That’s it in a nutshell. If I’m in a hurry I melt the butter, whisk the egg, add the cold lemon juice to butter just as it finishes melting and now it’s room temp, pour the egg in and whisk. Uses only one pan, one bowl and the whisk, takes about 90 seconds. Just gotta be paying attention.
Once you crack the code, it is easy peasy – but it’s very non intuitive until then. Either use a double boiler (I don’t recommend this approach, it makes it harder to tell whats going on, reduces your control and makes setup feel like a chorae) … or buy a few dozen eggs, a couple pounds of butter and a dozen lemons and just practice the sequence until it clicks.
The key is to control the temperature carefully, and keep that temperature homogenous and even… that means knowing how warm and cold your ingredients are, and steady whisking.
Two ways to do it:
Whisk together eggs, water and lemon juice until the mixture thickens, and then add melted butter slowly (your slowest and most foolproof method)
Whisk your eggs to aerate them, set them aside. Melt your butter, remove it from the heat and add your (cold) lemon juice and water. Should be about room temp now. Whisk it together and drizzle in the eggs, whisking constantly. Then put it back on the heat and whisk it steadily till it thickens, which will be quite soon.
The first path is the correct way, in that it minimizes the risk of putting the eggs into a hot pan (and curdling them), but it’s also slower and more involved. Basically, any way that ensures the eggs are about the same temperature as whatever gets mixed into them, and heated up gradually from there, works.
For reference, nowhere in Western Europe is even close to the much of the west coast of the Americas in terms of seismic activity.
My teens and 20s would be pretty interesting, if you’re into drama, crime and lots of psychedelic sub plots.
My 30s would be… pretty boring, things are a lot stabler.
Yeah, prickly pears are tuna fruit, from the tuna cactus
Yeah, I did a bit of poking around, check this out. Till the tuna canneries started showing up in the early 1900s in California, “tuna” was just as likely to prefix “cactus” as “fish”.
Mystery solved I think
There is, yes … that’s the main Spanish name for prickly pear.
Up until around 1907, your odds of encountering the fruit by the name “tuna” were about the same as the fish, when the first commercial canneries started to pop up in California… hence, a habit of clarifying between the two that stuck, even though most folks outside of the southwest had never heard of a tuna cactus.
I order a tuna salad sandwich or a tuna sandwich, but I grew up hearing tuna fish… specifically in reference to the stuff that came in a can.
Both were equally common years ago but over time, “tuna” sans fish has won out… likely because fresh, non canned tuna is very common.
I read an article a while ago that theorized the reason for Americans calling it “tuna fish” was that it rose to prominence as a canned staple good in the 1940s, and many Americans who didn’t live on the coasts had never heard of tuna before. Its light meat, when canned and cooked, was very mild and chicken-y compared with the heavily salted, oily canned fish folks were familiar with, hence both “chicken of the sea” and the precaution of labeling the can with not only tuna, but “fish”.
I think an alternate explanation is probably more likely… the 1919 Oxford English Dictionary describes “Tuna” as an alternative spelling of “tunny”, the old name for the fish (still used in a culinary sense in Britain) … not coincidentally:
Californians would also have been familiar with the other tuna… tuna fruit, the prickly pear.
Possessed of both a fruit and a fish of the same name, distinguishing one from the other when canning fish seems reasonable
The largest canneries of tuna (e.g., the one that ultimately became Chicken of the Sea) were all based in California.
Drinking can be a big part of socializing in the US, but you’ll be able to get by without it. Neighbors don’t come over uninvited here, and it’s unusual to have the type of friendships where people come by unannounced all the time (at least, after college).
I might try a few things:
If you haven’t already, find a local mosque to attend; that’s a good way to widen your social circle with American Muslims, who may be able to introduce you to more people, broaden it further, etc. It’ll be folks who are more culturally familiar, but many will likely be a bit more integrated already and have a wider group of American friends as well.
Hobby based clubs are great, but they do tend to be a little transactional – think about hobbies you want to be doing anyway (so you’re not JUST there to meet people).
If you have the time, I’d be on the lookout for volunteering and community service type activities – it’s a great way to meet good people, more committed than a hobby group, and much less awkward to socialize in than a workplace.
Depending where you live, try and strike up conversations a bit more openly / frequently, and be willing to mention that you just moved here and don’t know many folks. At the barbershop, out to breakfast, in a long line, at the coffee shop, etc. Make conversation, a lot of people will be happy to chat and some will invite you to things. Just gotta be ok with lots of chats.