#180 In which our hero cooks a meal and only later discovers he could have gone a lot easier on the goddamn lemon juice.

We had the delightful Miss Kate over for breakfast yesterday.

She is soon to leave us forever in favor of the icy Wisconsin wilderness. Being that she hails from the Badger State (had to look that up, I assumed it was the “cheese state”) and will be empowered by the new “Dr.” in front of her name, I’m sure she’ll do fine. But we will miss you and your new short hair!

The Scientist and Miss Kate used to work in the same lab. I’m not sure how, but The Scientist somehow convinced her to take the thankless job of watching our dog when we were out of town. This is, of course, before we had children and actually left the house. The dog loved her and we never returned to a destroyed house (which cannot be said about other dog sitters we used) and Miss Kate got to use our washer and dryer, so it was win-win-win.

We wanted to get together again before she left since, sadly, after the dog died, we really don’t see her that often. We started talking about days and times, and decided on breakfast at 8:30am.

This really illustrates our lives right now… as little as three years ago it would have been UNTHINKABLE to host a meal on a weekend before 11; but now I knew 8:30 would be fine because I’d already be up for HOURS. Ugh.

Miss Kate indicated a fondness for eggs benedict, which I’ve made before, no problem. I wasn’t crazy about my hollandaise sauce recipe, so I went back to the ultimate source, my beaten and battered Betty Crocker cookbook.

Y’know, I have no idea where I got this cookbook. Did mom give it to me? Maybe. Or maybe I just bought it myself, new. Anyway, even though most of the recipes are ridiculously dated, the basics are still strong. And I liked the hollandaise recipe.

Except… I really need to read the entire recipe before starting to cook. And this is my second time making this particular recipe, so there’s no excuse. Here’s the thing: the recipe calls for two egg yokes and ¼ cup of butter (that’s one stick). So I read this and think, “that’s not going to be enough for three adults, I’d better double the recipe. No, I’ll triple it, just in case Miss Kate is a sauce hog.” Well… had I read a little further along, I would have seen that after the stick of butter, you finish the sauce with another stick of butter. So by tripling the recipe, I suddenly had to add three more sticks of butter than I expected. Even so, I might have been able to fake my way through it with less butter -- except for the lemon juice.

The recipe calls for three tablespoons of lemon juice to the two egg yokes and stick of butter. So I put in nine tablespoons of juice -- actually, a little less. Even so, this shit had enough sour to knock the smile off the Joker. Ugh. Maybe lemon juice wasn't so potent 30 years ago, but Betty? You can ease off a bit.

And thank you, Miss Kate, for being polite enough to not mention it at the table. Even though I’m sure on your way home you were like, “Jesus dude, add a little lemon juice, why don’cha?”

Even so, I think it was passable, and there was bacon and other stuff and coffee to take the taste out of your mouth; so breakfast was a success, for the most part.

We sat around and BS’d and played with the girls, and it was very nice. But a little sad in the end when Miss Kate returned our house key. Which, honestly, I had completely forgotten that she even had. She could have robbed us blind and we wouldn’t even have considered her a suspect. Thankfully, Miss Kate’s desire for crappy paperbacks and Little Einsteins DVDs is slight, saving her from a life of crime.

Best of luck, Kate. You’re a good egg.