Weekend Meze or Mezze or Both
When given the choice, you should take both.
Weekend brunches shouldn't be about choices, but what you can fit on the table. This doesn't really help with the waist line, but it is a lot of fun. I grew up with dim sum - the Cantonese brunch where you get served small portions of everything.
Back when we lived in Eau Claire, my parents would often drive 1.5 hours on the weekend to the St. Paul Peking Garden on the U of M campus just to get their dim sum on. That really was my first view into the U of M campus (well, and there were the late night drives to Village Wok...after they closed down their restaurant at 9 pm, we would drive 1.5 hours to Village Wok and then back on the same night...all this for Chinese food...on a school night!) I borrowed a book from the local library on the art of making dim sum to save us these voyages in the mini van. I'm not sure if it was my being a teenager in the culinary world or if the instructions were just plain terrible - but I could never make the rice dough clear, thin and chewy for the Ha Gao (Shrimp Dumplings) or the flaky crust for the Dan Tat (Egg Tarts). My parents told me dim sum chefs in Hong Kong only make one or two items. They train their whole lives for that so I had no business thinking I'm going to glean this type of knowledge out of a paperback cook book. In Eau Claire. Fine.
Mezze, on the other hand seems quite easy to make. According to wikipedia, mezze is a selection of small dishes served to accompany alcoholic drinks as a course or as appetizers before the main dish in the Near East and the Balkans. In Levantine, Caucasian and Balkan cuisines meze is served at the beginning of all large-scale meals.
I like the concept of mezze for brunch. On my table, I usually have the following items: 1) a bowl of mashed up hard boiled eggs with salt and pepper to taste. Drizzled with olive oil. In that order. 2) a bowl of mashed avocado with lime, salt and pepper to taste. Drizzled with olive oil. Do you see a pattern? 3) a bowl of labne with salt and pepper to taste. Drizzled with olive oil. Always served with slices of vegetables that's in the fridge. Mostly crunchy Persian cucumbers and Roma tomatoes (sprinkled with salt if you wish). Oh and some pita bread.
This is where vintage divided casserole dishes are so awesome. I often serve my mezze in them because they're perfect for small portions! Or sometimes even labne on one side and cucumbers on the other. Really, the possibilities are endless. I have many Pyrex divided casserole dishes, but here is the ONLY Glasbake divided casserole dish that I have. I decided I needed to focus my kitchen space on Pyrex. There's just too much good stuff out there and I have to try to remain in control of hoarding. It's very hard to do. Fire King and Glasbake has some pretty cool retro patterns.
So, it used to be store bought pita bread until I was listening to Lynne Rosetto Kasper and she was talking to a certain Jeff Hertzberg who is a medical doctor but somehow perfected a dough recipe that required no kneading and could be kept in the fridge for up two weeks (he confessed it took 10 years of trial and error). Whenever you feel like fresh bread (all the time, right?), you can just pull a bit out of dough out, shape it and bake it.
So this weekend, after several failed attempts at pita bread that looked like flat bread, I finally got the pita to "puff"!
Pita
Some additional notes for making the pita bread not available in the link above.
Preheat oven to 450°F and also put in the pan you will use for your pita. (I used a sheet pan because I don't have a pizza stone.)
Right before the oven hits 450°F, take out some dough about the size of a medium orange. Be careful not to play with the dough too much. Quickly pat it with flour so it's easy to handle, shape it into a ball and roll it to about 1/8 of an inch thick.
Put in on the preheated sheet for about 5-8 minutes or until the top is puffed and slightly browned. Wrap in bread cloth until you are ready to serve.
It may not always puff! But it will still taste good.