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" You&amp;#039;re pretty much a goddess in the dessert universe. Why a brunch book? I&amp;#039;ve wanted to write one for years. I really like to entertain at home, but I have 4-year-old twin girls and a 12-year-old boy, so elaborate dinner parties are pretty much out of the question. After having my kids, I think I just lost the confidence that I could even pull it off. But I can pull off brunch. It&amp;#039;s more laid-back.  So brunch is the new dinner party? It makes sense. The ingredients are cheaper and easy to find, and the recipes take much less time. Sometimes reading them takes longer than cooking them. It&amp;#039;s also a meal where a whole family can come over. It&amp;#039;s not like you have to get a sitter, so it&amp;#039;s great for people who don&amp;#039;t want to segregate family and social life. And it&amp;#039;s food kids really like. You say it&amp;#039;s the meal where sweet and savory meet. Like most Americans, I love salty and sweet together. I&amp;#039;m from Chicago, and when people ask, &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s the regional cuisine?&amp;quot; I say, &amp;quot;Cracker Jacks.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a very natural pairing, and brunch foods have the flexibility to straddle breakfast food, lunch food, pastry. Is it a bread pudding or strata? Or are the PB&amp;amp;amp;J turnovers a kids&amp;#039; lunch or a brunch starter? A lot of these dishes are sort of fraternal twins. I&amp;#039;d never have thought that mixing crispy bacon pieces into waffle batter would be a natural pairing. I got that idea from a friend who&amp;#039;s a great cook. Food needs contrasts in color, texture, temperature. It&amp;#039;s like a design idea, but translated into your mouth. So you have sweet waffles contrasted with crunchy, salty bacon. You also say it&amp;#039;s not complicated techniques or fancy equipment that makes food delicious. That&amp;#039;s right. It&amp;#039;s the way you combine ingredients, not technique or fancy equipment or any of that stuff, that makes things taste stellar and makes cooking a lot faster. My husband says that&amp;#039;s my genius \u2014 the unexpected ingredients that take a dish from good to great. I think your genius is your substitutions, like whipped cream made with brown sugar. The superfine sugar industry has made us all think that it&amp;#039;s the only sugar that will dissolve. It&amp;#039;s not. Try subbing brown sugar for white with hot cocoa. It&amp;#039;s got this roasty, toasty, molassesy flavor, and it&amp;#039;s just a matter of grabbing a different container. This book is full of those kinds of tips that give big results without taking any more time to make.  Eggs Benedict is what I most associate with brunch, but you don&amp;#039;t have a recipe in your book. I just felt like the world doesn&amp;#039;t need another eggs Benedict recipe. Don&amp;#039;t forget that with individual egg dishes like that you have timers going off at different times and tons of pans to clean. I really like make-ahead egg dishes \u2014 frittatas, strata (get Gale&amp;#039;s recipe for strata here), quiche. They&amp;#039;re easy and inexpensive for a crowd. So these are the secret stash of shortcuts from a time-strapped cook?  That&amp;#039;s it. These recipes don&amp;#039;t require precision cooking to look and taste really great. Before I was a pastry chef, I was a diamond setter. So I know precision. But then real life comes into the picture, and it&amp;#039;s one of the first things to go. Get Gale&amp;#039;s recipes for strata and watermelon gazpacho here. RECIPE REPRINTED FROM THE BOOK GALE GAND&amp;#039;S BRUNCH! BY GALE GAND WITH CHRISTIE MATHESON \u00A9 2009. PHOTOGRAPHS BY BEN FINK. PUBLISHED BY CLARKSON POTTER, A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC. PORTRAIT: VICTOR SKREBNESKI. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.housebeautiful.com/lifestyle/recipes-cookbooks/reviews/a305/gale-gand-brunch/>