Behold! My first attempt to make eggs benedict - and it was a success! Okay, I haven’t totally cracked the egg poaching process yet; when I drop my eggs in the water, I tend to wind up with a little globule of yolk surrounded by filaments of white that never coalesce into a solid (even though I use fresh eggs and make a whirlpool in the water and all the rest of it). But since the egg got covered up by Hollandaise sauce anyway, it didn’t really matter that it looked a bit funny.

Ah yes, the Hollandaise sauce. I was sure my sauce was going to split, or curdle, or just never thicken up, but again, beginner’s luck was on my side. Even though I put in only about three-fourths of the butter the recipe called for (and that was still a LOT of butter), the sauce turned out creamy and glossy and very, very rich, with just a touch of heat from the cayenne pepper and a bit of tang from the lemon juice. I put some ham and the freshly poached egg on a toasted bagel, drizzled over the sauce, gave it all a few twists of ground pepper, and served it up with cold orange juice and hot coffee. The perfect Easter-weekend brunch treat!

Further reading…