…like my first try at egg nog for instance.  It wasn’t…wonderful.  Oh it isn’t horrible either…but the recipe I used called for Way too much booze in retrospect, and for some reason the ingredients mixed up a tad flavorless.  You could tell it was rich…I used the best milk and eggs and cream I could find at Whole Foods…but it didn’t have much egg noggy flavor.  Or maybe the smell of the booze was just overpowering it.  My nose isn’t all that great at the task of smelling stuff anyway.  So I tossed it and I’ll spend New Year’s Eve at the drafting table with the last of the store bought I have here at Casa del Garrett. 

It’s okay…my first attempts at beer batter fish frying didn’t work out either, but I kept on tweaking and tweaking some more and now it’s a neighborhood and co-worker favorite.

Saving grace is I taught myself how to separate eggs and fold ingredients.  Not that hard really…I’d just never done it before.  I have long narrow fingers so I started out by dumping the contents of an egg into the palm of my hand and letting the white drip between my fingers into a bowl.  The other method is to shuffle the yoke back and forth between the two halves of the shell you’ve just opened, letting the white drip off in the process.  But the egg in the hand trick works for me like a charm.  I’ve never held a yoke in my hand before.  Felt…odd…