Kim Shook

A couple of recent purchases. I found the first two at an antique store and Mr. Kim surprised me with the Duncan Hines "Bake Shop in a Book" off my wish list.

@Pete Fred – My daughter and I really want a piece of that final lardy cake. It looks perfectly perfect! @RWood – toasted coconut is one of my favorite flavors. Your Mama is a lucky woman! I made a Kentucky Brown Sugar Pound cake for the birthday of one of Mr. Kim’s staffers: He managed to bring pieces home for Jessica and me. It was really good – nice crumb and a delicate brown sugar flavor.

We luckily have a small "college fridge" in our family room, so that will be the home for the giant jar. So, do you agree with @Senior Sea Kayaker that she can back off the spices a little? My thinking was that in all that brine a smaller amount would flavor the pickle just as much as a large amount would. Does that compute?

Yes, she just does raw vegetables - she doesn't process them in any way. She's found that between what we eat and what she shares with others a lot get used up fairly quickly. It helps that she uses hard vegetables - carrots, cauliflower, garlic cloves, green beans, etc. - no soft stuff like cucumbers. I suspected that she could cut back on the spices. Thank you!

Jessica has been doing pickled vegetables for awhile now, with great success. She's been putting them in different sized Mason jars, but has gotten ahold of a giant 128 oz. pickle jar and is thinking of doing one large batch instead of multiple jars. She has two questions: 1. Is this a good idea at all? Or should she just stick with the smaller individual jars? 2. If this is a good idea, she wonders if, as she is multiplying the amounts of her ingredients, should she equally multiply the spices. I.E. - if a recipe calls for 3 cups of vinegar, 2 1/2 T. kosher salt, 3 tablespoons coriander seeds, mustard seeds, and whole peppercorns, and she's going to multiply it by three; should she multiply the vinegar, salt, and spices TOO? Or multiply only the vinegar and hold back a bit on the other stuff? Thanks in advance for your help!

The butters are from all over Europe and the US. I noticed Irish, Scandanavian, French, and goat's milk butter from somewhere. Also local Amish butter. I have no idea about this, but I honestly don't remember EVER hearing a complaint about any freshness issues when we lived out there and can't find any online complaints on that score.

This is very delayed, but I thought it might make fun reading for some folks, so I’ll go ahead. We left Richmond on April 7th to drive to Ohio/Indiana for the solar eclipse on the 8th. Breakfast was at Kathy’s in Staunton VA. Mr. Kim and I ate there last year on our anniversary trip and loved it. I had the biscuits and gravy with fried eggs and their fantastic fried potatoes: The gravy looks so blah, but it is delicious – loaded with sausage flavor even though it doesn’t seem to have a lot of crumbled sausage in it. Mr. Kim had the country ham breakfast with potatoes, grits, biscuits, and eggs: The ham was SO good, though oddly the fat on the edge wasn’t snipped and it curled into a bowl. Unfortunately, Jessica wasn’t happy with her meal: She got the lemon-blueberry pancakes. I’m not sure why, but she expected that the lemon flavor would be IN the pancakes instead of a drizzle of what seemed to be lemon curd. I thought they were fantastic. Determined to hit as many of our favorite restaurants as possible in the OH/IN area, we stopped for dinner at Big Boy in Ohio south of Cincinnati. Big Boy is less “Big” than I remember: I got the Big Boy burger and crinkle cuts: Jessica got a double cheeseburger and onion rings: Mr. Kim got the pork tenderloin and rings: The burgers, fries, and rings were great. The tenderloin tasted good, but it was a little too thick and not quite crisp enough. Eclipse Day!!! We were so fortunate to find a church that was taking donations for parking at their lot to watch the eclipse. We’d seen up to $50 and they said any amount. We gave them $20. It was far enough out in the country that there wasn’t a lot of noise or buildings or busy-ness. They were selling hot dogs, chips, and drinks – so that was lunch. Sun gazing: They were even selling T-shirts! Dinner that night was White Castle: Cheeseburgers, onion chips, and crinkle cuts. The 9th was the drive home with two important stops before we left Cincinnati. The first was the incredible Jungle Jim’s grocery store. It was amazing when we shopped there in the early 1990s when we lived in Batesville, IN. It is truly mind blowing now. Calling it a grocery store is hardly sufficient. There ARE groceries, of course, but SO much more including a section of housewares and kitchen equipment larger than any Williams-Sonoma I’ve ever seen. They also have an entire room devoted to modern culture kitsch – Funko, lunch boxes, action figures, etc. – on TV shows, movie franchises, Anime, etc. And then there’s the food. The cool thing about Jungle Jim’s is that while you can get an incredible assortment of specialty and “gourmet” foods, you can also find everyday items. Some of the deli/charcuterie area: Cheese selection: c The butter bar – which is actually two sided: Gummy candies: The Pez display – half of it. It’s also two sided: Part of the bakery/pastry case: All kinds of meats: They have an incredible seafood section – especially considering that they are in the Midwest: A small part of their hot sauces: Jerky: Their international food is arranged by country and some of them were amazing to see – Sri Lanka, Iceland, Nepal, Togo. My anglophile self was, of course, drawn to the British section. Cadbury selection: Sauces and canned/bottled things: I can get HP and Branston pickle, but they had Daddies which I can never find in my area. My mother would have been so excited to see the Bisto powder. She always preferred it to the granules: Frozen stuff: The oil aisle: Popcorn stunt eating: Our last restaurant stop in Cincinnati was a late lunch at Skyline Chili. This is how our food was delivered: I got a four way with beans (spaghetti, chili, beans, and cheese) and Mr. Kim got a 5-way (all that plus onions): Jessica opted for a new, to us, item – a “Chilito”: Basically, a flour tortilla stuffed with chili and cheese. Kind of underwhelming. All three of us had Coneys – little hot dogs topped with chili, mustard, cheese and onions: Rode all the way home wishing I could have another one for dinner, so I think that means the meal was good! Just a portion of the culinary goodies we came home with: I’m actually embarrassed at the top picture. We love trying interesting and new foods for videos that Jessica posts to FB, but that is ridiculous. In the bottom photo, the mock turtle soup is something that we discovered when we lived in IN. Folks would get together and make gallons of the stuff – the ones that I had were all made with beef, turkey, and vegetables and everything is ground up. It’s quite a production, so I thought I’d see what the canned stuff was like. The next two cans are probably mistakes – I saw the “famous” names and neglected to read the ingredients. They are both mostly beans – one has NO meat at all. The crock, lid, and weight are probably the most interesting purchases. Mr. Kim has decided that he’d like to try making sauerkraut. I’m looking forward to that! One more Jungle Jim purchase: Really good cheese balls. From the left: olive, beef & onion, and white cheddar. We had a really wonderful time and even got to go back to the little town in Indiana that we used to live in. Mr. Kim and I had been back more recently, but Jessica hadn’t been since she was in grade school and it has changed so much. It was fun watching her see what has changed and what hasn’t. We love road trips and weren’t in a special hurry, so this was a really good one. EDITED TO FIX PICTURE ORDER

Welcome to eG, @rukie! I think you'll find a LOT of help here!

Glad you're home! Take care!

I was in the hospital for a few days last week. I had pneumonia and managed to cough my way into an abdominal hematoma (????? I had no idea that that was a thing). The hospital was part of the same corporation as the one I was in back last summer. The food there was surprisingly good, as I reported. This one was less so. Still, better than other hospitals I’ve been to and what others have reported. One nice thing (no idea if this is common) is that you can order a guest meal, free of charge. So, Mr. Kim didn’t have to go foraging for meals while I was there. Here’s a sample of what I had. This was the only meal that I didn’t specifically order. I was admitted too late to order lunch, so this is what they automatically sent: Fruit, glazed carrots, grilled chicken, and rice pilaf. The fruit was mostly cantaloupe and honeydew, neither of which I like. I don’t eat cooked carrots. The chicken was tender, but seriously over-peppered (and I love pepper) and the pilaf was simply brown rice – cooked ok, though. I did order dinner: This was much better. A really nice salad (terrible salad dressing, though – some fat free raspberry balsamic mess) and good egg salad. I also was able to order breakfast the next day: This was kind of comical. The peaches were tasteless. You can’t tell, but the SINGLE pancake was about 3-inches wide. But it was cooked perfectly and tasted really good. I’m sure it was from a mix, but I was happy with the flavor. Even the sugar free syrup was ok. They forgot my bacon, though. Lunch: This was really good. Vegetable soup that was obviously made there. Some of the vegetables were certainly frozen, but the carrots and potatoes were fresh, I think. Nice flavor, too. And then just a simple, good tuna salad sandwich. For dinner, with trepidation, I ordered a burger: I was pleasantly surprised. It was pretty good. Juicy, nice char and it tasted BEEFY. The only issue was that they didn’t send any mustard. What kind of animals are working in that kitchen😁?? Another nice salad (I got smart and got Mr. Kim to smuggle in a packet of Caesar from the cafeteria). And I’m sure that there’s a piece of fruit somewhere – I think I requested either an apple or banana with every meal. My last meal before being discharged (yay!): Decently scrambled eggs (they were even warm), under-toasted toast, and they remembered my pork!

I do have some kind of press, but only because Jessica and Mr. Kim love using one. I either use a knife or this if it is a lot of garlic.

I’d love the opportunity to taste all of the gorgeous goodies that you all have been posting. I’ve only got a couple and they are not as delectable as all of these! For what has turned into an annual event, Jessica and I spent the Saturday morning before Easter at church dipping strawberries, marshmallows, and pretzels in chocolate for the champagne reception after the Easter Vigil. Marshmallows and pretzels: The stuff in the center is edible (but not tasty) Easter grass. Pretzels: The bunnies are more edible decorations. They tasted for all the world like banana flavored communion wafers 😄. Platters of strawberries: Jessica and I both made desserts for Easter. Her pineapple icebox pie: My roasted strawberry cheesecake: Both of the desserts were served with dollops of Cool Whip. The cheesecake was also sprinkled with pulverized freeze dried strawberries. I made a blueberry breakfast cake for a meeting of the Episcopal Church Women at church one Saturday morning: It was very popular, as always. I was only able to save Mr. Kim and Jessica one piece to share:

@C. sapidus – Thank you! And, no, we didn’t get the lobster roll, but we almost stopped there. We ended up at the ToDo instead, which was great but I love a lobster roll! I’ve had a hard time getting caught up lately and I think I’ll just cut and paste from my breakfast post today to explain: “UPDATE: Well, I had this all ready to post back on 4/29, but I ended up in the hospital that night through yesterday. Sigh. I’m home and doing better now, but I’d better post quickly before something else happens! Once again, I’m having to say sorry that I’ve been absent for so long. I’ve had more health issues. I seem to just be starting to get past my second bout of pneumonia since January and the COPD is still kicking my butt. All three of us have had upper respiratory stuff for the past week or so, but only Jessica and I advanced to pneumonia. Mr. Kim was lucky enough to avoid that. Which meant, of course, that he ended up taking care of us! Poor fellow. Anyway, I haven’t been doing a lot of cooking in the past couple of weeks. If I dated my meals, you’d see that they go back to the beginning of April.” Just a couple of lunches (I’ll put the hospital stuff in that thread). We drove to Cincinnati/Indiana to see the eclipse and brought back our favorite fast food leftovers and some local specialties. One lunch was White Castle and Grippos potato chips: I did a turkey breast one night and had the leftovers for lunch the next day. Split whomp Crescent rolls: Turkey: Dressing: GRAVY!!!! Post church lunch at our favorite local deli: The club was a bit disappointing. Very little bacon and no ham. I guess I haven’t had a club there in a long time because I would have sworn that their club was turkey AND ham.

This is most definitely me. I’m fairly open to “different” things later in the day (within reason), but for breakfast, I want my toast, eggs, and meat (mainly pork) and sometimes something sweet – pancakes, cinnamon rolls, etc. UPDATE: Well, I had this all ready to post back on 4/29, but I ended up in the hospital that night through yesterday. Sigh. I’m home and doing better now, but I’d better post quickly before something else happens 😉! Once again, I’m having to say sorry that I’ve been absent for so long. I’ve had more health issues. I seem to just be starting to get past my second bout of pneumonia since January and the COPD is still kicking my butt. All three of us have had upper respiratory stuff for the past week or so, but only Jessica and I advanced to pneumonia. Mr. Kim was lucky enough to avoid that. Which meant, of course, that he ended up taking care of us! Poor fellow. Anyway, I haven’t been doing a lot of cooking in the past couple of weeks. If I dated my meals, you’d see that they go back to the beginning of April. A few assorted breakfasts – they are a combination of Mr. Kim (bless him) and me when I felt up to it: Eggs and leftover pancakes and ham. Easter eggs, ham, and toast. The eggs were cooked together. One has NO green and the other does 🙄. Toast, scrambled eggs w/ cheese, and the last of the Easter ham. I ended up buying another small ham. We had a LOT of @Tropicalsenior’s fabulous mustard sauce left! Eggs, ham, toast, and Watergate salad. Grilled bacon, egg, and cheese. Grilled ham, egg, and cheese: Ham, egg, and cheese on a croissant. with tots: Campari tomatoes on toast, sliced bananas with raw honey, and fried ham. ET bagel with whipped cream cheese. I love whipped cream cheese, but I’m usually too cheap to buy it 😁. Lidl croissant dug out of the freezer, split and toasted, sage sausage, fried eggs, and a cut up pear.

Just checking in and saw your travels and travails! I'm so sorry that you all had to go through all of that while on the road and so glad that your darling is on the mend. Remember to take care of yourself as you take care of him. Glad to see you got home safe and sound. Hugs from me.

You kindly directed me to the recipe a few years ago and it was a huge success when I served it. SO good! Thanks for the reminder.

Jessica and I have had these at H-Mart in Northern VA. We loved them. They are certainly over the top, but in a fun, quirky way. Koreans have a knack for taking foods, trends, etc. from other cultures and making them even more inviting.

It's hard for me to be objective when he's such a known asshead.

It just occurred to me that the thing I was thinking of using them on is probably a bad idea. I was thinking that they would be great on my KA mixer. It is SO heavy and it sits far back in the only corner of my counter top. That is really the only place for it and it's a pain to pull out to use. But if it has the sliders on it, I'm betting that it would slide right off the counter when I'm mixing something heavy. It already shimmies a bit. LOL. I think I'd better stick to manhandling it. Thank you!

We went for a short (1 overnight) trip to the Northern Neck (a region in Virginia off the east coast) to celebrate our 42nd wedding anniversary. Stopped in Tappahannock for lunch at the To Do Café. I had the “pick two” with oysters and shrimp: Served with hush puppies, butter beans and excellent onion rings: Mr. Kim had the catfish, hush puppies, and housemade potato chips: Everything was great – we just happened upon it online and picked it because it was close to the museum we went to, and we liked the menu! Mr. Kim was out of town judging a BBQ competition, so I was on my own for Sunday brunch. I gave a nearby, but never yet visited Chinese restaurant a try. I’d heard that they had a Sunday buffet and I love buffets, but Mr. Kim doesn’t so it seemed perfect timing. Well, they don’t have a buffet, but I went ahead and had lunch with mixed results. Spring roll and hot and sour soup: The spring roll was fine – nothing special and the soup was incredibly peppery. Even Mr. Kim thought so when he ate the leftovers. The Mongolian beef: The menu said that this was flank steak fried with spring onions and bamboo shoots. It was easily half assorted mushrooms and lotus root. Really vegetable heavy, but the flavor was good – not overly spicy. The side dish of fried rice was a nice surprise: Nowadays when they ask if you want white or fried rice with your meal, I feel like you’re not really getting fried rice when you choose that option. Even at good places, it always just tastes like unseasoned plain brown rice. This was definitely fried in a wok with seasoning and some vegetables. I don’t imagine I’ll ever go back there with Yen Ching (“our place”) around the corner, but I’m glad I tried it after almost 30 years of living within 2 miles of it! Another lunch was leftovers from a dinner out the night before: Half a Sailor and some hard to find Wise salt and vinegar chips – the best! A Sailor is a Richmond VA sandwich tradition. Knockwurst, pastrami, and Swiss on grilled rye bread. It’s probably available all over the place, but if you Google “Sailor sandwich”, the references are all Richmond. I’m trying really hard to get through a bunch of OLD stuff in the freezer and pantry. So weird meals that other people purchased but aren’t eating. These taquitos were yesterday’s lunch, I guess: They were crunchy 🙄😑.

@NadyaDuke – I am extremely judgey about hashbrowns and those Hawaiian ones look amazing. March 20th was our 42nd wedding anniversary. We took a little one night trip out to what’s called the Northern Neck of VA. It’s a lovely little area between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers on the Chesapeake Bay. Tiny, charming riverside towns and villages. Interesting stores, antiquing, and surprisingly good food. We had breakfast on our anniversary at the Kilmarnock Inn where we were staying. These lovely, tender, still-warm little scones were an amuse: I got the eggs Benedict: Probably my all-time favorite breakfast dish. If it is on the menu, I’m almost always going to order it. This was really good. The ham was top quality, the hollandaise the perfect texture and the egg was cooked exactly right: They put it on a biscuit instead of an English muffin, which would have been fine, but the biscuit was a bit tough – like it had spent too long in a steam drawer. Mr. Kim got the scrambled eggs with spinach, bacon, onions, and Swiss cheese: Both breakfasts came with their country style potatoes, which we loved. Went to a great little bakery called Out of the Oven bakery in White Stone and got some goodies, including this pumpernickel loaf: A few meals have featured this including a couple of breakfasts. For this one, I toasted some slices and served it with what was intended to be a cheese omelet: It was a mess, but tasted good. This morning was an orange blossom muffin that I got at Old Farm Truck Market in White Stone last week. It got buried in the breadbasket and I forgot about it. I figured it was stale when I unearthed it this morning, but when I heated it on bake/steam in the CSO, it was fine. Nice crumb and beautifully scented with orange: A little while later – 2nd breakfast: Heavily buttered toast, baked beans, scrambled eggs.

Lunch the other day was a hot chicken sandwich with gravy, dressing, mashed potatoes, and salad greens with Dorothy Lynch dressing (thanks @Shelby!): Without: And WITH 😍: Yesterday being Sunday is considered “little Easter” and we get to eat out (we’ve given up restaurant eating for Lent and will be donating the $$ we save to the food pantry and an Iranian family our church is sponsoring)! We went to a Greek place we hadn’t been to in a long time. We ordered the small mixed grill and shared it. For $24 we got fries: Greek salad: Choban salad, pita, tzatziki, stewed green beans, beefteki, chicken souvlaki, and lamb/beef gyro: Everything was delicious and probably enough food for 4 people.

@Ann_T – I’m still catching up. I hope Moe’s dental surgery went well and that he’s eating more like he likes now. A couple of recent meals: Toasted Lidl baguette and sage sausage. And another… Toasted Lidl baguette, scrambled eggs with catsup, and Jones link sausages. I love these sausage links so much and they are SO hard to find. Everyone has the already cooked ones, but almost no one stocks the raw, frozen ones and the ones that do run out so fast. Today – late breakfast: French toast from the freezer, scrambled eggs with cheese, Benton’s country ham, and a tiny mandarin orange.

@weinoo - I just put a hold on Jubilee at the library. Abebooks.com has a couple copies for $12 free shipping. If I like it, I'll hope they still have them! Thanks for posting that. So, do these count? 😄😄😄 Jessica picked these up for me during one of her thrifting jaunts. The first one is from 1966, the second from 2007, and the third from 1987. I've been watching a fun YouTube channel lately called Cooking the Books. She collects and cooks recipes from cookbooks and pamphlets from mostly the 1940s-1970s. She's in her early 40s, so it's all "retro-new" to her, but to me it represents some memories - of eating these foods from my grandmothers and mother and from my own interest in vintage cookbooks. I'd kind of gone away from that in the past couple of years, but I've gotten more interested again watching this channel. I can't help but think of @David Ross and how much he would have enjoyed her.

That lime and Ritz cracker pie is fantastic. Perfect for hot weather and I've never had anyone not like it. I meant to try other versions - lemon, orange, grapefruit - but I've never gotten around to it. Maybe this summer!