Breakfast & Brunch

This is my mom’s Cheese, Onion & Tomato Pie based on the Savory Cheese and Onion Pie in “The Vegetarian Epicure” by Anna Thomas published in 1972. All my life, we’ve called it Cheese, Onion & Tomato Pie, but after I reached out to Anna Thomas and asked permission to publish this recipe, I looked it up and see that she has another recipe called Cheese & Tomato Pie in her book, The Vegetarian Epicure, Book Two. This is not that recipe although that one looks good too. My mom uses a frozen 9” pie crust for the pie, but the original recipe calls for a 10” shortcrust pastry. My mom adds Parmesan cheese to the recipe as well.

The Roasted Asparagus, Mushroom, Bacon & Goat Cheese Tart I designed for an Easter brunch. It would also make a fine Easter bonnet, it’s so pretty.

There is something so satisfying about making your own gravlax. It’s easy, but looks like you sweated over it. I added fresh beets to the curing mixture to give even more dazzle!

I make them my way. I like them crispy and golden and salty and slathered with sour cream and something sweet.

I live around the corner from Paisano’s Meat Market on Smith Street in Brooklyn. They sell Italian sausage meat which is a fatty, spiced ground pork mixture studded with fennel seeds. You could pretty much mix anything into it and it would be AMAZING. When I was researching my International Men With Balls Brunch I came across this popular dish that’s often made with Bisquick. Mine have a much higher ratio of I made gluten free sausage and cheddar balls.

Yes, please. A blend of butter, maple syrup and maple sugar crystals that you can slathered on toast or just eat with a spoon.

My lemon curd goes POW! It’s a delicious balance of sweet and tart for making tarts, filling cookies and cakes and crêpes, adding to parfaits and more. Or you could just eat it on toast!

Bacon Fried Rice is my favorite breakfast dish, but I could also eat it for lunch, dinner, afternoon snack, or even dessert. Clearly, it may seem that I have a problem. I say, “There’s no problem unless there’s no more bacon or rice in the world.”

The 70’s were a funny time food wise. As a pseudo-hippy kid, making bread out of pumpkin seemed revolutionary and wild until I heard of zucchini bread. The only time we had pumpkin was in pie at Thanksgiving and I hated it. My mother would bake this bread fairly often and all the other ingredients masked the nasty flavor of canned pumpkin that I still loathe today.One Christmas we baked them as gifts in old coffee cans, as you did back then. It was our way of recycling and being environmentally conscious. If you make this, use roasted or steamed sugar pumpkin, butternut squash, calabaza or another dense pumpkin as the base. It’s worth the extra work.

This is a gluten-free pie where the crust is made from potatoes in the style of a potato roesti. I was creating a recipe for one of the sponsors.

Cheese blintzes are comfort food in my family and at the same time a special treat. I think they are best homemade because commercially made blintzes are ruined by making the filling too sweet. According to my mouth, they should be just slightly sweet and served with something sweet and of course, sour cream.

After being in the chocolate fountain business for ten years, I’ve gotten sick of strawberries. I can only eat perfectly ripe, sweet organic ones, preferably just picked. But there’s an exception and that’s when there’s rhubarb to pair with them. I will eat this combo anytime. That said, it tastes best with perfectly ripe, sweet organic strawberries, preferably just picked. I made this strawberry rhubarb compote to go with cheese blintzes on Mother’s Day for my mom.