You know what the best meal ever is? Dessert. But you know what the best meal ever after dessert is? Brunch. And do you know why? Consider the Venn diagram below. Study it closely. Learn its truths.
Today was a grand and glorious celebration in the holy and delicious name of a meal time that occurs between 10am and 2pm. We called it, Brunchapalooza! Continue reading
Well, it’s New Year’s Eve. How exciting and yet terrifying. I mean, after midnight tonight, it will officially be 2011. And I have to say, I’m a bit disappointed. I mean, I love my Camry and all but I kind of thought by now I’d have a flying car, or at least a pegasus that was hooked up to a cart of some sort. But no. My vehicle is still a non-magical, non-nuclear powered terrestrial vehicle.
But if I can’t have a personal automotive levitation device, I might as well have the next best thing this new year: brunch. I love brunch. First of all, it’s a delightfully crunchy-sounding word. Brrrrruncccchhh. It’s like weekend-in-a-bowl. It’s also flexible, relaxing, laid back, amenable to last minute plans, sociable and full of delicious flavors and my friends and I are indeed fans of delicious flavors (and also of the TV show Psych). Thus, we are big believers in the awesome healing powers of a good brunch.
Our last brunch was a bit last-minute. It was a couple weeks ago and the planning started on Friday, I think, with Paul messaging me as to whether we were interested in brunching at his place on Sunday. On Saturday, he laid out his menu ideas and we assigned tasks during a quick phone call and then we went grocery shopping for whatever items we didn’t already have in stock. On Sunday, Josh, myself, Brian and Rita trooped over to Paul’s house to get the party started, so to speak, with him and his roommates. Continue reading
maybe she meant, let them eat cherries
Or, “What to do with 14 pounds of canned cherries.”
Josh likes cherries. Josh likes canning. Josh cans cherries. Lauren carries off two cans of cherries. Lauren cooks cherry cake. Cherry coffee cake. Cherry coffee cake with canned cherries. Josh is cheery. Josh likes cherry coffee cake with canned cherries.
I was bored on Saturday and that’s usually a recipe for disaster deliciousness because when I get bored, I bake. Only I was running low on ideas. It’s amazing, really—there are seven hundred and fifty recipes in my Evernote cookbook and yet, not a single thing I wanted to make right then and there. Well, that I could make anyway, with what I had on hand.
So I went offline and in search of my 40-something cookbooks. I wasn’t inspired by much there that day either, until I went through a Tastebook I had put together several years ago. If you’ve never been to Tastebook, it’s basically a site that lets you organize and print your own cookbooks—it’s rather nice, and I especially like it for gifts. But anyway, I’d printed myself a cookbook of recipes I found online a few years ago and one of them–the very first recipe in the book, actually—was for a cranberry coffee cake. Well I could do that, I thought. But I don’t have any cranberries. But I did have a basement wine cellar full of unfermented fruit (I know—I’m doing it wrong). That is, full of cherries that Josh bought fresh and canned a few weeks ago. Josh likes cherries. Josh likes cake. Cake likes cherries. Lauren cooks cherry cake. Continue reading