Kim Shook

Hello, @Hooking and Cooking and welcome to eGullet. I'm familiar with Venice. My mom and stepdad lived in Englewood and my dad and stepmom lived in Sarasota. Any trip down there involved going to Venice for a nice dinner and lots of interesting food shopping along Tamiami Trail - including the European Deli. One set has passed on and the other set has moved back up to VA, so I miss those trips! I'm very much looking forward to your posts, as seafood is a favorite of mine.

Those are incredibly beautiful! I've never seen anything like them. Lunch the other day was pretty horrible. I heated up what I thought was leftover Sloppy Joe meat. When I stirred it, I realized that it was much pastier than that would have been. It turned out that Mr. Kim had taken the Sloppy Joe to the office and what I had was leftover canned hot dog chili (no beans Hormel). I put it on a bun with some slaw and hoped for the best. It honestly reminded me of when we dropped in on Mr. Kim’s mom for the first time and she offered us an impromptu BBQ sandwich. It turned out to be canned BBQ. I’m not even sure if it was pork or beef. Awful stuff. As was this. Served with good beans, though:

My mom and I did Weight Watchers in the 1970s. Their version of spaghetti with sauce in those days was boiled mung bean noodles with boiled down V8 juice. That was in the "carbs are all evil" days. We tried it once.

@Ann_T - Good luck with returning to work. I'll be thinking of you! Dinner was the trashiest thing I’ve made in a long time – a breakfast casserole with whomp biscuits, breakfast sausage, cheese, eggs, and a prepared packet of cream gravy. It was delicious😁. Biscuits, sausage and cheese: Out of the oven: Serving: Served with a fairly trashy fruit salad: Frozen pineapple chunks, bananas, and maraschino cherries. Can't wait for leftovers tomorrow.

LOLOLOL! Oh, I learned that, too. From my Italian great-grandfather (he was born about 2 weeks after his mother arrived in the US from Genoa) who made spaghetti with Chef Boyardee sauce from a can. No one in that family could cook. Apparently, his wife, my Irish-Italian great-grandmother was raised in a house with a cook in NOLA and never learned to cook. His daughter, my grandmother was even worse - her pasta sauce was watered down tomato paste.

Saturday night we went to what has been a favorite place for years and all three of us had less than great meals. We’ve been here a lot and have always had really good meals. The quality of the food was still very good, but the execution was pretty poor. My chili, was delicious, but actually cold: I stirred it well, thinking it was just the cold sour cream on top, but the cheese wouldn’t even melt. Jessica had the shrimp quesadilla and it tasted great, but fell apart every time she picked it up: Mr. Kim had the club, which again tasted good, but was a mess: The “toast” was soggy and floppy and just didn’t hold the sandwich together – and it wasn’t even a double decker. I had the oyster po’boy, which I’ve had often in the past. The oysters were on the edge of being slightly funky (not rotten, just muddy) and the fries were stone cold: So disappointing to see a place that you like going to fall so far. And since it wasn’t the quality of the ingredients (except maybe the oysters), but the execution it makes me think that there is no one in the kitchen that actually cares about the food going out to customers. Yesterday’s dinner was extremely simple – salad, fixed up Manwiches, and cheese potatoes leftover from Xmas from the freezer:

@Paul Bacino – very clever way to save your shrimp burger. Does your recipe call for a mixture of chopped and finely minced shrimp? The recipe that I use calls for 1/3 of the shrimp to be minced in a food processor and I’ve never had any trouble with it adhering. @Steve Irby – I love fried livers with gravy! No one else in my house does, so I usually only have them when I’m frying chicken. The last chicken I bought had 2 necks and NO livers. I was so disappointed! @BonVivant – Love the Mexico pictures. Is lead still an issue with Mexican pottery? I remember when we moved home from Southern California, my mother read an article about it and only used it for decoration thereafter. Brunch after church yesterday was a bittersweet experience. We went to one of our very favorite places. The food was delicious, as always, and we enjoyed every bite. But it was sadly our last visit since they are closing in the next few days. It sounds like the owner wants to get more into community activism. Which I admire, but we will miss this wonderful breakfast/lunch place. Jessica had the Ham & Jam Biscuit: Their buttermilk biscuit,country ham, Brie, and house-made blackberry jam. Mr. Kim had the Asheville Chicken Biscuit: Biscuit, crispy chicken breast, spiced sweet potato purée, slaw, egg, and sriracha aioli. I had the Smoky Tomato & Roast Beef: House-roasted beef, Brie, smoked tomato jam, pickled red onion, and arugula on a baguette.

Cadbury drinking chocolate and my niece's homemade marshmallows:

I forgot to say that some restaurants have started serving those coated/battered fries which I assume are a frozen product. I haven't accidentally bought a bag of them so far. If I do, they will be thrown through the kitchen window. Detestable things.

1). Speaking as an expert, the sauce in SpaghettiOs is more like tomato soup, NOT catsup. 😁 2). I'm betting that the Italians of 200 years ago would have the same sorts of opinions of 21st century "authentic" Italian cookery.

Cleaning is not my issue. It cleans completely in seconds. My problem is getting thicker stuff out of the bottom - I made hummus once and lost a good 1/4 cup of it because I couldn't scrape it out.

Of course! The recipes for the chicken and the sauce are now on my webpage.

Some blender containers have a screw off bottom. There is a blade mechanism and a rubber gasket between the container and the bottom to stop leaks. Like this.

@Shelby – you make some of the best looking French fries! Jessica found a recipe on Instagram for chicken Karaage and wanted to make it for dinner last night. I’m so glad that she did because it was so delicious. Tender and juicy and incredibly crisp. It included a recipe for a miso aioli dipping sauce that was also delicious. The chicken is marinated in a soy/sake-based marinade and then coated in potato starch. It’s then double fried. After the first fry: Served with the aioli, jasmine rice, and stir-fried vegetables: This was supposed to serve four people, but we ate it all! Mr. Kim came back into the kitchen twice from his Zoom poker game to grab more pieces off the rack! Dessert: Biscoff ice cream bar. Really good. Nice, thick chocolate coating.

Not mine but my MIL's. Mr. Kim went over this morning to offer some IT assistance and she sent him home with these: She has such a hand with pastry and bread. Her choux is beautiful as is her pie crust, yeast rolls and sweet dough for breakfast items. Unfortunately for me, she uses vanilla Jello pudding for her filling and canned chocolate frosting for the "glaze". I don't mind the frosting so much (though it is a bit overwhelming), but I'm just not a fan of Jello vanilla pudding. I don't taste a real vanilla flavor. It tastes fake and chemically to me. I don't mind the chocolate flavors, but really don't like the vanilla.

Mr. Kim wants "Totchos" - basically nachos made with Tots and added BBQ pork (his) Jessica wants my Hot Bacon & Swiss Dip. I have a craving for Chex Mix and the cereals were on sale last week for $1.50 a box. The obligatory crudités and dips. That's all so far. I really hope it stays that way. It will just be the 3 of us and last year was insane amounts of food - none of which we really wanted after the day.

Such lovely breakfasts! Mine was an Americanized bacon butty - no back bacon available, but plenty of butter:

This is what we've been doing, too. We've backed away from places that seemed crowded or if the wait staff wasn't masked.

This is what I detached from a packet of "ready to cook" snow peas last night: I get the same things from what are called "stringless" beans in the grocery stores.

Using my Vita Mix yesterday made me wish again that we had done some research before Mr. Kim (very sweetly) sprung for the big bucks for it. I just don't like a blender with a base that doesn't detach. Unless I'm making something very thin that pours out easily, I end up with a base full of unreachable food. Mr. Kim got me the blade scraper for Xmas and it really doesn't help. I got rid of an old one my mother had from the 1970s when I got the Vita Mix and I've regretted it ever since.

Hi, @ThisIsEarls! Welcome to eGullet. So interesting to see someone from the Philippines. My daughter is enamored of what she has experienced of Filipino food and for her birthday a couple of weeks ago we took a trip down to Norfolk Virginia in the US, where there is a large ex-pat Filipino community to sample Filipino food. I'm looking forward to your posts. And that burger looks fantastic.

When we were up in the DC area last weekend, we stopped at Giant (as we always do for bakery cookies and cheesecake). I couldn't see any indication of shortages at all. We went up and down every food aisle and around the entire perimeter and everything looked like it was fully stocked. This was the Annandale 236 store. It was wild. Looked like a Richmond store from 2019.

Thank you. This is not a lemon curd at all, though. I've never seen a chess pie prepared in that way and I'm not sure that it would have the proper texture. My grandmother's Chess Pie always turned out smooth, and the recipes are almost identical - ingredients and cook temperture/times. It's so frustrating - women all over the South have been turning out perfect chess pies forever and I can't seem to manage it.

I hit "like" before I realized that the raw tuna was on top of the lovely foie. Can you please remove the tuna from a couple of the toasts for me? 😁 Last night: Really good Dietz and Watson natural casing dogs with fixed up Bush's beans and tots. I offered a wide array of "go-withs". I chose a Carolina dog (mustard, chili, slaw - it usually has raw onions, but I detest them) and had my kraut on the side.

Murray's cheese is really good stuff - we get it at Kroger (which is the same as Ralph's).