[Miscellany]

Usually on Sunday morning I go out for breakfast (well by the time it happens, it's actually closer to lunch, but who's counting the minutes anyway, punk?). Since I didn't do that this morning I decided to make myself breakfast. That is... make something that wasn't cornflakes. And yes, I DO count cornflakes as cooking, you got a problem with that? I figured, eggs florentine was the go - mostly because that's what I usually have if I'm going out for breaky, also it looked like a harmless meal to make. Bit of egg - more egg on top..bit of muffin...bit or spinach. Easy peasy, Japanesey.

WRONG. HARD! HARD! VERY FUCKING HARD!

I guess my first problem was not actually ever having made a Hollandaise sauce in my life - so I looked it up on the old internet on a site called "reluctant gourmet" and discovered that apparently this sauce is quite a difficult one to master. Pshhhhh! How difficult can it really be to whisk a few egg yolks together? Then as I kept reading I realised that it did actually sound a bit hard. I mean, they had so many specifications like 'make sure the water is simmering not boiling' and that 'the purpose of whisking was not to aerate but to something-something' (lost track a bit). Meh I hate wordy presidential speeches disguised as recipes, so I figured that jumping in feet first would be the way to go. Best not to get bogged down in the specifics of it all.

About half way through desperately trying NOT to aerate the egg yolks and holding a pan of hot butter ready to pour into the mixture my eyes fell upon the part of the recipe that confused me

as you near the milk solids, be at your most diligent not to add too much as the hollandaise is more likely to split at this stage.

HUH?

My eyes go back up to the ingredients. No mention of milk solids there. Was this a trick? A typo? What the fuck is a milk solid anyway? Isn't solid milk a cow? What's cows got to do with it? Why are they mentioning cows all of a sudden? Here, my friends is where I started to panic. Then I read the word Sabayon and lost it. SABAYON? What the fuck? I'm still confused about where I'm going to find a fucking cow in suburbia and reluctant gourmet brings out the Sabayon big guns. The whole thing got me so flustered that my hand "slipped" and the oh so important "steady thin stream" of hot butter turned into a farking waterfall right into the goddamn Sabayon and the hollandaise started to split. The split, according to reluctant gourmet is the most dreaded of all kitchen terms to a chef. Well, THANK YOU!

I looked down at my dreaded split Hollandaise sauce and decided that I was going to whisk the shit out of it and keep on going anyway! I am a trooper dammit and I want eggs florentine for breakfast. I am the breakfast MASTER! The excessive whisking was burning the hell out of my biceps but the mixture was beginning to gel. Ha! I knew then I didn't need reluctant gourmet telling me what to do. Sabayon my ARSE!

It looked okay so I decided to concentrate on the egg poaching instead. The problem was that I'd never actually poached an egg (successfully) before either. So back to the internet where I found a site that informed me that this was basically a foolproof recipe and reading over it I realised that I could do the gently floating the egg in the water thing. It WAS kind of easy. The only problem was that I had forgotten about my muffins. They needed to be toasted. It took a little while to get that done and then I realised that after cooking spinach it must be strained...so I did that. Meanwhile the eggs have been in the fucking water for so long they've turned completely hard. Then I look down at the Hollandaise and it had split again..

Muffin with soggy spinach, hard boiled egg and split Hollandaise! Yuuuuuuuuuum.

Next week, I'm going out for breakfast!

Labels: best to stick to foods which do not require heating such as icecream, breakfast, crap cook

posted by M at 2:25 pm 17 comments