Kim Shook

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!

Well, Anna, I don't know how the not treating lunch as an afterthought project is going, but your photos are GORGEOUS! Nice job.

Soba – beautiful, beautiful squid dish! Nick – I’ve heard of vanilla w/ lobster, but never tried it. I want to now – it looks lovely. djyee – the next time we roast pork, I want to make that EXACT sandwich. Fantastic! dcarch – Bacon rings for scallops? Genius!!! Mr. Kim went out to the farm where we get Hanover tomatoes last night and picked up some tomatoes, so we had the first of the season fried green tomatoes: Fantastic! We really didn’t need another thing. We could have just eaten a plate of these for dinner. But we also had some zucchinis from the CSA box that needed cooking: I sautéed them with tomatoes and onions. I didn’t like them of course, but Mr. Kim, who doesn’t usually like zucchinis either loved them. I put them in an omelet for him: We also had sausage rolls and the obligatory summer salad:

Dinner tonight started with a salad: That’s CSA Bibb and carrots – everything else is just grocery store stuff. Slow cooker London Broil w/ Bisto gravy and onions, CSA potatoes, green beans and crusty bread. With gravy: I have about had it with fresh green beans. They purport to be stringless and certainly there is nothing there when you try to string them, but once they are cooked, its like eating a plate of green dental floss. They tasted really good, though.

These collards were very young and tender, so they didn't cook as long as the ones that I get in the winter, but the method was the same. I fry up some sidemeat until it gives up most of it's fat. Add the washed and torn collards to the pan and cover with water. Add lots of pepper, a little hot sauce and (our family secret to great greens - a smidge of brown sugar). Bring to a boil and and cook until tender. I never need to add salt, but taste at the end to see if you need more pepper, hot sauce or brown sugar. Sometimes I'll fry some onions with the sidemeat and we always add vinegar at the table. The onions and sauerkraut were just fried in the pan after I did the sausage - I do the onions until browned and sticky and add the sauerkraut at the last minute. We like really strong sauerkraut, so I use canned and don't rinse it. And the fries were frozen!

Welcome, Daniel! I usually don't have a hard time the first few weeks of summer - the hot weather still new and (somewhat) welcome. I'm ready for all the fresh vegetables and grilling and all. When they are in, I can eat nothing but sliced tomatoes and corn for days. Summertime is a good time to grill fish. It's good hot the day you cook it and is wonderful cold (especially salmon and trout) the next day on top of a big salad. What Doodad said goes for me, too. When it gets to the middle of the summer is when I start to get so tired of summer food that I can't think straight. I feel that if I see another salad I'll go around the bend. I'm ready to donate the grill to the Salvation Army. At that point, when fall stews and braises beckon, but it's still too hot to even think about cooking such things, your pressure cooker is your friend. Crank up the AC, put some short ribs in the PC, pour a nice glass of red wine (no Pimms or G&Ts) and relax.

Dinner tonight: Kielbasa w/ onions and sauerkraut, fries and collards from the CSA box. The collards were especially good – young and tender. There was lots of pot likker left after cooking the collards, so we had a treat: pot likker and cornbread croutons – crazy good !!!

Thanks so much! That looks like a good publication. I'll look at it in more depth when I get home!

For dessert last night, I made The Blissful Glutton's peach-cherry crisp: with vanilla bean ice cream on top: I’ve made this before and we like it a lot. You can assemble the whole thing before your guests arrive and stick it in the oven when you sit down for dinner. By the time you are ready for dessert, it’s hot and ready to be topped with ice cream. But the topping was different this time – less crumbly and browned. I think I know why: since three out of the four of us are diabetics, I tried using Sugar Twin Brown in place of regular brown sugar. It tasted fine, but the texture was off. I don’t think I’ll do that again. After all, with the fruit and the heavy carb load of flour and oatmeal and ice cream, a little regular brown sugar is hardly worth bothering about!

Prawn – Beautiful, as always and the proscuitto wrapped monkfish sounds awesome! MiFi – can you expand a little on the cod gratin? It sounds wonderful. Low effort dinner the other night: Some of Jessica’s sublime blueberry pancakes (leftover from a dinner that she had for friends), basted eggs and bacon. Simple, but very satisfying. We had our Father’s Day celebration last night. Jessica kidnapped Mr. Kim this morning for a Daddy/Daughter weekend. He doesn’t know it, but they are going to WV to raft on the New River. It’s something that he’s always wanted to do and hasn’t ever had the chance to. We had a bon voyage breakfast at Cracker Barrel this morning. And now, I have two days of solitude. Just me and the cat . We had Mr. Kim’s dad and stepmom over for dinner and started with this: Caprese w/ bocconcini and grape tomatoes – and some really huge, flavorful basil from the CSA. Dinner was: Ribs slaw w/ red wine vinegar, mayo and brown mustard. I often add some kind of mustard to slaw – we first tasted it at a little BBQ shack in NC and like it a lot. My version of CI’s Boston baked beans. cornbread gems Dessert was a peach-cherry crisp w/ vanilla bean ice cream:

Nope, not your imagination. There is a thin layer of sweetened sour cream that is put on in the last 10 minutes of cooking.

dystopiandreamgirl – let me add my kudos for that amazing cake. I am just in AWE! pastrygirl - every single one of those desserts sound amazing! How about some pictures? I made a low carb dessert for Mr. Kim tonight to welcome him home from Arizona: Lemon cheesecake. He’s diabetic and lately is being really careful with his carb intake. It’s really starting to make a difference in his blood sugar levels, so I’m trying to be supportive. This was made with Neufchâtel cheese, low fat sour cream and Splenda and it was delicious with a really good texture.

Blether – nice looking fish! robirdstx – I like the looks of your meatloaf, too! I’ve copied the recipe and will use it soon! Jmahl – the shrimp looks fantastic. When we were in NOLA in March, I enjoyed the shrimp and oysters and crab so much and it’s heartbreaking to know that it may be gone and that those folks who make their living bringing it to us will lose their livelihood. Dinner last night was a pizza made by Fat Guy’s method: Mr. Kim has been in AZ this past week and got home this morning. His welcome home dinner was all by-request: Salad with my dad’s paprika dressing Steamed, roasted new potatoes w/ parsley and olive oil Broccoli w/ lemon Peppered pork loin With the sauce – white wine, chicken stock, cream, sour cream and whole grain mustard. I surprised him with a low carb dessert: Lemon cheesecake

I've had this thread bookmarked forever and finally made a pizza tonight. My first successful pizza EVER! Nice crust and so EASY. I did a sausage and onion pizza and we really liked it a lot. I avoid making pizza because I've always had trouble rolling out the dough and doing the peel slide. This was great and I'll be able to make pizza anytime now. Thanks for starting this topic, Steven!