Brunch It Up

On Sundays in New York City, groups of friends congregate at restaurants, coffee shops or simply their friends' apartments for the traditional Sunday Brunch. The time is often spent discussing the week to come and laughing about the previous night's revelry. (And more importantly to recover from what ever sort of stupor they put themselves in the previous night.)

My group of friends have developed a decent tradition of meeting at one of our apartments, once or twice a month in order to "brunch it up." There was a point where we went to one of the neighborhood restaurants and simply ate together but we realized that it was easier and a bit more fun to simply create the meal together.

Today, the brunch was held at my place, a slightly below street level apartment in the Italian section of Williamsburg where often it is my landlords' and their family's voices, who fill the apartment with noise as they hold one of their weekend dinners or baby-sit their grandson. (The grandson and his voice and mannerisms will be the subject of another entry in the nearby future because there is noise, and then, there is the noise of a young child who clearly does not understand the meaning of the word "no." )

At this point, our brunch production has been culled into a sweet science of interchangeable parts much like Eli Whitney and his cotton gin (actually it is nothing like that but I always like to work a cotton gin reference into my daily existence.) Our standard menu usually involves bacon, eggs, more bacon, some type of meat sausage-esque product (Knockwurst was today’s selection), little more bacon, and then home fries. For drink, we have coffee, orange juice, grapefruit juice, and potentially some type of alcohol. (Cider and mimosas reared their evil heads this morning.)

Through practice and patience while incurring grease burns, real burns, and narrowly avoiding collissions in our tiny kitchens, we have mastered the process by which we create this feast. My favorite part of these events and the reason I encourage their undertaking is not necessarily the meal itself, but rather the fact that they provide the group with a decent block of four hours to simply decompress, talk, and laugh as the clock slowly moves towards Monday morning. And even though it is rare for us to solve the major problems facing our world, we usually manage to keep each other entertained reminding each of us why we are friends in the first place.