I love the concept of brunch. You can eat breakfast food, lunch food, or both, and you can do it all in the same meal while drinking champagne. Who wouldn’t love that? As an added bonus, it is one of those meals that you can linger over for hours on end (which just means more champagne).
Yesterday, we had a few people over for brunch because nothing says “Happy Mother’s Day”quite like smoked fish. We started with
Ruby Slippers, my new favorite blend of pomegranate juice and prosecco, as well as baked brie with honey and homemade pita chips. Of course, there was also plenty of coffee drinking from the DIY coffee bar, complete with both Keurig and Nespresso machines.
The buffet was an assortment of all my brunch favorites. Naturally, we had the requisite bagels, along with cream cheese, scallion cream cheese (I made that, too, so you could actually taste the scallions) and nova. We also had tuna salad, whitefish salad (nope, did not go the store-bought route on that one, either…), quiche with cheddar and leeks, blueberry muffins (Ina Garten’s recipe was a huge hit) and lemon bars (one of which is making a repeat performance as I type.)
A few thoughts:
1. I removed the center skeleton from the whitefish so I could make the salad, then stuff it all back into the fish for a nice presentation. The thing is, those fish have a lot of little bones. In addition to the big, easy to remove ones, there are hundreds of tiny, softer (but you still don’t want to eat them) bones. Yes, it would have been easier to just buy whitefish salad. No, it would not have tasted as good.
2. Tuna salad is better if you make it in the food processor. You don’t have to process it until it is unrecognizable, just enough to give it a nice, creamy, even texture. I know – you have to then dirty the food processor again. Whatever. It is worth it.
3. Lemon bars work for any meal or occasion. I dare you to find a time when they don’t work.
4. Pita chips are really easy to make (pita bread, olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic… bake for 10 minutes) and they are so much better than the store bought kind.
5. My quiche, on the other hand, is going to take some more work to get perfect. Yes, it tasted good and it looked OK, but it certainly could have been prettier.
What is your favorite part of brunch?
