Monday, October 3, 2011

Happy Hollandaise and S@!*# Soufflé

We have to keep picking ourselves up and trudging along, striving to maintain our balance and improve ourselves. If we can do this and pass what we learn to the next generation, and if they can improve on that and pass their wisdom on to the next generation, then some day . . . some day we’ll have a genuine era of enlightenment.

It won’t be in our lifetime or the one after, or even the one after that. We can make remarkable improvements in our own lives; however, until we learn that if we don’t each allow others to grow and develop and advance, it will never be possible for ourselves.

 

I did finally get to making a proper hollandaise sauce. The eggs are not cooked, but since we have our own chickens and I know that our eggs are safe, I didn’t worry about them. However, the sauce was rather boring compared to a lot of other sauces made in America. I decided not to pursue hollandaise, since I cannot recommend the sauce for any of you who don’t know the diet and health of the flock laying your eggs.

So, I moved on to soufflés. I read that section very carefully a few times before my first attempt, which was a cheese soufflé. And, actually. it turned out exceptionally well. The essence of a soufflé, Julia said was getting the eggs whipped up to form shiny, stiff peaks and to fold your sauce into the egg whites quickly and smoothly so you don’t flatten the whites. Simple enough. I got it.  I was so confident, in fact that I decided to try a rhubarb soufflé just yesterday. It looked beautiful (and tasted wonderful) as it went into the oven.

It flopped.

I studied several other types of fruit desserts to see where I might have gone wrong, but found that Julia doesn’t reference any sauced fruit soufflés. She did make something similar, but called it a custard, unbaked she called it a cream to put into cream puffs. My crashed rhubarb soufflé, had actually tasted really good and reminded Ben and me of a bread pudding. (Custard.) But it wasn’t, of course, a soufflé.

Today, then, to soothe my corpulent, male cranium, I decided to try a chocolate soufflé. Simple, right?

It flopped.

It did make a good chocolate pudding. So, after Ben and I had a dinner of meatball burgers, Swiss chard with balsamic vinegar, and borscht, we ate the chocolate pudding with chokecherry sauce. It was so unbelievably delicious that I nearly cried when it was gone.

But it wasn’t soufflé.

Obviously I didn’t learn the lesson. Therefore, I’m heading back to the book. (I was so ready to move on!)

 

 

So, I’m drifting back into the beauty of Autumn for a couple of days to console myself.

 

2011-09-28 001 135

2011-09-28 001 137

2011-09-28 001 151

DSCN0645

No comments:

Post a Comment