Was a large scale mess. I tried to make eggs Benedict with real Hollandaise – I used to make a batch of Hollandaise with 36 eggs and 6 pounds of butter on Sunday mornings at 6:00 a.m. when I opened for brunch at Ovens East – but the memory of doing that was not helpful trying to make a 3-egg-half-pound-of-butter size batch this morning. It broke, and I tried one of the standard fixes, which is to buzz it in a blendor – to discover that my blendor seemed broken, too. The blades just wouldn’t turn. Tried the food processor, too. Long story short we had poached eggs on Canadian bacon on English muffins with cheese and hot sauce. But I had to clean the blendor (which, happily, worked after cleaning – seemed that’s all it needed to free the blades), and the food processor, the two sauce pans and 2 skillets I used for the Hollandaise, to poach eggs, and to cook the Canadian bacon, not to mention all the egg-coated eating off of plates for three people having breakfast.
I also made a cherry Danish from Food 52. That was good. The recipe gives you a choice of one big or two small – I opted for the two small, which were actually pretty big. Not sure if one large one would have been possible to cook done in the middle. Amanda replaces her mother’s candied cherries with dried cherries soaked in rum; I replaced those with thawed out Door County pie cherries.
I got more presents than I expected – stainless steel cookie sheets that were written up in the Milwaukee paper at the beginning of December (Mark got John to go pick them up in Milwaukee, where they’re made; because they’re stainless steel they’re so heavy the shipping costs as much as the sheets), iPhone gloves, a book of food poetry, and a fancy market bag with separate compartments for different vegetables. Not counting the sound system that Mark and I bought for each other – powered speakers that you can hook anything to, and a USB turntable, so I can buy the new Peter Buck LP, and rip it. Not to mention my dozen or 14 or so vinyl records that I never listen to, that I now can.
