Low-Key Brunch
And Other Ideas for Easy and Joyous Holiday Entertaining
The holiday hosting season is astride us. Thanksgiving was last week, and Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Year’s Eve loom. That’s a lot of parties! The prospect of planning, shopping for, cooking, and cleaning up after a formal evening meal can feel overwhelming.
So why not host a brunch instead? I’ll admit my bias: For a morning lark like me, brunch is the perfect social event. I’m up early anyway, so there’s ample time for me to throw together a meal. The night owls roll out of bed around 10:30 and head over around noon. We share a meal and then repair to the family room to watch football. Cleanup is quickly dispatched during commercial breaks. The perfect Sunday activity!
Or that’s how I think of brunch (she said darkly). There are people out there who treat brunch like a competitive sport. Like New Yorkers, who apparently love seeking out only the very hottest spots, with the very longest lines, for brunch. As the humor writer Dave Barry puts it,
These are the same people who become visibly annoyed if somebody in front of them on the sidewalk is walking slower than 16 miles per hour, yet they will patiently stand motionless for hours outside a restaurant. . . . [T]he ultimate New York restaurant would . . . just be a closed door with a long line of trendy New Yorkers staring at it hopefully.
Brunch at home can get needlessly complicated too, if we are striving for perfection instead of simple enjoyment. Last year I wrote about a New York brunch I once attended:
To assemble the meal, we first went to one store that sold the best bagels. We waited in a long line, bought the bagels, and walked a few blocks to another store that sold the best lox. We waited in a long line, bought the lox, and walked a few blocks to another store that sold the best salads. We waited in a long line, bought the salads, and finally headed over to brunch. All three stores sold bagels, lox, and salads, so it would have been possible to purchase everything at one place and avoid all that walking and waiting. But then our brunch wouldn’t have been the very, very best.
When did brunch become so much work? It’s Sunday! We want to relax!
There is a better way:
The Strata Strategy
On a visit to Minnesota last summer, I made brunch for our family and friends. The secret to stress-free hosting is strata—a dish so hearty that all you need alongside it is some fresh fruit (and of course coffee) to make a complete meal. You can make a strata during the Saturday-afternoon doldrums and stick it in the fridge overnight, which leaves Sunday morning free for reading the paper instead of racing around.
Some quick googling turned up this recipe. As is typical for me, I used the online recipe as a springboard for creating my own version, which I’m sharing here, because, as my friend Kathryn texted the next day, “in no spirit of jest whatsoever, I think you have to share the strata recipe as ‘The Best Strata Ever.’”
The Best Strata Ever
A strata is basically a brunch lasagna, with bread instead of lasagna noodles. Stratas are a terrific way to use up leftovers.1 Do you have sweet potatoes, green beans, or spinach salad left over from Thanksgiving dinner? Just throw it all into the vegetable mix! (In fact if you have enough leftovers, you can skip step 3 below altogether.) If you make the strata a day ahead, cover the pan with foil and refrigerate it overnight. Remove the strata from the fridge an hour before baking.
Ingredients
For the bread layer:
1 loaf crusty bread, for example sourdough or ciabatta, or you can use heels of bread left over from Thanksgiving
For the vegetable layer:
olive oil
1 shallot or small red onion, finely minced
12oz (350gms) baby bella mushrooms, thinly sliced
1 small clove garlic, finely chopped with 1tsp salt to make a paste
freshly-ground black pepper and dried oregano to taste
1–2 fresh tomatoes, halved, pulp squeezed out, peeled, and chopped
12oz (350gms) baby spinach, stemmed
1–2tsp fresh thyme leaves
about 1/4c fresh Italian flat-leaf parsley, stemmed and roughly chopped
For the cheese layer:
12oz (350gms) grated Gruyère—or any other sharp cheese you have on hand
For the custard:
1-1/2c (350ml) whole milk
1c (250ml) cream
8 large eggs
1T mustard
1/2tsp nutmeg
plenty of freshly-ground black pepper
unsalted butter for the pan
Method
Prepare the pan: Thoroughly butter a 9x13 baking pan, line the pan with parchment paper, and then butter the parchment paper. (This may seem like a lot of butter, but when it comes time for cleanup, you will thank me.)
Make the bread layer: Preheat the oven to 375F/190C. Cut the bread into cubes and spread evenly on a cookie sheet. Toast the cubes in the oven until golden-brown. Remove from oven and allow to cool.
Make the vegetable layer: In a large pan, heat the oil and add the onion. Sprinkle salt over it to help it purge its juices and sauté for a few minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the mushrooms and a bit more salt, then sauté until the mushrooms have given up most of their liquid. Add the garlic, pepper, and oregano and cook briefly. Add the tomatoes and a bit more salt and cook for a minute or two until the tomatoes have broken down. Add the spinach and herbs and cook just until wilted. You want the veggies to be a little bit wet so the flavors will soak into the bread.
Make the custard: Mix all the custard ingredients in a bowl or large measuring cup.
Strew the bottom of the prepared pan with the bread cubes. You might find that you have too much bread to make the proportions work right. If so, no worries—just store the extra bread cubes in the freezer and use them as croutons later.
This is about the right amount of bread. Then spread the vegetable mixture over everything and top with the cheese.
Carefully and evenly pour the custard over everything.
Bake at 350F/175C for about an hour and fifteen minutes, until the strata is golden brown on top. Let it sit for fifteen minutes, then cut and serve.
Then again, for a truly low-key brunch, we could try an idea my mom cooked up: cooking together. She had invited some church friends for lunch, but what with one thing or the other she hadn’t gotten around to making the salad. So when her friends showed up, she gave them a choice between no salad or a salad that they would prepare together. Of course her friends chose to make the salad. Cooking together is fun!
Which leads me to my next point:
Overcoming Inertia
It’s time to get controversial. We are having a national conversation about the loneliness epidemic. (I recommend Ezra Klein’s recent podcast about why we don’t hang out anymore.) Whether it’s our phones, our busy lives, or the habit of isolation we picked up during the pandemic, we have somehow lost the knack for casual, face-to-face time together. And so a spontaneous offer to just hang out is not usually appealing enough to overcome the inertia, cultural reluctance, and social anxiety we have sadly fallen into lately.
I think that we need to tempt our friends with activities. We could follow my mom’s lead and invite people to cook with us and maybe learn one of our signature recipes. We could host a trivia contest or an afternoon of card games, and for an incentive, we could offer to donate to the winner’s favorite charity. Or we could take a walk, sing karaoke, or try dancing.2 Yes, dancing!
A few months ago, the Substacker Cartoons Hate Her asked “Why Did Men Stop Dancing?” Why indeed? It is such a loss. How do I know this? Because my dad was a fantastic dancer.
When I was a kid, my parents used to go to a Bierstube (casual beer hall) every Friday night to drink beer and dance the polka. More than half a century later, at Dad’s ninetieth birthday party, he danced with all the ladies. Dancing gave Dad a whole lifetime of fun, fitness, and friendship.
Dancing is one of the many ordinary activities that used to be impromptu, casual, and open to everyone, but that now have become niche and professionalized. I grew up singing around the piano with friends and family. Now if people sing, it’s alone in the car. Pickup touch football games and kids’ free play have been replaced by team sports that are organized and regulated by adults.3 Forget bowling alone; we’re not bowling at all. All we seem to have left is talking about politics or scrolling on our phones. No wonder we’re socializing less!
I’ll leave you with an inspiring story. Way back when I was in grad school, I sang in a professional choir. One year, another alto, Judith, invited the whole choir to a holiday party at her place. When we arrived, we discovered that Judith had planned for us to gather around her Kimball Swinger organ, where she would accompany us as we sang carols together. Judith was about a generation older than the rest of us. We twenty-somethings were used to parties where we drank, gossiped about our professors, and griped about our dissertations. Caroling—let alone when accompanied by a Kimball Swinger—seemed dorky and old-timey to us. What to do?
Well, we went for it. We gathered ’round and caroled for an hour, broke for snacks and drinks, and returned to sing some more. Far from being awkward, Judith’s party turned out to be one of the best I’ve ever attended. Singing together lifts the spirits like nothing else. Why not suggest singing some seasonal favorites at our own holiday parties? I predict that after some initial hesitation, our guests will join in with gusto. Who knows? Maybe everyone will decide to continue the festivities and head out to wassail, wassail all over the town.
How about you, readers? What is your favorite tip for stress-free get-togethers? And do you have an idea for an activity that you could offer your guests? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The Tidbit
Speaking of dancing, check out the video below. Two old guys in hats pop and lock! A Boba Fett t-shirt! They are role models for us all!
If you decide to repurpose leftovers in your strata, be warned that this decision may not be popular with everyone in the family. A friend made turkey tetrazzini to use up Thanksgiving leftovers, which prompted her son to protest that “You made the leftovers bigger!”
For example, here’s a cherished memory: We were on a family vacation but were stuck in the house because of the terrible weather. My sister-in-law Mel, sensing everyone’s grumpy boredom, decided to teach us all the Electric Slide, to the tune of “September,” by Earth, Wind, and Fire. After just fifteen minutes our grouchy mood had lifted and we were happily laughing together.
Community choirs and pickleball are encouraging exceptions to this professionalization trend.
Lovely article, thank you. I've taken it as motivation to re-memorize a couple songs that have gotten dusty.
I use essentially zero social media, (sure, there's this substack account and a discord account with five people on it, otherwise nothing) and I still feel the social isolation that social media has brought to us.
Yet, I have formed the habit of being alone (or mostly alone). And I see where dancing might serve to reduce this condition. For myself, 'dancing' has turned out to be different. I've been participating in role-playing sessions with other (younger) adults. Whilst I might be slow to accept an invitation to dance, I will not demur at an offer to role-play.
Anyway, that's just me. Dance as suits you, I sez.