Brunch it out

Brunch, as a meal, works for me. We wake up late on the weekends, and usually try to go for a run right away so a big meal in the early afternoon hits the spot. Brunch as an event, however, is a pain in the ass. The places that take reservations book up, the places that don't take reservations have epic waits, and it's physically painful to mill around outside a restaurant for an hour when you haven't eaten anything yet for the day.

The easy solution, it turns out, is to have people over for brunch. This works well as a standalone event, and it works even better when your boyfriend is in playoffs mode and spends the weekend on the couch yelling at the TV. I like football, but I don't like that much football. I'm not sure Mike even really likes that much football; by Sunday night he was a little fatigued, but maybe that was just the exhaustion of vigilantly fast forwarding through millions of car insurance commercials while muttering about how crappy they are.

On Saturday I brought in entertainment reinforcements: friends, for brunch. I made a frittata based loosely on the one here, with mushrooms, chard, brie, and a lot of tarragon. Mike whipped up hot mess, his take on the Midwestern delight of tater tot hot dish. Swap out the ground beef for breakfast "soysage" and you're good to go. Homemade bagels made an appearance, as well as some really tasty bloody marys.

If you haven't made a bloody mary sans mix before, take that leap - once you have the ingredients it comes together quickly, and the flavor is just right. I got hippie tomato juice, which was all you can get in my neighborhood, so I added more olive juice than called for to amp up the salt. I also made ice cubes with the juice to minimize waterdown. I used smoked paprika for the rim, because again, the hippie yuppie shops apparently don't sell things like Old Bay, but otherwise I stuck to the recipe, and it did me right.

Ain't brunch grand?