The Backstory: In 2010, I have set a goal for myself to experience one new thing per week, every week of the year. Each week, I try something I’ve never done before, and then I document my experience here, regardless of whether I succeed or fail. Read more here.
Week: 25
The Challenge/New Experience: Make Eggs Benedict.
Well, no rest for the wicked, Dear Reader — a new week is here, which means a new Challenge is here with it. Since last week’s New Thing took several days (very nearly the whole week, in fact), I decided it was okay to pick an easy one this week — yes, it’s time for another cooking challenge!
Eggs Benedict is my favorite breakfast, but I’ve never had it at home before, just in restaurants. I’m no stranger to poached eggs, however, or frying up a bit of ham, so the only uncharted territory here was the Hollandaise sauce. I know you can get a mix, but since that was the only challenging thing I decided to go ahead and make it from scratch, with a recipe from AllRecipes.com.
Incidentally, in a recent episode of Good Eats that I saw on the Food Network last week, Alton Brown made Eggs Benedict also, and he even made the English muffins from scratch. I am not that ambitious yet.
Just a few pictures for you this time, because I had all four burners going in the kitchen and it was tough to keep up with everything cooking and take pictures at the same time.
Basic ingredients: Eggs, Canadian bacon, English muffins
This is a nice international meal — the muffins are English, the bacon is Canadian, the sauce is French in orign but named for Holland.
All four burners going at once!
There’s some weird spot on that picture, looks like some weird orange blob in with the poached eggs. I don’t know what that is, it’s some flash from the camera or something, because whatever that thing is, it wasn’t in my eggs. I don’t have a double boiler, so as you can see I’m doing the Hollandaise in a metal bowl over a pot of simmering water.
Who's hungry?
Here’s breakfast — in addition to the Eggs Benedict, I have some fried red potatoes. I would love to share this with you, Dear Reader, but as you can see:
All gone.
There was nothing left — I am a member of the Clean Plate Club today. Yum!