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I have been desperately afraid of making this sauce since forever. (Not afraid of eating it mind you, I’ve never met an eggs benedict I didn’t like, or eat.) To overcome this fear I asked my friend Hankto show me how to make it. OMG. Hank’s hollandaise didn’t separate, and he didn’t swear (any more than usual), but the work! The beads of sweat forming on this man’s forehead as he whipped those egg yolks and butter into submission. I was dreading the attempt. Hank has arms of steel. I have arms of, hmmm, a young, willowy sapling? Whatever. Not steel.

The solution? Blender hollandaise. It’s easy! Even I can do it. Which means even you can do it. So I encourage you to try it, if you like me have been intimidated by the thought of attempting this sauce. Use it over fish, steamed vegetables like broccoli or asparagus, or on top of poached eggs, bacon, and English muffins.

By the way, if you want to try your hand at traditional Hollandaise, Michael Ruhlman has a great post breaking down all the steps on his site: Classic Hollandaise Sauce.

Easy Blender Hollandaise Sauce Recipe

Yield: Makes about 1 cup of sauce, good for about 4-6 servings.

Ingredients 3 egg yolks (see how to separate eggs) 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon cayenne (optional) 10 tablespoons unsalted butter (if using salted butter, skip the added salt)

Method

1 Melt the butter slowly in a small pot. Try not to let it boil – you want the moisture in the butter to remain there and not steam away.

2 Add the egg yolks, lemon juice, salt and cayenne (if using) into your blender. Blend the egg yolk mixture at a medium to medium high speed until it lightens in color, about 20-30 seconds. The friction generated by the blender blades will heat the yolks a bit. The blending action will also introduce a little air into them, making your hollandaise a bit lighter.

3 Once the yolks have lightened in color, turn the blender down to its lowest setting (if you only have one speed on your blender it will still work), and drizzle in the melted butter slowly, while the blender is going. Continue to buzz for another couple seconds after the butter is all incorporated.

4 Turn off the blender and taste the sauce. It should be buttery, lemony and just lightly salty. If it is not salty or lemony enough, you can add a little lemon juice or salt to taste. If you want a thinner consistency, add a little warm water. Pulse briefly to incorporate the ingredients one more time.

Store until needed in a warm spot, like on or next to the stovetop. Use within an hour or so.

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Classic Hollandaise Sauce- Michael Ruhlman whips up some Hollandaise the old fashioned way, with a whisk.

Gwyneth Paltrow, who runs lifestyle site Goop, at a book signing. Photograph: Jason Merritt/Getty Images

Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle site is now hurtling into its seventh year and during that time it has laid claim to many weird and outlandish cures and lifehacks. But a guide to getting longer legs? Please.

Earlier this month, Goop ran a piece about fascia, which it called The Secret Organ, explaining how its manipulation was the key to getting longer legs. Fascia, in case you didn’t know, is the thin membrane that covers all of our muscles, the white stuff that you get when you remove the skin from a piece of chicken. But due to ageing or injury or just sitting badly at your desk, this membrane has a tendency to get dehydrated and decompresses. Through treatment with a structural integrative specialist – something we call Rolfingand that we’ve mentioned before – it is possible to repair the fascia which, claims Goop, may lead to longer muscles or, in this case, longer and leaner legs.

But is there any truth in it? I asked an expert called Alan Richardson who runs Rolfing London.

“Whether from injury or ageing, the muscle tissue can become dehydrated and decompress,” explains Richardson. “The objective of rolfing is to realign that muscle which we can do in somewhere between 10 and 12 sessions.” While he isn’t keen to suggest you can actually elongate your legs by treating that area, he admits “it is not an unreasonable claim depending on what you do and how you do it”.

If, through correct treatment, the muscle tissue is treated (ie hydrated and released) “it will certainly give the sensation of elongating”. However, one thing you can do which is most likely to add a little length is work on “the head of the femur which connects to your hip socket. One of the objectives of rolfing is to release the muscles in this area, which may have the effect of pulling the femur out of the socket by anything up to a few centimetres.” Yep, that means adding two inches to your legs. One of the areas which gets less attention is the spine, however, and “people really do get taller when we treat the muscles in that area because Rolfing can have the effect of decompressing the spine especially in the case of Scoliosis”.

All that aside, he doesn’t have a vested interest in “the Hollywood cosmetic side of things” and is more interested in “improving people’s structure and bodily comfort” mainly because Rolfing is known to give patients a sense of grounding; they stand up for themselves when previously they may have been pushed around, they deal with stress better. Some even describe the Rolfing experience as catalysing a major life change or decision.” As for giving you longer legs, this may be possible “but it’s merely a coincidence.”

Sometime last year Richardson started treating a man who had hurt himself horse-riding. They worked together for about nine months after which he returned to the 10-day horse-riding event. Not only was he able to complete the full 10 days but he went up two notches in his stirrup ie, he had, to all appearances, “grown”.

By Christina H July 19, 2011 757,232 Views

Fine, you might think. I can see why doctors would need this stuff, and probably business types. But, hey, if you can’t talk to people, you can still become a programmer or something.

First, as an aside, apparently business graduatesare also becoming incompetent at human interaction, increasingly demonstrating “unacceptable handshakes, inappropriate manners at business meals, improper

introductions and unsuitable lunch behavior as well as some general office errors.”

Unsuitable lunch behavior?

Secondly, sure, IT and engineering are magnets for people increasingly desperate to find some kind of job that won’t expose their inability to talk to others, as you can see in these somewhat touching forum posts.

If you read the rest of that thread you will see that those poor guys are out of luck. The only job where you don’t have to deal with any people at all is probably wilderness explorer, and nowadays, chances are you will attract a camera crew following you around anyway. As an engineer, you don’t have to be a super-suave schmoozer, but you do have to have a fairly impressive array of interpersonal skillsto really get far.

But there’s help! MIT is actually teaching people skills classesto some of its best students, tired of seeing them passed over for promotions in favor of dumbass MBAs with winning smiles. And a lot of IT professionals, tired of getting nowhere because they keep sighing loudly every time someone doesn’t understand something, take the initiative to fix things at professional how-to-talk-to-people courses.

Lesson 1.

Because the truth is, the people that move up are the people who understand people. They may not understand the most efficient way to pursue technological developments, or the difference between a hard drive and a memory stick, or what a computer is, but they know “appropriate lunch behavior.” So, like many office humorists have observed, many workplaces are full of smart, technical people being managed by smooth talkers who are still amazed by email.

That’s kind of horrible. And that’s why …

A lot of us would prefer to work in a corner somewhere and not have to worry about office politics or kissing asses or spending countless hours in meetings. Some of us are even afraid of asking how someone’s day was or explaining the project we are working on. Or even asking a teammate on the same project what they are doing.

And sure, you might be happy knowing that you know what you’re doing and that you’re doing a good job, and you don’t care about being promoted. The bosses might be a bunch of buzzword-swapping know-nothings who get all their technical knowledge from Hollywood movies and ask you to try “reversing the polarity” when something goes wrong, but you’ll just vent about it to your co-workers later and have a good laugh.

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“Then he asked if I couldn’t just put on a helmet and hack into the database!”

The thing is that management is steering the ship. At its worst, they could have thousands of brilliant engineers, scientists or programmers studying how to manufacture adamantium or stop time. Or a district full of experienced teachers throwing out their curriculum and copying lesson plans directly from Dangerous Minds and School of Rock . If they don’t have enough field expertise to tell who’s good and who’s incompetent, when layoffs come, they might as well be throwing darts blindfolded at an employee list.

Or the actual employees, why not.

And all this could have been stopped if some knowledgeable but shy employee had stepped up and taken one of them Carnegie interpersonal skill classes or just made himself practice chatting with a different co-worker at lunch every day, or something. That employee could work their way up to a position where they could focus the department on something that’s actually physically possible. Also they would have more friends and dates.

Because this isn’t just about faking social skills and manipulating people with some stupid “social engineering” tricks. Learning things like empathy and listening puts you in a place where you understand other people a little better, and saves you from living in a paranoid world where you imagine everyone’s thinking bad things about you, or everyone you don’t get along with is an oversimplified villain or shallow stereotype.

And if you like to be honest and blunt, that’s one thing, but it’s another thing when half the people you’re talking to think you’re insulting them just because you don’t know what phrases come across as condescending. You’ll alienate both the people you meant to rip on, and the people you didn’t. Maybe you want to come across as that sarcastic, insulting guy — but not on accident , right?

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“But I said you were PLEASANTLY plump! That’s a positive!”

I know a lot of us don’t have the energy to socialize with more than a certain number of people every day, and that’s no problem. I’m just saying that I see a lot of Internet people express the view that 90 percent of people out there are boring or vapid and they don’t need to learn to deal with them. They’ll just hang out with the few people that respond positively whenever they blurt out whatever is in their head at the moment, and trying to adapt their manner to get along with anybody else is “being fake” and “not being themselves.”

You miss out on a lot of life that way. And if that’s fine with you, keep in mind it’s that kind of attitude that’s going to lead to some company spending millions on developing sentient kangaroos when one employee has an AIDS cure gathering dust or something. You could have stopped that. Just saying.

For classes we need to teach our kids, check out The 10 Most Important Things They Didn’t Teach You In School. And then check out things people actually learned about, in Smash Bros Theory: 6 Absurd Classes Taught at Actual Colleges.

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