All posts tagged: brunch

buttermilk beignets

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It’s my birthday this week, and it falls on a Sunday. First, this is incredibly exciting – I love my birthday. I love other people’s birthdays. I love them all. A day to celebrate the people you love with food and presents? And then a day to get food, presents, and love? What’s not to excitedly bounce up and down in anticipation of about that? But argument could be made that Sundays are also my favourite days. So it’s a double whammy. They speak of pjs and papers. Hot coffee and pottering about the house in socked feet. Brunch and, more specifically, beignets. Making beignets has been a revelation, born out of my recent obsession with the food of the American South. You make a dough the night before and the next morning, after a little oil heating and dough rolling, you’re in for crispy, fluffy, sugary perfection with your Sunday morning.   J and I have been known to make a platter of these, liberally snowed with icing sugar and plonked down on the …

Peter Reinhart’s bagels

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I’ve always loved bagels. Chewy, tasty, slightly crispy – they’re the whole package. But I’ve recently upped my bagel ante. Gone are the days when all I’d do is wax lyrical about the different ways to top a bagel – of which, incidentally, there are so very many more than the four I mentioned here back in the day. You see, I’ve now baked bagels. And I can’t go back. They’re too good, and they’re so easy to make. In fact, I think it’s safe to say I’m now forever ruined for supermarket simalcrums. I have baker extraordinaire Peter Reinhart to thank for this particularly wonderful new addition to my life. Not being a native New Yorker, or living near enough London’s Brick Lane, believe me when I say that I did not know bagels could taste like this. Baking these came about as part of the recent bread-baking kick I’ve been on. And, let me tell you, a little bit – and I do mean a “little” bit – of effort here goes a …