Champagne Brunch with the Neighbors

It was high time we entertain Tom’s neighbors. Tom had been living in this apartment for the last 5 years. One of his neighbors is probably just as long. When we got married, we invited them to the reception. But they couldn’t make it because Jacques owns a restaurant in Palos Verdes and he needed to manage the restaurant on a Saturday night. Afterward, he and his girlfriend, Kitty, treated us to a nice sit down dinner at the restaurant. So we need to return the favor.

I didn’t want to entertain on weeknights. And Jacques is busy on the weekend evening at the restaurant. So we finally picked a Sunday brunch instead. We also wanted to invite another neighbor, Eileen had to work; instead Lisa came. She brought the champagne as admission ticket, yes, all 6 bottles plus raspberries and blackberries. I thought there was no way we could consume 6 bottles with 5 people. Well, I underestimated this crowd!!! Both Tom and I are the lightweight and the other three certainly made up the difference! Lisa’s pup came for a visit too; he is an eight month old black lap, so calm and so adorable. We all love him.

As you can tell, we are spoiled. We probably have one of the best settings for ocean front dining, just outside in the community balcony. The weather could be a bit warmer and less windy. But we are not complaining too much after a few glasses of champagne to warm us up. I put the white table cloth on, brought my matching china and linen from Irvine, and got Tom to buy some flowers for the table. Our guests never came to one of my dinner before; they were in for a surprise. Kitty, after waking up on Sunday morning, seeing our table setting, decided she needs to put some decent clothes on, not your breakfast in bed attire. She even joked that this is her engagement brunch to Jacques!!! Of course, Jacques claimed he would never come to our brunch again as this could be a trap for him!!!

By the time we had our dessert, I was ready for a nap. I don’t know how many glasses of champagne I drank, but I was first laying outside on the recliner, then moved myself back inside the apartment to the living room coach because it was still chilly even under a blanket, and subsequently moved inside to the bedroom as some other neighbors started to come by (after seeing us dining) and the Lakers were playing, it got too noisy. The brunch started at 11 am. And by the time I woke up, it was like 4pm in the afternoon. Needless to say, goodwill was built with the neighbors.

As for the menu, I thought I over prepared the amount of food, but I was surprised there wasn’t much leftover. All the recipes here are first time trial for me except for the arugula salad.

Arugula Salad

Billionaire’s Bacon – I read this somewhere before. All I did was to coat the bacon with brown sugar. And instead of cooking them in a pan, I bake them in the oven. The brown sugar caramelized so nicely. One of the quick visit neighbors took a piece with him on his bike ride, and later on called Kitty to ask me how I did it. You don’t even need a recipe for this.

Crepes with Smoked Salmon and Asparagus – after much searching, I finally found
this single recipe that seems to have all the right feel to it, except it doesn’t have the recipe for the crepe itself??? So I kind of mix and match on this one. The white wine sauce is creamy, perfect to go inside the crepe. Smoked salmon, I got it on sale and pre-sliced. So the difficult part is to make the crepes first. Then assemble with the smoked salmon, sauce, blanched asparagus, top it with more sauce and shredded cheese. In the oven it went, and came out beautifully. Impressive and yummy. Recipe for the crepes.

Zucchini and Ricotta Frittata – this is a recipe from the Donna Hay magazine. The ingredients are simple. The pan I used (yes, didn’t bring my good pan from Irvine) probably needed a bit more butter instead of the olive oil I used. It wasn’t burn, but I had to finish the cooking in the oven a bit longer than what the recipe called for. Part of it is also his oven. It doesn’t have the heating element from the top, so you can’t really add quick color to the top of the frittata. But it is delicious and light!!! So doing this again….

Never-Fail Soufflé – when it first came out of the oven, I was wondering if I picked
the wrong recipes. The color looked dark because I use multigrain and wheat bread (already in Tom’s fridge) instead of white bread. But when I took a bite of it, I was sold!!! Oh my god, this is really really good and so easy.

It is hard to say which one of these is my favorite. All of them are good. The frittata was completely gone. So I would say that is probably most popular and perhaps it is so light weighted that people don’t know they consumed a lot.