Kim Shook

Cleaning out the freezer unearthed these from a few months ago: These are made the with recipe that I got from @JohnT a few years ago. They are really, really good.

Dinner tonight was all leftovers for me – the rest of my sandwich from our lunch after church today and corn and stuffing from Thanksgiving: The sandwich was a steak and cheese.

We’ve had a few leftover whomp biscuits from me making a Thanksgiving morning casserole, so I made this for Mr. Kim for lunch a couple of days ago: Sausage and egg biscuit and berries. My lunch the same day: Cold turkey sliders with mayo and Napa cabbage. Today we had a post church lunch at our local deli, Boychik’s. It was drizzly and chilly, so matzoh ball soup seemed to be in order: I didn’t realize the picture was blurry until I uploaded it. Mr. Kim had the corned beef, pastrami, and slaw: I had the steak and cheese:

@liuzhou – So sorry that you are back in the hospital! I hope you can go home soon and continue your back recovery. Not eating breakfast much this week. I had a ham biscuit a few days ago: Just a whomp biscuit and one of those sliced, boneless ham chunks. But it was pretty good just the same.

@MaryIsobel – I hope you do try the sausage gravy. It’s like nothing else and very good. The only thing I’d add to @Shelby’s directions are to let it cook low for a few minutes after it thickens to really let the flavors get together. I do mine for about 15 minutes (VERY low). I also add a little scraping of nutmeg at the end. Side note: I have a niece who lives in Abbotsford. It looks like you probably pass right through/by there on your way to Bellingham. I love little connections like that! @Tempest63 – your blended family sounds like mine. When my father and stepmom retired to Florida, they purposely moved near where my mother and stepdad had already moved because they all were such good friends. Make it so much easier on the children. @Shelby – those scalloped potatoes look scrumptious! I love how brown and crispy you got the top. That’s EXACTLY how I’d like mine to look. Also, it looks to me like you did your quesadillas in a panini press. Is that right? I never thought to do that, but maybe I’ll get Mr. Kim to dig my press out of the attic and give it a try. @rotuts – I agree with you about the Campari tomatoes. They, along with grape tomatoes are really the only kind I’ll buy out of summer time. As I said in the breakfast and lunch threads, I’ve been MIA lately due to a lot of things, but I hope to improve my attendance 🙂. With the holidays looming, we’ll see, but I promise to try. I have been keeping up on coming and looking at the fantastic meals that everyone has been serving. I’ll show some meals that I’ve served over the last few weeks. We’ve done a LOT of eating out and take away - both with guests and on our own, so I’ve mostly left those meals out and just showing things that we’ve actually cooked. Sorry in advance for this being so long. When our Florida guests were here, I did a ham dinner. Started with some pickly stuff: Jessica made Mr. Kim’s grandmother’s tomato pickles, My NC grandma’s Easy Pickles, Jessica’s pickled vegetables, my marinated cucumbers, and some dill pickles. My SIL’s Ham w/ Brown Sugar & Pineapple: It’s a slow cooker recipe that she does a spiral sliced ham with, but I don’t like those, so I always use those Costco Master Carver hams. Fantastic. Pineapple/brown sugar sauce from the ham and @Tropicalsenior’s Gourmet Mustard: IP Green beans: Slow Cooker Candied Orange Sweet Potatoes: IP collards: Cornbread: Dessert was just purchased lemon chess tarts: Another dinner with our friends. Salad with Momofuko dressing: Spaghetti with Bolognese: Crusty bread stuffed with garlic butter: This is a upgrade of what I call “Momma garlic bread”. My mom used to buy supermarket “Italian” bread, slice it almost all the way through and stuff it with soft butter and garlic powder before wrapping in foil and baking. It had so much butter that is would literally be dripping with melted butter when unwrapped. I got a good, rustic loaf and used actual garlic, but it was VERY buttery! Spaghetti leftovers when our friends were gone – salad: Fried yellow squash: Spaghetti with Bolognese: Kielbasa, kraut, sautéed potatoes, and broccoli: Salad with ham and provolone: Steamed shrimp (from Costco): Bread and Boursin: A more recent dinner was a shortcut Instagram recipe for chicken and dumplings: It included a rotisserie chicken, chicken broth/stock (it called for a box, but since I had the bones and scraps from the rotisserie chicken, I just made a quick IP stock), canned chicken gravy, cream of onion soup (it called for cream of mushroom, which I detest), and whomp biscuits. I added Bell’s Seasoning, parsley, and lots of pepper. It was actually quite good. Served with limas, slaw, and kraut: One night Jessica made the viral Big Mac tacos and tots: Not bad – her “Special Sauce” was especially good. I had some thawed ground beef that needed to be cooked and some Spanish Rice Rice-A-Roni and thought of a dish I used to make years ago when we were first married and broke. A young girl (newly married and broke like us) I worked with gave me a recipe for this: Basically, you make the Rice-A-Roni and add some cooked ground beef. I also add some sauteed onions. I haven’t made it for years and when I tasted it after making it I was really disappointed. It just didn’t taste the way I remembered. Not nearly as good. So, I put it away and thought that we’d get through it, and I’d never make it again. I tried it the next day and lo and behold, it tasted good – the way I remember. Apparently, all it needed was to become leftovers! We did decide that next time I make it, I’ll use crushed tomatoes – we really don’t care for hot chunks of tomato. Spanish Beef & Rice, salad, and a biscuit: A tossed together dinner of the contents of our deli/cheese drawer and salads. Cheeses: Starting at 12 o’clock: Port wine & Cheddar, Boursin, Cheddar and Gouda cubes, aged Gouda, St. Agur bleu, and another chunk of Cheddar. Salami, Ham, crackers and bread: Salads: Mr. Kim’s with pickled beets and tomatoes, mine with hearts of palm, and Jessica’s with just lettuce, endive, and cucumbers (she pickled all of my carrots). Yet another meal starting with some pickly stuff: And breakfast for dinner: Panettone French toast, ham, bacon, some terrible pineapple (it was tasteless and crunchy), and cottage cheese. Used up the Momofuku dressing with this dinner. Salad: Tempura shrimp from the freezer, Spanish Rice-A-Roni, and slaw: Meals are gonna start getting weird now. We’re trying to eat from the freezer as much as possible to make room for Christmas make aheads. A couple of nights ago Jessica made sliders: Served with a bunch of leftovers and freezer stuff – baby English cukes, corn salad, pickled vegetables, mashed potatoes, and Brussels sprouts. The night before Thanksgiving was smoked pork chops, kraut, Hawaiian rolls, succotash, and Poppaw’s green beans (canned whole beans with Kraft Zesty Italian dressing that my great-grandfather used to make): Mr. Kim grew up eating smoked pork chops, but I’ve never made them (or had them that I remember). They were good – basically like a ham slice. Last night was Thanksgiving leftovers. Without: And with: Today were busy all day – unpacking Xmas decorations, packing up the stuff that is usually out, finding and bringing home the Xmas tree, etc. Mr. Kim is a budget director for the state, and this is budget season, so he had to get on the computer for meetings after that. Jessica and I went to lunch and grocery shopping. I knew I wasn’t up for cooking a big dinner and I hadn’t thawed anything. So, I decided to try the Lidl refrigerated already cooked rack of baby backs. They were surprisingly good – meaty, not overcooked, and the sauce was not overly sweet or loaded up with smoke flavoring. Served with leftover green beans, deviled eggs, fixed up canned baked beans, Brussels sprouts, and leftover mashed potatoes and gravy: OK - that's it. I'll try to do better and keep up so you aren't subjected to a billion meals at a time from me!

This is the kind of thing I was talking about. My SIL sent me home with a lot of beans since she knows they are a favorite vegetable of mine. It's so aggravating because they are otherwise SO good. Made with lots of fatty smoked pork.

Stuffing is STUFFED in the bird and dressing is cooked on the side in a casserole dish. I have NO idea why the filling was so good - but it was sweet and rich, without being cloying. And, as @rotuts says, the nuts were perfectly toasted. One thing that was different from usual is that the crust was extremely thin and VERY crisp. She is the past master at pastry, so her pie crusts are always excellent, but this was unusual.

I almost given up buying fresh green beans. They are labeled "stringless" and sure enough when trimming them, there is no string to pull off. But as soon as they are cooked it's like green dental floss. My SIL made wonderful tasting green beans yesterday and they were stringy. I'm wondering if other people had that issue or if it is perhaps a regional problem.

I think that mac and cheese is probably a southern/soul food thing. I miss it if it isn’t part of any holiday meal. And I’m one of those who adores the really sweet sweet potato preparations. Either the marshmallow ones or the pecan praline ones. My SIL made some that were savory that I actually liked a lot – they were cubed and tossed with olive oil and rosemary and roasted. Dinner at my MIL’s was very good. I did the requested apps – shrimp dip, green olive tapenade, and my corn salad. Served with tortilla chips, crackers, and toasted baguette slices: Jessica made her wonderful deviled eggs: She also brought a jar of her lovely pickled vegetables that everyone loved. The menu included turkey, dressing, stuffing, gravy, roasted sweet potatoes w/ rosemary, southern green beans, mashed potatoes, yeast rolls, cranberry sauce, corn, corn pudding, pecan pie, and pumpkin pie. My plate: The pies: Possibly the best pecan pie I’ve ever tasted. Everything was truly delicious, though a few things were a bit too salty. She brined her turkey and didn’t rinse it. My SIL and I think that she confused the instructions regarding not washing poultry before cooking (lest you spread bacteria) with rinsing AFTER brining. The stuffing and the gravy were especially briny. But it all tasted good.

@Smithy – I have to say that those exact whomp sweet rolls are our family tradition. The orange ones were the only kind my mother ever made, and they are the ones that I still use to make the silly Christmas breakfast “tree” every year: 😁 @Pete Fred – a couple of things: the texture of that lemon tart is amazing. If I could make something that looked like that, I’d just quit doing anything but those. And yet, everything you make is rather astounding looking, so maybe not 😉. Also, that brioche loaf is my idea of a perfect bread. And making it into Bostock is genius. Our church had a table at a local neighborhood’s holiday market and I made goodies to sell. Chocolate Crinkles: This was a Tik-Tok recipe I saw. Crazy busy week and I was looking for EASY. These were a cake mix, an egg, Cool Whip, and 10X. Pretty and fairly tasty. I also did mini muffins from Krusteaz mixes that I zhushed up a bit. Banana pecan: Just added pecans and each got a sliver of dried banana chip on top. The blueberry muffins just got some sprinkles: These were surprisingly good, but I think would have benefitted from the addition of some dried blueberries. I also made orange cranberry with the addition of dried cranberries, but I forgot to take a picture.

@chileheadmike and @lemniscate - I'm so sorry to hear of your health issues! It's an especially terrible time of year to be less than well. Hope your respective recoveries are swift!

Finally got the frozen since January panettone out and had a French toast making marathon earlier this month. Before cooking: This is about half of what I cooked. It is all cooked and back in the freezer and has make a few breakfasts and dinners since: Jessica has even taken some to a friend who is giving birth any day now and needs something easy to prepare.

@BonVivant – thank you so much for sharing your shopping trip photos and experiences. It makes me homesick for somewhere I’ve never been. I watch so many videos of Germany and would love to visit. I’ve been terribly remiss in posting lately. Many reasons, but I hope to do better in the future. We’ll see! You’ll notice that every one of the meals I’m posting are restaurant meals. The truth is that if I eat lunch, it tends to be out. If I’m at home a late breakfast tends to suffice until dinner – though sometimes I have a snack or what my mom called “kitchen sink meals” – foldover sandwiches or rolled up lunchmeat and a few chips eaten at the kitchen counter while doing other things. We had friends from Florida staying last month. We took them to one of our favorite spots for lunch one day – Westwood Fountain: lunch counter food at it’s best. They loved it and said they wish Jacksonville had something like that. The bologna burger: The Italian sub: The Patty Deluxe, which I’d never seen before: Cheddar cheese, grilled onions, 1000 Is. dressing and lettuce on grilled sourdough. It was wonderful. The hot dog with kraut: Mr. Kim and I had lunch at a place we hadn’t eaten at in years. We didn’t remember it being as good as it was. I had fried shrimp, pintos, corn, and cornbread: Everything but the corn was excellent – the corn was canned. Mr. Kim had meatloaf, biscuits, eggs, and fried potatoes: All good, but the potatoes were especially great. We ended up back at the Westwood Fountain for post church brunch. Mr. Kim had the Italian sub again: I had the club and their delicious fries: Mr. Kim, Jessica and I lunched at one of our new favorites Lalo’s Pinches Tacos. Queso Fundido – chorizo, cheese dip, and pico: All three of us had the Birria Tortas: These were amazing. I honestly don’t know which is better – the tacos or the tortas. Their fabulous fries: I discovered an amazing place a few months ago and have been trying to get Mr. Kim there ever since. It’s called Europa and is a combination deli, grocery, café, etc. specializing in European foods – with an emphasis in German and eastern European things. It’s the place where I finally found (and fell in love with) Leberkäse. Well, I finally got him there on Saturday and he loved it. He had The Mighty German - beerwurst, Bavarian sauerkraut, imported baked milk cheese, sweet onion & mayo: I had the Roast My Beef - 1/2 lb. Rare roast beef, horseradish mayo on a brioche roll: No idea why the top looks so burnt – it wasn’t at all. Both sandwiches were incredibly good. Can’t wait to go back again and try something else. Drinks:

So many amazing breakfasts! I have to make sure I don’t look before my breakfast or I won’t be satisfied with anything I can make! Between house guests, the looming holidays, ongoing health issues, I’ve been MIA for a good bit of time. I’ve dropped in to read and look, but haven’t posted in forever. Some stuff from the last month: We had friends visiting from Florida and took them to one of our favorite places for breakfast one morning. They loved it! Cinnamon bun topped with salted caramel maple syrup and cream cheese frosting: Amazing, as always. Texas Toast with sausage and bacon gravy: The burrito – eggs, spicy pimento cheese, jalapeno, tomato, black beans, and green onions with honey sriracha sour cream: The Benedict: Eggs, VA ham on a grilled croissant with smokey tomato hollandaise. With cheese grits, dressed greens and fruit. The fruit has their signature edible glitter all over it: Honestly, the quirkiness of this place would get tiresome if the food wasn’t so good. But we forgive the glitter and the cutesy names because the food and the people are awesome. One morning while our friends were here I did a breakfast was a casserole – whomp biscuits, eggs, sausage, cheese, and sausage gravy. Biscuits, sausage, and cheese: Baked: Serving: Another morning was just some fantastic things from Whisk (a local and nearby bakery) – croissants and Kouign-Amann: Jams and preserves: Bacon and sausage: A solo breakfast: Croissant, bacon, sausage, and a great pear. One day earlier this month I made French toast for about four hours. We had leftover crusty bread from a recent dinner, 2 panettone in the freezer, a partial loaf of German bread in the freezer and some good white bread also in the freezer. The was the crusty bread: The panettone before cooking: This has made easy and delicious breakfasts and even dinners this month - Panettone French toast and bacon: And ham: Creamed chipped beef on a biscuit with some grapes: This morning: Ham, eggs, and roll from the Greek/Italian restaurant we had lunch at yesterday. Here's hoping I can manage to keep up better from now on!

This sounds like a shortcut version of my grandmother's Thanksgiving "Congealed Salad". It consists of ground cranberries, lemon jello, sugar, chopped pecans and celery, and a finely chopped peeled orange plus the zest. It's actually delicious and I wish I'd thought of it sooner, so I could take it to dinner.

The funny thing is that my MIL is an excellent cook. Mostly. I mean winning blue ribbons for baking and canned goods for many years at the VA state fair. Though last year she sent us a picture of the finished and still stuffed turkey at 1pm. We didn't eat until 6pm. So, that stuffed turkey sat for 5 hours 😨. I ate a LOT of the side dishes.

That last sentence is SO true. I have a cousin who is a retired nurse and she always said the same thing.

Thank you everyone for the understanding and sympathy. And while I'd be perfectly happy to miss spending holidays with my MIL, @Katie Meadow has hit it on the hear when she said, "For others it means a chance to see relatives or friends we don't get together with that often." I love seeing my nieces - and one lives in CA so Christmas is practically the only time we see her. Also, my BIL lives in CA and AZ and it gives us an opportunity to spend time with my favorite in law. Another thing to consider is that my MIL is 82 years old and Mr. Kim just lost his dad last December. That has brought home to him that he has a finite amount of time to spend with her - for all of them to spend time as a family. So, I grit my teeth a bit - and bitch and moan to understanding friends - and enjoy the fun parts!

I think in some places they've overbuilt. I belong to a Lidl FB group and lots of people are talking about closing locations. We had one close that is in an area that I would think would be perfect - upscale, residential, retail and business. There is an Aldi that is doing fine and I think Lidl is a much superior store to Aldi. Odd.

I adore tea towels that that one is especially lovely!

Damn. As I said, the enoki mushrooms are the only mushrooms I like (I find that all other mushrooms tastes of...mushrooms 😁). I guess I could get a grow kit and start growing my own.

This is very true - I never want to host Thanksgiving. Christmas is my holiday (though I've decided not to do our regular Xmas Eve party this year - I don't think I can manage that and all the other holiday things). I guess what I'm reacting to is that it feels like Jessica and I are considered "outsiders". I know that Jessica's feelings have been hurt when she's told not to bring anything and then we walk in and the other granddaughters have been there the preceding 3 evenings baking pies with Grandma. My MIL, SIL and nieces usually provide all the food. So, while I truly do appreciate someone else hosting, I'd still like to pitch in a bit. I'm 64 years old - this whining isn't very dignified, is it? 😄

We've been summoned to my MIL's for dinner (😄). For the last few years, I'm told that she doesn't need me to cook anything. A few years ago, I'd bring some kind of nibbly, snacky thing to have before dinner - something light because it's usually up to an hour before the food hits the table. She asked me to please stop doing that since "her family" didn't like to fill up on stuff before the dinner. (Can you tell I find all this a bit irritating 😁?). Anyway, this year she asked me to bring an appetizer. So I'm bringing a trio of dips - green olive tapenade, shrimp, and corn dips with crackers and toasted baguette rounds.

I did some shopping at Lidl yesterday and made a good holiday treats haul: Most of this will get tucked away until closer to Christmas (the milk chocolate butter cookies will almost certainly get eaten in the next couple of weeks!). There was also a nice assortment of what I consider "stocking chocolate" - little foil wrapped Santas, angels, balls, ornaments, and a large Santa that will look perfect peeking out of Jessica's stocking.

Thank you! They are on the list!