Hollandaise From Scratch

Do you know that 1 cup of Hollandaise sauce has 1264 calories? It does. I know because I ingested at least that much last night. I always sort of thought that, with the exception of die-hard cooks with nothing but time on their hands, Hollandaise Sauce was made from a white-ish powder, neatly enclosed in a foil-lined packet. Not the case, as it turns out. Let me explain.

My boys, Sam in particular, are fierce asparagus / broccoli-loving toddlers. Give it a green colour and make it look like a twig or a tree and they are all for it. Needless to say, we are eating a lot of gas-inducing vegetables these days. Sam might not mind but, for me, these things have got to become a little more interesting if we're to consume so much of them. Hence, the Greek spiced pizza with asparagus, zucchini and broccoli of 2 nights ago and the Hollandaise covered green veggies of yesterday. That's Hollandaise from scratch, by the way.

Oh my. Oh my, oh my, oh my. Give me a vat full and let me lick off the whisk too. It's amazing to me that I can even write about this with any sort of authority; after all, it wasn't that long ago I figured pasta had to come with a packet of powdered cheese and pancakes with a note to "just add water." Who is this girl whose idea of a good time is a shelf of cookbooks and a pantry of exotic ingredients? I remember, not so long ago, a friend giving me a recipe for a chicken dish that called for a clove of garlic and I thought that meant the entire bulb. Thankfully, crisis was narrowly averted as I received a fairly quick rescue email from her before I dumped the entire spicy lot into the mixture.

For this miracle I can only blame pirated cable and the FoodTV Network. I was on bedrest, pregnant and large with the boys and became hopelessly addicted to the channel. I was mesmerized by the way a chef could make a complicated dish look simple enough for even my own basic (very basic) skills. I would check-out a dozen cookbooks at a time from the library and keep them all piled haphazardly on the coffee table or floor around it, to be pulled out and read through like novels. For his part, Terry didn't dare say a word about having to step over yet another stack of books stacked dangerously high as he'd never eaten so well since he said "I do."

Hence the Hollandaise and the minor miracle that the boys have, thus far, been raised to subsist on something other than instant mashed potatoes (although surprisingly good as they are) and frozen TV dinners. To that end, I will happily devise new and interesting ways to eat aspargus until they have passed on this particular culinary phase in favour of something even less likely for a toddler, like artichokes.