Kim Shook

Ooooh! Handwriting! I love seeing folks handwriting! That was a really cool gift, Chris.

Thanks, Rico! I'll pass the compliment on to Mr. Kim. Can't wait to see pics of your lamb. I think that pizza looks wonderful - gooey and crisp all at once - EXACTLY like pizza should be!

That's a really interesting article. I've been keeping track since 2000. I started actually writing in a blank book - pasting in pictures of my dishes or restaurants and now do it mostly on the computer. I prefer the books that I can hold in my hand and see the tucked in menus and invitations, etc., but the physical journals take up so much room:

Soba – crispy toast, indeed! That looks like English fried bread. Yum. Blether – meatloaf for breakfast is awesome. Period. percyn – from what restaurant did you get the duck pastrami and duck fat potatoes? Cuz we are planning to come to Pennsylvania sometime in the next year and that looks amazing! kayb – the only possible indecency re: fig jam is when there is only a little scritch left in the bottom of the jar. And no new jar in the pantry. Sunday we hosted a brunch at our house. I ended up being really inspired by a bunch of recipes from Cuisine at Home magazine’s April issue. A lot of what I served was from that issue. We started with a really good Lemonade Sangria: Really refreshing. Mr. Kim accused me of pulling a Sandra Lee with ‘choking hazards’ in my drinks! We had doughnuts from a new doughnut shop near us: They were pretty good, but nowhere near as good as the doughnuts at our favorite shop across town. Benedict Baskets w/ Julia Child’s blender hollandaise: These were great. English muffin baskets with eggs, Swiss cheese, spinach and tomato. Everyone loved them. Breakfast kebabs: Bacon, sausage and ham kebabs glazed with pecan-maple syrup, apple jelly and cinnamon. Genius! Pork sticks!!! Why hasn’t anyone ever thought of THIS before? Steamed shrimp with cocktail sauce: Mike’s smoked leg of lamb and Yogurt-garlic-mint sauce: Hanover tomatoes: Marinated cucumbers: Fruit salsa and pie crust chips: Hot potato salad: Another popular dish – everyone wanted the recipe for this one. Purchased mini croissants: Dessert was Pots du Crème and Limeade Tarts w/ Tart Cherry Sauce: Plated: The sangria, egg baskets, kebabs, fruit salsa, potatoes and limeade tarts were all from Cuisine at Home. I really like this magazine. I like the fact that there are no ads and everything that I’ve ever made has been very successful.

kayb – I’m glad that you liked the shrimp and corn. When Maggie talked about it on her blog, she talked about how simple, but how amazingly good it was. She was RIGHT! Loving the corn and black bean dishes, too! Time to make a bowlful of that. It goes with just about any summer meal that I can think of. dcarch – your pork tenderloin is just awesome looking. So thin and crackly looking! Mr. Kim smoked a leg of lamb Saturday: It was just as delicious and juicy and perfect as the last time: We also had roasted asparagus and potatoes: And possibly the LEAST appetizing looking dish I’ve ever served: These are wax beans from our CSA box. They tasted fine (stringy – my usual complaint about fresh beans), but, boy, they were ugly. I’ve never eaten wax beans before and the flavor isn’t different enough to put up with that horrible color. Regular green beans for me from now on. Some lovely Russian black bread that we got at Whole Foods: Plated: Dinner tonight: Another breakfast for dinner from me. Salad, ham and Cheddar omelets and more of those lovely beans .

I made two desserts for our Sunday brunch. Pots du Crème: I’ve done this recipe a couple of times before. It’s a Pioneer Woman recipe and amazingly good and easy. It’s all done in a blender with super hot milk or coffee. Incredibly smooth and rich. Limeade Tarts w/ Cherry Sauce: Really rich and creamy and refreshing. The cherry sauce was too thick – I misread the amount of cornstarch!

I love the look of that halvah! The halvah thread keeps calling to me!

Reading this is really setting me free! I am going to be much less regimented from now on seeing how all these good cooks disregard the 'rules'! I customarily double the salt in a recipe (especially a sweet recipe), quadruple the pepper and add hot sauce to anything cheesy or creamy whether the recipe calls for it or not. I do use extra vanilla, too. RE: the salted/unsalted butter issue. I can get sweet butter at Costco and prefer the flavor of it on bread, so that's what I keep on hand. I honestly don't think that my palate is sensitive enough to disern the difference in baked goods, but a thick smear of sweet butter with a scattering of coarse sea salt on a slice of crusty bread is heaven to me. I find the texture of 'sweated' onions unpleasant, so I always cook them to at least lightly browned, if not caramelized. I always sift 10X, if I'm using it for an icing, but only whisk flour.

I was confused about something: when Tom got all pissy about using canned beans he says something to the effect of "they couldn't cook a bag of beans". They had 45 minutes, right? So, NO Tom, they couldn't cook a bag of beans. Even in a pressure cooker the beans have to be presoaked. He didn't seem to be suggesting that the beans were a bad choice, just that they should have cooked from dried rather than canned. But they couldn't have been with the time constraints. I'd expect a chef of his caliber to know that. So - what am I missing? IS there a way to cook a bag of dried beans in 45 minutes?

Rico – that is some smoke ring on your brisket! Gorgeous. Soba – everything is beautiful, but the shrimp dish is really spectacular! Prawn – I really, really like the idea of fennel slaw, too! It was breakfast for dinner tonight: fried eggs and potatoes, Benton bacon (our favorite) and Hanover tomatoes. We got our shipment of Benton’s today, so breakfast for dinner was a given.

We actually just finished eggs, bacon, fried potatoes and sliced tomatoes. We have breakfast for dinner a lot. It’s quick and easy and besides, one of our favorite meals. I don’t have time to make breakfast for breakfast more than once or twice a week, so we like to squeeze in an extra one when we can. When our daughter (26 years old now) was a little girl, Friday night was pancake night. Pancakes (or waffles), eggs, bacon or sausage and fruit. After about 2 years, she asked plaintively one week, “Do we have to have breakfast for dinner every Friday?” I guess I overdid a good thing. She’s still not crazy about it.

Oh, yes...this, too!

Kent, you are in the wrong thread. This is for folks who LIKE canned foods ! Besides - I am a Southern cook. And I don't know if haricots verts would put up with ham hocks and long cooking.

Finally posted here this morning. You can stop crying now.

This is so funny. The very first thing that I thought of when I saw the topic was green beans. I do love fresh green beans, but have a problem with strings. I try to string them before cooking and get nothing, then after cooking THERE they are. Like a mouthful of dental floss. And frozen green beans have a horrible texture - tough and bouncy - no matter how long you cook them, they never seem to get tender. I also prefer canned sauerkraut to the 'better quality' bagged kind. We like REALLY sharp sauerkraut and find that the canned (unrinsed) more to our taste. Tomatoes for cooking, too. Even when good fresh are available.

Made a coffee cake for work last night: It’s basically a cake mix fix up recipe that I got from someone at another website. It is very good and not overly sweet. I’m sure that everyone at work will love it, but I’ve made the Lois’ Best Coffee Cake that Maggie posted and it is faster, tastier and calls for no convenience products, so I don’t know that I’d bother with this one again.

I'm sorry, dear! I haven't put it on the site yet - it was a new recipe. I'll let you know when it's on - probably tomorrow. It's really, really easy, too!

Mr. Kim came home from the farm stand on Saturday with a pile of cucumbers, so I started them yesterday. I did my regular cider vinegar this time, but next week we'll grab some more and I will do a rice vinegar batch too.

Soba – beautiful fish. And I love the idea of using corn with it – perfect. For dinner Saturday, I made Tortilla soup. My MIL has a pot-luck for our family Christmas gathering every year on Dec. 26th. At that point we are all turkey and ham weary, so we have everything from bright, fresh salads to pancit. My BIL has lived in Arizona for years and one year this was his contribution. It has become a tradition. It’s a very simple soup – but really, really good. The accoutrements: Soup: With all the fixin’s: Served with salad and sliced tomatoes: I haven’t been at all pleased with the quality of the farm stand tomatoes yet this year.

Well, everything that y'all had sounds a lot more interesting that what we had! We spent the 4th quietly with friends. Just talk and cards and food! Perfect. There were even some fireworks being set off at a nearby baseball field that we could just see. They provided the burgers, dogs, brats and macaroni and cheese. I did snacks and dessert. Tortilla rolls ups: Filled with bean and cheese dips and topped with cream cheese. Gingered shrimp: Frying cheese w/ honey served with pita chips Fluffy Pink Lemonade Dessert w/ Pretzel crust: slice: Messy to cut, but it was very light and tart and everyone loved it.

lizztwozee – Your cake is gorgeous and delicious sounding! I would be thrilled to produce something that looked like that. You want paltry – read on: For our Independence day celebration, I made something called ‘Fluffy Pink Lemonade Dessert w/ Pretzel Crust: It is a recipe from one of those checkout magazines that I can somehow never resist. I almost never cook from them, but I must buy them. This one was a Betty Crocker Summer Appetizer issue, but had a whole section of desserts. I couldn’t resist the lemon and the pink of this recipe. It had the whole cast: Cool Whip, instant pudding and even food coloring! It was actually really light and refreshing. The tartness of the lemonade concentrate balanced the sweetness pretty well. Everyone loved it and I took very little home. Slice: Very messy slices – wish it firmed up more.

percyn - that entire meal looks awesome! Did you make it or was it a restaurant meal? 'Cause if you made it, I want your crabcake recipe!!!

Rico – thank you so much! Tried a new method of poaching eggs tonight. Mr. Kim wanted another one of those salads w/ a poached egg on top and I’d heard about this method on another thread here. Basically you put the eggs in individual plastic wrap bags and drop them into boiling water. The directions say to boil them for 2 1/2 minutes. Yeah. I’m thinking that some other people eat eggs at a point that I would consider revolting. I took them a little too far, but I think that they would be perfect at somewhere around 5 minutes. I snipped the bags at 2 1/2 minutes and there was lots of raw white. At one more minute, there was still raw white. One more – still needed a little bit of time. But another minute was slightly too much. They were beautiful, though. And I like the fact that you can get them in their little bags ahead of time and set them in the fridge until ready to cook. I think that once I have the timing down, this will be my poached egg method. Egg baggies: Cooking: Pretty eggs: Salad:

percyn – all that lobster! Wow! deensiebat – I really want a piece of that pizza. I haven’t gotten any scapes this year – those are gorgeous. For some crazy reason, summer is fried chicken time. Hot or cold, we in the South seem to crave it when the temperature goes up. So you find some poor perishing cook sweating over a hot skillet, frying up chicken pieces. Makes no sense, but we do it. Jessica has been asking for fried chicken lately, so I thought that it would make a good Sunday dinner. I make a lot of different versions of fried chicken, but my go-to recipe is from “Endangered Recipes” by Lari Robling. It’s called Shelly’s Fried Chicken and calls for Sazon and lemonade Kool-Aid among other things. It’s a crazy sounding combination, but it’s the best fried chicken I’ve ever made. I usually brine it with either a salt and brown sugar or iced tea brine, but I had a lot of buttermilk, so I soaked it in the buttermilk overnight instead. I rubbed the spice mixture on the drained chicken, then dredged in flour and refrigerated it for one hour before frying. It turned out beautifully: There was also gravy: salad: sliced tomatoes: mashed potatoes: biscuits: (they were frozen ) Plated: Dinner tonight was from maggiethecat’s blog “Cheap and Cheerful”: Originally from epicurious.com, this is a wonderful blend that is much greater than the sum of it’s parts. It is simply shrimp, scallions and corn cut off the cob sautéed in butter and topped with fresh basil. That’s it – 5 ingredients. It couldn’t be more fresh tasting – summer on a plate. Served with garlic bread and tomatoes.

Richard, I just love it when I see you've posted something. It is like opening a surprise gift of something you've always wanted. Gorgeous!