close enough attention (a constant this season) and didn't realize that the cauliflower was so finely chopped. I still don't get why the judges would get their knickers in a twist about it, though. That's just how they are. I can just as easily imagine them getting huffy about NOT washing it and wasting food as I can them getting huffy about feeding them food that had been on the ground.

OK, I had another WTF? moment in the last episode. Maybe I am again confused and someone can help. When Kevin's cauliflower falls in the grass, he decides (against other's advice) to not use it and get something else. It grew in dirt. Covered with organic matter (fertilizer). Couldn't he have...oh, maybe WASHED it? They had raw meat, so obviously there was something set up to wash. A sink or something? It reminded me of my great aunt who refused to use fresh vegetables because they were 'dirty'. Canned and frozen were 'clean'. So - am I missing something here?

Breakfast this morning: Lamb hash (with Mr. Kim’s leftover smoked lamb), poached eggs, cherries, CSA cantaloupe, CSA Hanover tomatoes and some good seed bread from Whole Foods. The hash was wonderful. I riffed on a recipe for roast beef hash from Saveur.

pierogi – the figs sound fantastic. I found a wonderful sounding recipe for fig-lemon preserves a few weeks ago and have been wanting to try it. They had beautiful looking figs at Costco last weekend and I was desolate that I didn’t have time to make the preserves. David – that lamb is absolutely gorgeous and so is the romaine. I love grilled romaine, but haven’t made it myself yet. Shelby-girl!!! Hey! Haven’t ‘seen’ you lately. I must not be hanging out at the cool eG spots!

Not really with the beans - you still have to do a soak - even a quick soak and pressure cooking couldn't have been done in the 45 minutes. See, my thought on that was when they went to shop at whole foods and plan what they had to prep, they had in mind all *three* courses, and had to automatically assume they would be cooking all three. So those that planned on doing beans, would (or should) have started them right when they get back to the kitchen, since they were told to plan for all three meals. So with that in mind, I think Tom C was right. Ahh. My mistake then. I didn't remember that they got to do any actual food prep before the 45 minutes started. That would have left plenty of time to do the beans in a pressure cooker.

And why do so many restaurant websites forget to mention what city and state/country they are in? It's the INTERNET folks. I can stumble onto a website for a restaurant in Outer Mongolia from my little house in Virginia. I'd love to know if it's possible for me to actually GET THERE!

Kerry - I am in awe of your energy. And your cooking! Anna - everything looked delightful, but I'm thinking that a visit from Merry Maids would have made the perfect anniversary gift for you!

Not really with the beans - you still have to do a soak - even a quick soak and pressure cooking couldn't have been done in the 45 minutes.