Gand Gale - Gale Gands Brunch!: 100 Fantastic Recipes for the Weekends Best Meal

Thats my favorite invitation to giveand to receive. Im obsessed with brunch. I adore making it and I adore eating it. The food is delicious, and I love the way it often straddles the line between sweet and savory. Plus, brunch can be so much easier and more relaxed than dinner. And if Im going to entertain at home, it needs to be easy and relaxed!

I have three kids, and as my family has grown (and my friends families have grown), preparing and hosting a dinner party has become a complicated endeavor. A weekend brunch party is much simpler to pull off. People can bring their kids, so they dont have to worry about finding a sitter, and your own kids (and theirs!) can help you prepare the meal.

And people seem to have time to stop by for a two-hour bruncha heaping spoonful of ham and asparagus strata or a slice of Quick Pear Streusel Coffee Cake, maybeon a weekend morning, even if they dont have three or four hours free at night for dinner. Brunch lends itself to feeling casual and laid-back, though it can still definitely be a celebration. Just pour your guests a Champagne Pimms Cup and see how festive the morning becomes!

Because I think brunch is such a wonderful way to entertain, I have wanted to write a brunch cookbook for years. Recipes for brunch food can be accessible to all levels of home cooks, and theres usually a role for the kid-chefs in the household too. And even if Im not entertaining and Im just making brunch with my family, I love taking the time to sit down together to eat and then send the people I love off into their busy lives with a good, inspiring first meal of the day.

Another thing I like about making brunch is that the ingredients are usually familiar and easy to find. And the recipes are relatively fast, so the dishes are on the table in much less time than other meals seem to take to prepare. Nothing braises for three hours, and there are no intricate sauces to slave over. For many of the recipes in this book, reading the recipe takes longer than the actual cooking!

If theres one thing Ive learned from my decades of being a top pastry chef, it is this: Its not the difficult techniques or special equipment that makes things taste stellarits the ingredients and the way they are combined that make food so delicious. Using superb ingredients and combining them in innovative ways doesnt take any extra time or make cooking complicated. (In fact, the opposite is usually true.) Nowhere is this more evident than with the favorite recipes we all associate with brunch. Take my Hot Cocoa with Brown Sugar, for example: Making hot cocoa from scratch is incredibly easy, and simply swapping brown sugar for the usual granulated sugar gives it an unforgettable flavor. A big result that doesnt require any more time to make? Thats my kind of cooking!

Thats what separates the recipes in this book from the ho-hum standards youll find in lots of places. So many of my favorites feature one or two unexpected ingredients that take them from good to great. French toast made with panettone instead of standard white bread is a decadent treat. Made with ciabatta and spiked with almonds, the same French toast concept is excellent in an entirely different way. And then theres freshly squeezed orange juice: Its terrific as is, but when you add lime juice and a splash of grenadine, its over the top. If you like a side of bacon with your waffles, how about mixing a little bacon into your waffle batter for a sinfully good savory-sweet experience? Or eggs baked in ham cups in a muffin tin: a beautiful, delicious result for no more effort than your standard baked eggs.

Perhaps I appreciate brunch as much as I do because Ive missed it so often, either because I had to be in the kitchen early, preparing the days pastries, or because I was at work very late the night before and needed to sleep in the next morning. I sometimes have breakfastor at least breakfast-type foodfor dinner because its so appealing to me. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, so why not eat it anytime?

I got to enjoy breakfast a lot more often starting in 2006, when my partners and I opened Osteria di Tramonto, the first restaurant Ive ever owned that serves breakfast. At the same time, we opened Gales Coffee Bar, which serves breakfast food and beverages as well as all kinds of pastries. Both these places have been wonderful testing grounds for some of the recipes in this book. I get to see firsthand what foods people crave and regularly request in the morning.