Never mind the taste; few words are so pleasing as "nog."

After days of consuming rich holiday treats, Jason and I were pretty sure we didn’t need to add to the load. Yet there was one recipe that we hadn’t gotten a chance to try over Christmas, and we couldn’t resist giving it a whirl on New Year’s Day. The New York Times had run a recipe for Nog, the Hard Way in December, and we have a known weakness for things that are a) alcoholic and b) more difficult than they really should be. And so we put the black-eyed peas on to boil and got down to the business of nogging.

The NYT recipe is broken, rather arbitrarily, into five steps, but let me assure you, there are more than five steps. In fact, reading the thing beforehand made Jason (a wee bit hungover) threaten to wave the white flag. But once we got going, it wasn’t so hard after all, and despite a small disagreement over how fast a whisk should be moving before the action can be considered whisking, it made for an excellent tag-team cooking experience. For instance, Jason could stir in the heavy cream while I was preoccupied with cursing the fact that we only had three ice cubes left in the freezer with which to create an ice-water bath for the pan. (We ended up improvising by using an ice pack.)

Sometimes, you just have to improvise.

Jason was a tad skeptical of the raw egg factor, and we’d splurged on the freshest, most pristine eggs we could find. But regardless, it was amazing to witness how thorough of a transformation the eggs go through. After all of that whisking and beating, it seemed a chemical impossibility that they would be at all slimy or unpalatable.

Would all this intrepid nog determination turn out to be worth it? I could tell from the first sip that it would be. The final product was a vision of frothy white beauty, the sweet creaminess tempered perfectly by the sharp edge of rum and nutmeg. I should probably point out, however, that it did deteriorate a bit over the following hours, making it ideal for a dinner party rather than for two people trying to polish off an entire batch of it themselves. Jason had an epic stomachache that night from the abundance of dairy. But no one ever said that nogging was for the faint of heart.