A week or so ago I wrote a short post discussing some things I missed about living in the United States, but I left out one thing in particular – EggNog. I certainly miss it, and in any other circumstance it would be at the top of that list, but I left it out because Ma Li and I were going to try and make it… I smell an adventure!

I might as well admit up front that I am not a disciple of the culinary arts. My most successful breakfasts involve sugary kids’ cereal and milk. In my year or so of cooking my own meals here in Japan I have managed to pretty much nail down the elusive art of frying an egg, but that’s about it, and I only mastered that after someone helpfully pointed out that they’re *way* easier to cook if you butter/grease the pan first…

But no matter, I have a lovely Chinese girlfriend, surely she knows her way blindfolded around any kitchen! HA, you couldn’t be more wrong. My darling Ma Li, for all her wonderful good qualities, boldly flies in the face of racial stereotype and quite possibly might be the only Chinese student at APU – male or female – that can’t cook worth crap.

In short, this was going to be no Sunday stroll…

Unless you’re one of those fanatics that has pages and pages of recipes committed to memory, you’ve gotta get some instructions – enter Google, answerer of all of life’s most pressing queries. A quick search for “eggnog recipe” brought me to this page, and after comparing it with several other possibilities this was the battle plan I settled upon.

Why was this recipe exalted above all others? Simple really – it provided a formula for making a non-alcoholic version, and it provided detailed instructions for separating eggs. Don’t laugh, if you’re not a kitchen person this presents a fairly daunting obstacle for the first-timer.

Being a lazy yet passionate consumer of eggnog, I’ve always purchased mine from the store. Now I hold no delusions about the nutritional value of the most majestic of all liquids, but my sweet-tooth generally destroys all challengers. On several well-documented occasions I have even daringly paired fresh eggnog with Toll House cookie dough logs. I find this makes an excellent and portable meal-substitute in the neighborhood of about 4,000 calories. Yet even I, black hole of all that is sweet and tasty, was taken aback by the sheer cardiac-arrest inducing pile of ingredients I needed to concoct my magic wintry potion.

We started with the sugar, lots of the sugar.

Then, without screwing up once even though it was the first time I’ve ever attempted doing so, I successfully separated all the eggs. From there you toss the requisite sugar in with the yolks and start the mixing.

Now the recipe made it quite clear that one was to mix gently and slowly… I tried this, it didn’t mix worth a damn, so I jacked up the RPM’s a bit and before you knew it we had a nice bowl of brilliant orange goo. (I should be a hand model)

One must always be very serious and focused in the kitchen as well, dangerous places you know.

Once you’ve got your yolks and one half mountain of sugar slurried up nicely, you set those aside and get to work on the whites. As you’ll note in Step 3 we were instructed to “beat egg-whites until stiff.” I had and still have no idea what the fuck this guy is talking about. Ma Li made the first go at producing something resembling a stiff egg-white.

Enthusiasm quickly devolved into perturbation as repeated thrashing of the egg-whites produced no discernible change in their condition.

Time to give the big fella a shot – we’re lowtech here folks, none of those fancyschmancy electric mixer doodads.

Yet more elbowgrease began to yield a bit of froth, but still not “stiff.” After twenty minutes of this idiocy I was becoming annoyed.

Utterly defeated by Step 3, I retreated to The Wise One and humbly inquired as to what the hell I was supposed to be doing with these goddamn egg-whites. “Ahh,” I thought, “these sons of bitches are just supposed to be foamy…” And with that obstacle now behind us, the dash for the finish was on.

After conquering the egg-whites some whipping cream entered the picture and everything was rather unceremoniously combined into a large plastic bowl from the dollar store – we spare absolutely no expense around here.

It was precisely at this point that Satoshi walked in and tried to guess what we were making. I admit, it looked pretty damn disgusting at this juncture.

Yet into the pitcher it all went, and thence into the fridge to chill.

Having chilled like only a pitcher full of sugar/egg/cream slop can, the mistake savory draught was ready for consumption.

There was no sense in making Ma Li suffer first, she had never had eggnog before and therefore was of no use as an arbiter of quality. Slopping as it did into my mug, it certainly looked like eggnog, perhaps I wasn’t going to soon be yakking into the sink after all…

The verdict? Not all that bad.

You can’t taste the eggs, which we both found surprising considering how you just kinda toss ’em on in there… Ultimately the brew suffered a bit from our inability to find whole milk on short notice, and the fact that Japanese milk actually tastes quite a bit different from American milk. There is a rather queer aftertaste and smell with Japanese milk that I can’t explain, but which numerous other non-Japanese have confirmed is there. Maybe it’s something in their homogenization process, maybe they feed the cows something different, I dunno, but it’s there and you can taste it in the eggnog which detracts a bit from the overall experience. Adding booze and therefore lessening the milk used might ameliorate this slightly, I’ll let you know… heh.

The final test though? What does the Chinese maiden, lifelong eater of the Asian and therefore not artery-clogging diet, think of this liquid mix of fat, sugar, and cream?

Good god, she likes it!

Say goodbye to that slender figure sweetheart!