Sunday, November 26, 2006

Brunch italo-spagnolo

For our series of Italo-Spanish meetings, we recently had a brunch at our place. Trino and I had been speaking about having a brunch for a while, so I thought the moment had come, in the end :)
Having a brunch is really nice. I'm going to explain here what a brunch is for my Italian readers who may not know.
Un brunch e' un misto tra un breakfast, colazione, e un lunch, pranzo. Nei brunch americani, di solito a buffet, si hanno varie scelte di cose dolci e cose salate. Di solito le cose dolci comprendono muffins, pani dolci che assomigliano ai nostri plum-cake, pancakes, waffles (quelle cose gonfiotte e a quadretti che si fanno usando delle presse speciali), mentre le cose salate comprendono uova cucinate in vari modi, bacon, patate, biscuits (panini burrosi e salati). Se e' un brunch particolarmente ricco, si puo' avere anche carne, pesce, insalate varie, pasta, etc.. L'ora del brunch varia tra le 10 e le 2 del pomeriggio, e di solito e' una cosa che si fa la domenica.
One nice thing of the brunch is that there's no hurry at all. People are not tired and they can decide to stay together as long as they want. So we had a really nice time, including a walk around the lake, and lots of interesting discussions about nature, movies, music and life with all of our guests and in particular with Luisa and Jorge, who stayed with us also in the afternoon. It was a very enjoyable day.

At our Italo-Spanish brunch, people were encouraged to bring brunch or breakfast food from their countries. So we had a really nice variety of food, and a lot of it!!!
I'll show here a few pictures.
First 'course': American-style brunch:
We have bacon & eggs prepared by Lucas, and biscuits prepared by Ross. Lucas showed me how to make bacon & eggs: you have to fry the bacon in its own grease and take it out and adsorb the grease on paper towel, then once you're done with the bacon, you should keep only part of the grease released from it and scramble the eggs in it. Greasy, but not TOO bad. :) Ross's clue about how to prepare biscuits is 'Pillsbury' :) :) :) (E' una marca di biscuits surgelati... devo dire, ero delusa quando l'ho scoperto, ma devo ammettere che erano piuttosto buoni).
Tim and Ross, eating their own biscuits :)

'READ MORE' if you want to see the Italian, Mexican and another American part of the brunch!!!

The second course was Italian - made by me :)
In Italy we like to make bread, it's well-known :) - so I decided that sweet bread and some sort of jam and savory bread would be something that we would have for brunch, if it existed. :) So I made a sweet bread with walnuts, coconut and dried figs inside (the one on the right) and a savory ciambella (doughnut) bread, filled with either olives or cheese (I made two types). They were really good so I'll post the recipe in a next post.
The next course was Mexican. We had two wonderful things:
Enchilladas, made by Luisa and Jorge. These are made with a dough similar to the one Luisa tought me for tamales, but there was also spinach in it.. and they were filled with chicken, and with cheese on top.. delicious! A picture of the cooks:
Then, these are the wonderful quesadillas, i.e. fried tortillas with either chorizo or cheese. I loved the cheese ones :).
Here are the cooks :)

Our last course was another American tradition: cheese and vegetable quiche
It was very good, a perfect ending to our brunch :). It was made by Crissy and David, but unfortunately I didn't take a good picture of them :(

So just to conclude here is a final picture of the two hosts :)

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