Kim Shook

A couple of recent breakfasts: Those eggs are from the exact same carton and cooked at the same time😠. We STILL have panettone French toast in the freezer: Served with some Benton’s bacon.

Turns out I did forget some things: deviled eggs, corn pudding, and cranberry sauce. Listen, y'all. I'm all vaxxed and boostered up. If I run away, will you hide me and feed me a little dressing and gravy? 😄

Thank you, ma'am! I am planning to crisp the skin under the broiler when it is finished in the IP. I do want to clarify something. Since I am deboning the whole breast and pressing the two together and tying, it will, in effect, be twice as thick as the breasts still on the bone, no? Would they take longer to cook because of that thickness?

I am feeling terribly overwhelmed with dealing with packing up Jessica, moving her (and the grandkitties) into our house and into a storage locker and still cleaning her filthy apartment right now and can't believe that Thanksgiving is NEXT WEEK 😳. Unfortunately, we got no invitations, so it will be here for the three of us. And with my dear, but steamrolling, daughter there is really no scaling back. She swears that she'll be in charge of many of the dishes, but I know what that means: my kitchen destroyed and Momma to the rescue every 5 minutes while I'm trying to cook what I've been assigned. What I can remember is: turkey breast, dressing, green beans, sweet potatoes, relish tray, mac and cheese, @Shelby's cucumbers (the sour cream ones), yeast rolls (Sister Schuberts have been deemed acceptable, thank God😁), pecan pie (Mr. Kim chose that). There may be more that I've forgotten. One nice thing is, without guests we can do a fairly late (7-ish) meal and spend the morning in our pj's watching the Parade and Dog Show!

Looking for some advice for Thanksgiving. I haven't settled just yet on the exact recipe I want to use, but I'm planning to cook a turkey breast and bone and tie it before cooking. It weighs 5.73 lb. How long will a tied whole breast of that size take to cook? I was thinking of doing more a citrus based recipe than traditional roasting; the recipe I'm basing things on calls for lemon zest and rosemary (not our favorite - I'm changing to thyme). Should I brine? And, if so, should that have a lemon component? Thanks so much!

Welcome to eG, @onorland! Love seeing folks from NYC - one of my favorite places and one I hope to visit again.

Thanks for posting, @weinoo! Great article.

THIS! I'd definitely try those.

Thanks, everyone! Jessica tasted it and was a bit equivocal. I think she liked the taste, but the texture was a little off for her. I'll try to remember to taste one today when I'm over there packing.

Toasted cheese bread:

@Norm Matthews – thank you for the link. I’ll be trying that. @MaryIsobel – those toasted ravioli were just frozen ones that I cooked in the CSO (you could also use the oven or toaster oven). I don’t remember when I first had them, but I’m thinking it might have been trips to Baltimore growing up. These were Celentano brand that I found in Kroger. I got a bag of cheese and a bag of beef. We are in the midst of trying to help our daughter move out of her apartment and back home and cooking just isn’t happening. These just take a few minutes and with some jarred marinara and a salad, we’ve got a decent, hot meal. @mgaretz – great looking Cincinnati chili! I love the stuff. I grew up on chili-mac and when we moved to Indiana near Cincinnati I felt like I’d found my people😁! The flavor profile was completely different, of course, but I loved it anyway! @Ann_T – Oh, Ann! The chicken looks lovely, but the description of your gravy sent me over the edge! @Duvel - lovely sausage meal. I’ll take a serving of sauerkraut, please 😁. @Margaret Pilgrim – I would walk right across the country for that lovely, lovely prawn Louis. Mr. Kim requested pancakes and sausage for dinner on Friday, so I made pikelets and sage sausage: My pancakes, while they tasted fantastic, hardly rose at all. My self-rising flour and my baking powder were brand new, too. Perplexing. Served with apples and pears: We spent Saturday evening out looking at Halloween decorations and had dinner at our favorite Richmond pizza joint: Mary Angela’s. Perfectly tender calamari and their fantastic marinara: They do slices, which is perfect for us: And Mr. Kim and I shared a steak and cheese: Halloween night I made a batch of Mr. Kim’s chili to have when the trick or treaters were gone: Served with Wegman’s cheese bread, toasted:

We love Halloween and really look forward to the kids coming around. We sat outside this year, rather than wait for the doorbell to ring, as it seemed safer. We filled treat bags and placed them on a table rather than handing them things out of a bowl. The parents we talked to seemed to appreciate the precautions. We also participated in the Trunk or Treat (🙄) part of our church's Fall Festival. Instead of candy, Jessica bought a bunch of little Halloween themed toys at $Tree and did a version of the Duck Pond game - upended cups with the "treat" underneath for the kids to pick up. For me, Halloween is really a children's holiday and, not having any grandchildren, I love participating in things where I get to see the little ones (and some big ones, too - I don't mind) enjoying themselves.

@Norm Matthews – your fried chicken looks lovely. I need to get out the electric frying pan and make some soon! Not to pile on to @Katie Meadow, but I also can’t imagine life without gravy. There are so many meals that I just wouldn’t bother with without gravy – roasts (beef, pork, lamb, and chicken), meatloaf, sausage biscuits, smothered pork chops, meat pie, open faced chicken, turkey, or beef sandwiches, Yorkshire pudding, Toad in the Hole, etc. etc. Call my food stodgy, if you like, but I’d be lost without gravy! 😁 @Ann_T – your battered halibut is lovely and makes me wish I was making that for dinner instead of pikelets and sausage! And your liver dinner is gorgeous! The livers are cooked perfectly and your gravy is so dark and just glistens! I would even eat around the peppers and mushrooms to get at those livers! @liamsaunt – watched the America’s Test Kitchen episode featuring the Zuni chicken on the imdb app last night and was craving it. I was explaining to Mr. Kim what an iconic recipe this is and how people all over the world have been making it for years. And then I pull up the Dinner Thread and there it is! @gulfporter – Happy Birthday to you both! Lovely meal! @Shelby – I really need to make a batch of stuffed cabbage. I suspect with the sauce and braising that I might very well like it. Neither of us are cooked cabbage folks, but we both really liked Molly Steven’s “World’s Best Braised Green Cabbage”. What are yours stuffed with? And do you make your tomato sauce a little sweet? How I wish someone in my house liked liver. Those looked so good and with the new chicken liver thread that @liuzhou started and @Ann_T's livers, I’m ready for a big pile of fried livers and cream gravy! Dinner last night was frozen toasted ravioli with marinara for dipping: Quite good it was, too! The lettuce was ooky, so it was raw veg for a side:

@blue_dolphin - I talked above about being a bit of a staid breakfast eater, but I would definitely have a lovely hot dog like that (especially one in that beautifully grilled bun) for breakfast. I'm not a spice person, so I'd skip the kimchi, but a good sausage of almost any type would be welcome at my breakfast table! This morning was an ET bagel with onion/herb cream cheese:

Now that these are starting to appear in the grocery stores, it really feels like Autumn: Three of my favorite flavors all together - crisp, tart apple, chewy caramel, and peanuts.

Hi, @Dejan! Welcome to eGullet! I'm glad you found us. I'd bet that most of us would be thrilled to hear about the food that you cook and what it is like to live in Croatia. I know that, with what the world has been through the last couple of years, I'm starved for travel and new experiences and I'm sure everyone else is, too! I'm really looking forward to your contributions.

As a Southern girl, my favorite chicken liver preparation is fried with a brittle, thin crust on a plate next to a pile of rice or mashed potatoes with a cup of peppery milk gravy on the side for dipping. This is my favorite pate recipe. And, being a child of a mom who threw cocktail parties in the 1960s, I'm an absolute fool for rumaki!

Egg (a sort of unrolled omelet thing) on toast with hash rounds leftover from Bojangles breakfast yesterday:

@Margaret Pilgrim – I have actually been to the Peterborough diner many years ago – over 30. A dear friend from HS was there for the summer because her husband was in summer stock with the Players. I went for a week to keep her company and we ate there a couple of times. I can still remember how good the food was. The South doesn't really do diners. Our version is the cafe, I guess. But I adore a REAL diner (like those "train car" types posted) and, when we traveled north in the past, they were a frequent stop.

Jessica bought these persimmons last Friday. They were hard and the man said they would ripen on the counter. They are still pretty hard and are starting to get these little spots. Are they rotting before ripening?

@Shelby – May I place an order for fries and some ribs, please? They look amazing! And I’ll have a piece of pie for dessert. @gulfporter – Happy Anniversary! Bête Noir, along with Crème Brulee, is Mr. Kim’s favorite dessert and one he requests for his birthday fairly often. @Dejah – a fan of gravy on cold crunchy lettuce here, too! I used to get something they called Wor Shu Opp in a favorite, and sadly closed, restaurant when I was in college. They served it on shredded lettuce, and I loved a bite of lettuce, brown gravy, and duck! We are trying to get Jessica packed up for her (temporary, I pray) move into our house. So, not a lot of dinner cooking going on. Canned soup, quick sandwiches, and take out pizza seems to be most common. I did finally serve the baked spaghetti that I kept back out of the batch I made to send to Jessica’s friend’s family: Served with Poppaw’s “Italian” green beans: I’ve probably told this story before, but I’ll tell it again for the new folks. Poppaw was my Italian great-grandfather. He was born about a month after his family arrived on the boat from Italy. His wife (my great-grandmother) was half Italian and half Irish. Everyone (until my mother) in this line were terrible cooks. Momma and I used to say that we inherited the broad Italian butt, but no cooking skills from them. Anyway, when Poppaw was in charge of feeding me and my cousins, it would be gummy pasta, canned Chef Boyardee spaghetti sauce and these green beans: whole green beans – cold from the can – bathed in bottled Italian dressing. I now warm them up, but other than that they are still one of my favorite ways to eat green beans. Saturday was SV pork chops with a Dijon-Cream sauce, red cabbage (jarred) and tiny steamed potatoes: Rounded out with raw veggies, marinated cucumbers, and some really good bread from our favorite Richmond bakery, Sub Rosa:

@liamsaunt – pumpernickel is one of my top two (the other being ETs) bagel flavors. There is NOTHING better with smoked salmon. My breakfasts are all so similar – something bready, something eggy, and -sometimes- something porky. It’s what I want in the morning, but it’s also so fun to see the wonderful variety here! Thursday: Friday – that’s lovely Benton’s bacon: Friday, I had a lovely surprise when I went into one of the little neighborhood grocery stores to pick up some RG beans. They now sell bread from my very favorite bakery in the city, Sub Rosa. They are a great place that have survived a horrible fire and the pandemic to continue to provide amazing breads and pastries. They do their own milling and have the best croissants I’ve ever had in my life. Bought a “Classic” loaf to go with every meal and snack until it runs out: Ergo Saturday’s breakfast: Slightly overdone eggs and two slices of the Sub Rosa bread toasted – one with butter and one with fig jam. This morning: Toasted Sub Rosa bread and IP eggs. That damned green halo. Same carton of eggs and same cook. Grrrr.

I did super thick pork chops yesterday. We were helping Jessica pack up her apartment (in preparation to moving home for a bit 😳), so they went for more like 5 hours than 4 (which is what I usually do) and they were perfect. Not mushy at all, which I was afraid of. My only issue with the chops is that you get that squiggy stuff (I have no idea what it is) that oozes out of the sides of the chops and solidifies inside the cooking bag. I scrape it off as best I can. I also dislike the imprint of the pattern of the vacuum bag which is still on there after searing. But those are minor complaints.

So, is Mr. Cantcook aware that his digits are the subject of so much interest all over the known world? 😂

Thank you all so much. I've put the ones that @andiesenjirecommended on my wishlist, as I think I'd prefer no serrations.