The Devil is Eggs Benedict

I decided to make my sister a lovely, delicate breakfast of eggs Benedict this morning, thinking that cooking really isn't turning out to be all that difficult, and an inexperienced cook like myself can turn out some pretty good tasting things.

I started with the hollandaise sauce. Setting up my makeshift double boiler, I threw two egg yolks into the top and started whisking. It's very possible that the water was boiling too rapidly, or I'm just an idiot, but the egg yolks cooked much faster than I anticipated, which meant that when I added the butter, nothing incorporated like it should have. It ended up being an buttery egg drop soup.

So I threw it out and tried again, this time mixing all the ingredients before adding them to the double boiler. Perhaps I was not whisking enough, perhaps the water was too hot yet again, but the second try was only slightly better than the first. It tasted just lovely, but the texture was all wrong. I think the next time I try this, I'm going to bring my electric hand mixer to the double boiler, and hopefully that would make a difference.

And then I poached the eggs. I prepared each egg by cracking it in a cup and setting each cup near the two pots of boiling water I had going. Because I was to poach four eggs, I had a much larger pot for three of them, and then left the smaller pot I made my double boiler from on the stove and used it as a second. I added vinegar to the water, then I took a deep breath.

I grabbed the first cup of egg in my hand and let it plop from a height of several inches above the surface of the water. As an experienced cook would suspect, the egg dove straight down where it splatted all over the bottom of the pot. It resembled how we would imagine a yellow comet with a white tail. This made the yolk cook weirdly, and the whites ended up looking more friend than boiled.

I transferred the eggs out with a slotted spoon, which was so much more difficult than the YouTube videos made it look. Because I didn't have any paper towel, I had to use a normal, clean wash cloth and try to move everything from the water to the towel without breaking the yolks.

It was then that my sister called and said she'd be an hour late.

Moving the eggs from a cloth back to some hot water to preserve them was horrible. The wash cloth proved to cling right to the delicate whites of the eggs and simply wouldn't let them go. And it left purple strings on them that I had to pull off. Once my sister got here, I fished the eggs out of the water a second time and put them on a different cloth--one not so furry--and only managed to break one of my yolks and one of hers when I put them on a toasted English muffin smeared with sun dried tomato pesto and topped with Canadian bacon. The hollandaise was even less attractive. Because it had separated into a liquid of butter and egg yolk flocculation, the yellow stuck all over the egg and bread, and the butter just kinda spread out all over the plate.

But it tasted very delicious, and we were all grateful to be eating it.

Then I introduced my sister to a kettlebell routine. We were there less than one half hour, and she's now in love. She said how much she loved to get such a good workout for all parts of her body in such little time. We went online and started shopping for some so she can add kettlebells to her exercise room at home.