Yesterday, while the husband and I were trying to be adults and cook up some appetizers to take to a BBQ at our good friends’ house, I had a mishap that did nothing short of baffle me. We’ve been attempting to find recipes to create some of our more used and liked types of foods, and I have found that I have a knack for making sauces. We don’t make absolutely everything on our own yet (I have yet to try my hand at making homemade noods, but it’s coming for sure!), but when you find a recipe that uses only four ingredients and makes an amazing alfredo sauce, then why not? We pretty much always have those four simple ingredients in our house at all times anyway, so why spring for a bottle with ingredients that have a letter-count longer than the English alphabet? Right?
Anyway, I was going to make some deviled eggs to take because that’s always a crowd-pleaser, but that meant that I had to whip up some homemade mayo before I could mix it all up. No big deal, another recipe that needs only four ingredients, (oops, it’s actually five). But it’s simple. Put all the ingredients into a mason jar, use the emulsion blender, and 30 seconds later, Bam! Mayonnaise! I’ve used this same recipe at least 20 times by now, sometimes adding a few things like dill if we feel our sandwiches need an extra little kick every now and then, but since this mayo was going to be part of a mixture, I kept it on basic bitch status. Now here’s where the surprise comes in. Like I said, I’m not a stranger to this recipe and how the finished product is supposed to turn out. The kicker came when after I had all my ingredients in the jar and I was turning on the blender, it wasn’t gorgeous fluffy mayo that formed, but what can only be described as mayo-flavored milk. The emulsion never happened, the fluff never came to be. I had done everything to the letter like I always do, but the liquid never exited that state of matter. I moved the stick blender up and down hoping that it had somehow missed a layer, but nope. My hubby even suggested sticking it in the fridge to see if that would help thicken it up, but that’s a negatory Ghost Rider. The only thing that happened in the fridge was to show the weird oil layer that had formed and to get my mason jar cold. What happened? Was I losing my budding kitchen witch status already??? There’s only two little things that were a little off, but you tell me if they should matter that much. The recipe calls for those five ingredients to be put in the jar in a certain order, but I ended up mixing up ingredients 3 and 4, but seeing how all the ingredients need to be put in before the blender even makes an appearance, would that really throw it off? The other little thing was that the recipe said you keep the stick blender sitting on the bottom of the jar for 30 seconds before pulling up to mix the rest, since at that point the emulsion is already in full force. I held the blender in both of my hands instead of having one hand hold the jar in place, which resulted in the jar rotating ever so slightly on the countertop while the blender was turned on. When I say it was slowly rotating, I mean like one millimeter of rotation every second. I didn’t have a mayo merry-go-round happening in my kitchen or anything like that. Is this a lesson on following the instructions perfectly in life or some kind of random gremlin messing up my food for some reason? It could also have been that the kitchen was pretty warm and moist (sorry, that’s one of my favorite words to say) because the hubby had just finished making some homemade pretzel bites, and there’s a lot more boiling water and steam involved in that than you would think. Also, there was a lot of steam in the air from boiling 18 eggs in a big pot before I even started thinking about making the mayo. So was it because the environment was different than when I normally make it, some kind of weird kitchen glitch, or just a fluke of nature? We may never know. After I threw out my weird mayo milk, I cleaned out my jar, brought out all my trusty ingredients, and tried again. This time was a success, and when I first saw the fluff rise up in my jar, all was right with the world again.
P.S. The deviled eggs were a hit :)
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