Mother Sauce!!!

Cooking and baking has always been something I love to do. I love creating and inventing dishes when I'm not following recipes. One of my favorite things to do is open up a cook book to a ramdom page and give it a shot. Unfortunately, I haven't done it in a long time, but it may be time to start that up again.

On Sunday mornings, my husband usually cooks a big breakfast and sometimes I join in. Anytime he makes my favorite breakfast dish, eggs benedict, I try to stay away and wait to be called down. Yep, I'm spoiled like that.

But every so often when I'm helping out he makes me do the hollandise sauce. It's from an envelope so it should be easy, but dear me how I hate it so. Today was one of those days. There is something about adding a powder that might clump up if not stired often that just gives me the willies. So today as I stood there stirring I had a brilliant idea. I need to learn how to make this from scratch.

Any good Top Chef fan surely has heard about the 5 mother sauces. Hollandaise is one of those. I love hollandise so much I could eat it alone. In fact, I have. Sad. I know. But oh so delicious!

Here are the 5 Mother Sauces:

• Hollandaise - Buttery, lemony goodness.  
• Bechamel - Classic white sauce. 
• Veloute - Basically, same as Bechamel, but with stock instead of milk.
• Espagnole - Basic brown sauce... often the base for several other sauces. 
• Tomato - The most common, I think. It's the base for all tomato sauces.

This week I will start with my fave, Hollandaise. I will stay with one until I have not only perfected it, but learned it by heart. Given my crappy short memory retention, this should be interesting. I'll keep you posted. :-)