brunch & a typical sunday

photo: rosa

several weeks back i was asked if i would like to add my" two cents" to a little food event created by lovely rosa whose food blog, rosa's yummy yums, is written and published from the beautiful and scenic country of switzerland. rosa wanted to know about how some of us go about our weekend brunches.

breakfast, for me, has never been a big event — either on weekdays or weekends. i am usually satisfied with my seriously strong shots of espresso or double latte, until i've worked up enough of an appetite. food first thing in the morning is the last thing on my mind.

brunch, on the other hand — that mixture of breakfast and lunch — is more my style on the weekends. it is something i very much enjoy but only really indulge in once a month as i prefer to do it lavishly with a few friends.

depending upon where i am eating, the menu can range drastically. a few times a year we will meet at the ritz carlton hotel or a similar place like the queen elizabeth where the choices are more upscale and tend towards a lunch menu. the ritz is great as it has a garden setting centered around a duck pond.

most times though, i love to go to somewhere like the famous montreal eatery called beauty's {usually involving a loooonng wait to get in} or a typical chain restaurant such as eggspectations where one can get breakfast 24 hours a day. of course, the local neighbourhood "clog your arteries" hole-in-the-wall" is always an option.

in the end, my typical brunch consists of coffee, a fruit salad [hopefully made up of strawberries , grapes & melon], either french toast or omelet or bagel, cream cheese & lox, a pastry of some sort and maybe some kind of juice. that definitely fills me until late afternoon! some would say, a montreal brunch wouldn't be right without a bagel, cream cheese and lox ..... especially since our bagels, very different from others, are considered to be one of the best around.

my choices are fairly typical but always satisfying — just the way, i believe, a brunch should be :)

and as it's july 1st ....

our flag, only established in 1965!

just as the usa celebrates july 4th, we, in canada, celebrate july 1st as a national holiday called canada day. established in 1879 and originally called dominion day, it is day where people gather for parades, take off for a long weekend to the cottage, and celebrate with lots of food, and watch fireworks at night.

happy canada day!

a list long overdue.....

i have to admit it has taken me a long time to come up with a list of odd food-related facts about myself since i was asked/tagged by trinigourmet several weeks back. i guess i wasn't even sure if i even had any weird food facts about me to divulge to the public at large. after all, it's not like i'd eat stuff like this .... now that's weird. anyway, you can read on and decide for yourself. all things being relative, the question remains ....... just how weird are you?!

6 weird food facts about me:

1. i am obsessed with ACCURACY, especially in the arenas of measurement and size. when it comes to cutting and shaping things, i can spend inordinate amounts of time with my best friends in the kitchen — my ruler and uber sensitive & accurate scale [which, by the way, was one of the best purchases i've made]. ok, admittedly, i am not ready yet for a hospital program since i will forgo measuring and weighing things if they agree with the "eyeball" method. still, things look better when they are uniform and the same. errrr, most of the time, that is.

2. i rarely eat at other people's homes. this has been an item of contention for many years and made me either flatly turn down offers or find inventive ways out of eating at another person's home. i think my neurosis began with my experience of eating at a friend's home and finding dried food on the plates and then more on some of the serving utensils, including dog hair. i think i nearly barfed on the spot.

the fact is that you really never know how clean someone (you don't really know) is or what goes into the cooking of things. i also know people who have no problems with this, so maybe i am just weird! lol. my favourite thing is what i call "the microwave/oven" test. i always try to sneak a peek at the insides of the microwave (or oven) to see the state of it. if it's not clean, i definitely "ain't" eatin' your food.

3. glutinous and bitter foods are not my friends. anything which involves stringy mucilage is vorbotten and literally makes me wretch. foods like okra and natto come to mind when i think of goo. melted cheese, however, is not mucilage and is therefore 100 per cent fine by me in terms of goo. bitter things are also not items which please my palate. i have never understood people who actually say they enjoy things like rapini, radicchio, hilbeh or bitter gourd. i might as well use buckley's as a condiment if that were the case.

4. i only started eating dried fruit in my 20s. i have no clue where that came from but i refused to eat or even use it in my cooking until the recent past. i felt tortured as a child to continually find those damned little red boxes of sunmaid raisins in my lunches or given them for snacks. even to this day, i will not eat raisins though i have eaten the golden ones and will use only those kind in small amounts in cooking. owning a rabbit as a child reinforced my distaste for small dried black things. :O

5. i probably have 3 more sets of dishes, utensils, kitchen towels, etc. than you do. keeping a kosher style kitchen means separate everything (well, almost) for preparing and eating meat, dairy and pareve foods (anything non meat or non dairy). that's a 'hell-a' lot of stuff. i also have a whole set of everything again just for passover use but that is strictly for meat/pareve use (think whole kitchen's worth). no wonder i hardly have any space for all of my wares.

6. i love cutting up chickens. ok, that's definitely weird [and no, i'm not a hannibal lechter but i do own very sharp knives, so watch out!]. i just like being able to know that all parts of what i'm eating came from the same bird!! do you even have any idea that those chicken parts you're buying came from 20 different birds??? cutting my own chickens also means i can get the sizes and pieces i want but, of course, i have to use disposable kitchen gloves cause it's a dirty deed.

and as an added extra, since 7 is a lucky number:

7. sugar is a food group all on its own. i love sugar in all its forms. i mean i REALLY love it. my favourite sugar high is to toast [challah] bread, shmear it with lots of butter and then pack on a good 1/4 inch of brown sugar. oh baby.

weird, eh?

as this is supposed to be tag, i wanna know what oddities are behind the personae of:

*rosa [still workin' on your list!] ✓
*aria [oh, for sure there's some good ones there!]
*beenzzz [c'mon, i know you wanna spill the beenzzz] ✓
*topchamp [i can only just imagine!]✓
*pammie [i know you have more than 6! lol]
*tschoerda [tell me yours, my little gugelhopf ]✓
*emily [oooh, can't wait to read what the scientist reveals!] ✓
*you [-> e-me ✉ if you want to do yours!]

note: feel free not to do this; it's just an offer for a fun post. [if i haven't mentioned you, take no offense, was thinking of those who have done memes in the past or i though would be inclined to try one].