Easter Brunch: Jenny's French Toast

FIRST, HAPPY EASTER! Phyllis is hoping for an audition with the good folks Cadbury despite the fact that, yes, the eggs have gotten smaller.

After a few drinks last evening with Kevin, Elissa, Jenny, Phil, and Mint at Paloma, it was suggested that a brunch be held this afternoon. This, remarkably, came to pass (not all of our ideas shaped while drinking are so fortunate.) Elissa and Kevin arrived with two bottle each of orange juice and "inexpensive" champagne, while Jenny brought sweet raisin bread rolls, an orange, half-and-half, powdered sugar, and a sizable about of doubt in the resources of my kitchen.

Jenny did also offer my slightly wounded ego a delicious recipe for French toast, to which we added only flour:

6 large eggs

6 tbsp flour
1 & 1/2 cup half-and-half or milk
1 tsp grated orange zest
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tbsp honey
(plus 4 tsp sugar)
1/2 tsp salt
challah bread
butter
powdered sugar (for garnish)
berries (for garnish)

This is French toast, so mix up everything save for the bread, butter and powdered sugar (if you don't want the extra 4 tsp of sugar, omit it.) Jenny was afraid her only slicing the rolls in half was too thick, but everything turned out fine. We fried the dipped bread over medium heat in a pan with butter until the slices were browned and then stuck them in the oven to keep warm. These slices were huge enough that one was more than plenty for each of us.

This recipe is sweeter and soaks up more than my recipe proposed in the French Toast Bites post, but the orange zest is a very happy addition. In the future, I would add more vanilla soy milk to my original recipe, substitute honey for some sugar, and add the orange zest suggested here. But only add the orange zest if you have berries or fruit as topping, otherwise the orange can be a bit much.

Today in Blogs: An Ode to Mac n' Cheese

UPON HEARING ABOUT this little venture, both Elissa and Jenny mentioned to me the existence of a blog of similar food nature--Not Eating Out In NY. I checked it out, was quite impressed, and decided that it would be the topic of a future post. Until I happened to glance at it this morning to find Cathy from Not Eating Out, in her infinite wisdom, had posted a recipe for spicy macaroni and cheese, whereupon it was decided that Not Eating Out would be the topic of today's post.

The only "mac n' cheese" in my apartment at present

I used feel about french toast the same way I presently feel about macaroni and cheese: I love it. I love the idea of it. I want to have, like, ten thousand of its babies. I don't know what happened to french toast in my mind, but I suspect that the sheer overabundance of it took some of the thrill out of my search. Unlike french toast, with is fairly ubiquitous at any diner or brunch spot in the city, macaroni and cheese is not the type of menu item that gets a lot of attention. I suspect it's just too annoying to make in a commercial kitchen, too hard to perfect, and perhaps just not cost effective enough to make it worth the while, but I balk at all these explanations. Honestly, I think people have just grown out of it.

In addition (and Not Eating Out makes a grand point of this in totaling the price of her creation at $6.57), no one wants to spend $10-plus on mac n' cheese. It's macaroni. And cheese. As any hungover college student knows, Easy Mac costs approximately $0.10 per gallon. If we go gourmet and, let's say, you put noodles and cheese in a pan and stick it in the oven, that same hungover college student will declare it a four-star meal and you still haven't spent more than $7. Yet, if you find mac n' cheese on any menu in this city, I defy you to pay less than $11 to have it brought to you.

Like french toast, you run a risk in searching for mac n' cheese that, when you find it, it might be as awe-inspiringly amazing as you had hoped, or as bland and clearly just-thawed-out as you feared. Which is why making your own seems the best solution--if you want it done right, do it yourself. I will admit I have not made mac n' cheese in a very, very long time, but this recipe stirs something inside me, something more than my secret vegetarian desire for chorizo. This mac... it will be made.