Eggnog Is The Mother Of All Invention

My Christmas day started out quite lazily because I didn't have to work. I woke up around 11 and logged on to my computer to try to kill some time before my Christmas party. As I am checking my mail, Golze sends me a chat message with a great idea. "We should make some eggnog." I am like that this the best idea I heard this Christmas, let's do it. Some sends me the recipe. I give it a cursory glance and tell him to come over, so we can pow wow and make a game plan, this was necessary because neither one of us has ever made eggnog. So he comes over and we determine, yes! we can get all these ingredients here in China, especially the all important nutmeg. We also read the instructions, but don't quite understand what they mean, but we figure we have at least one college degree between us and we know how to use the information gatherer we can figure that out later. After taking a quick trip to the store and buying all the ingredients, plus some extra eggs in case we messed up the seperating the egg whites process (for some reason we thought this would be the hardest part of the whole recipe, followed by folding the egg whites in, boy, were we wrong; who knew that beating 12 egg whites by hand would be hard), we begin trying to reconstruct this eggnog recipe. The separating the the egg whites and yolk goes over relatively smoothly, only a couple yolks fall into the the whites (this taught us valuable lesson as well, knifes and forks don't fish yolks out of the whites as well as spoons). Once the whites and yolks get separated. I begin the task of trying to beat the egg whites, while Golze does everything else and uses the information gatherer to look up what soft peaks means, (you don't really learn that at Middlebury for some reason) I spend like 20 minutes trying to beat these 12 egg whites into whatever soft peaks means. The closest thing I get to soft peaks is a little bit of bubbles in the egg whites. So Golze and I switch and I do some other random task of the eggnog process. After he is beating a way at it for 15 minutes, like my ex chinese co-worker, we decide to switch again. As I am doing this, Golze goes and looks up what folding egg whites in means and my roommate comes home. And looks at what I am doing and says, that's impossible, you will never be able to beat 12 eggs into soft peaks. Golze and I assure her, we are men, we can beat these eggs, and we have a lot of time before the party, this will not be a problem. She just kind of roles her eyes and says okay. But after another 10 minutes of beating these eggs, begin to realize that she is probably right, these eggs look in the exact same state as when I first started to beat them. Then, I have an epiphany, something like the Virgin Mary appearing to me in a water stain and saying, "on this Christmas day, I present you with a gift and a secret that will help you make great eggnog, and baby Jesus in her hands saying to me, "drill, baby, drill." At first I don't understand this message and I say to Golze, "I have a drill?" He takes this as an affirmative statement and says, "Yes, use it." And I am like oh I have drill, thank you baby Jesus. So we take my Black and Decker and attach the end of the whisk that we are using, see video; and in no time we have soft peaked egg whites.



We then add brandy and fold in the egg whites and let that chill for three hours, and did some other steps after that, that also involved the Black and Decker (this whole experience made me realize why and how the electric hand mixer was created.) To make a long story short, the trick to great eggnog is a power drill and nutmeg, oh and our eggnog was great. I highly recommend the recipe. Happy Belated Christmas and Hanukkah everyone, enjoy our Holiday party photo montage.



Highlight of the Day: Finishing the apple pie with digestive biscuit crust that I baked yesterday. And knowing that I still have gift cards to starbucks and subway to use; thank you very much Smith family for the lovely present, I can't wait to use them.