Brunch in 2 hours

Blame on global warming or Southern Oscillation, two weeks ago we had a incredibly warm october weekend. What does one do with that kind of awesome weather? Have a B.Y.O.B. in the park of course. The last 'B' in this B.Y.O.B. doesn't stand for bottle, although there were a few bottles at this event, it stands for brunch. Miss Nonstop, the brains for this operation, came up with the idea late Saturday evening for brunch in the park Sunday afternoon. I knew that I would have the sisters' fantastique with me which meant that if I didn't cook for all we would merely attempt one of their most daring cooking feats. Stopping at the closest store and raiding their 'easily consumed in the park' aisle.

So, i woke Sunday morning with a house full of fruit, vegetables, left pork shoulder and 2 hrs to do something with it. i started off with the sweet, because any brunch worth it's weight will have a sweet component as well as it's savory component. A few days earlier I was salivating over this recipe over at Apartment Therapy. I was currently swimming in apples from my C.S.A. fruit share, I had walnuts sitting in the pantry from some failed attempt at something earlier that fall. I even had a huge bag of french bread croutons from a B.L.T. salad I was trying to perfect the weeks prior. All I was missing was raisins which in my opinion could have been easily sacrificed so I jumped right in. Everything was sailing along until iI went to make the custard. I have a love/hate relationship with dairy I love cooking with it but my body hates it. So I always buy milk or cream and then it has a tendency to sit in the fridge when my body reminds of what's going to happen after I ingest it. I grabbed the milk I had purchased a while back checked the date, we were a little past the date but I always took those a more of a paranoid suggestion than hard fact, then I opened the bottle. It frothed and hissed and this was only after breaking the seal, not even taking the whole top off. I'm no dairy expert but my time in the kitchen has taught me one thing and this milk shouldn't hiss and froth at least not on it's own. So, I grab my keys and make a quick milk run and since I'm there the raisins get a chance to get back in the game. Except I decide to step it up a bit and use a raisin/cranberry mix instead. I spent more time than I expected on this raisin conundrum. Right next to each other in a row were raisin, dried cranberries and a raisin/cranberry mix. I pondered going all cranberry but thought that might be to tart since I was using tart apples. Then I thought 'sometimes raisins are just Boring', and this seemed like one of those times. The mix for some strange reason looked to be a cop-out like I was too much of a wuss to stand strong on either side of the raisin/cranberry debate. But then I told myself 'No, you're the wuss! The raisin/cranberry is a perfect sweet/tart mixture, jerk!' Then I realized i was arguing with myself and quickly grabbed the raisin/cranberry mix and my milk and proceeded home to finish. After my fierce debate which the world hasn't seen since 1858, the rest of the bread pudding was easy as pie. [BTW that saying is such bullshit pies are hard!]

After tossing the bread pudding in the oven it was on to the savory portion of this event. I knew I was going to do a hash because, making hash is easy and quick and I can throw what ever the hell I want into it and can still call it 'hash'. Another not as earth-shattering but quick debate came up again, this time between white potatoes and sweet potatoes. Not really much of a debate it really just a check to see if I had enough sweet potatoes to go around, which I did so let us soldier on. As I stated before hashes are so easy to make, chopped potatoes, onions, threw in some beets, a few other weird root vegetables i couldn't identify but looked really pretty on the inside and some left over pork shoulder from last week. Voila! Awesomeness in a pan. I added some eggs to it as the bread pudding left me with 3 egg whites with no home. I started this venture at about 10:30 that morning I was packed up and ready to go at about 1. O.K. so it took me a more than 2 hours to put this all together but it was still a pretty swift feat on my part.

The sisters were picked up coffee was procured and we were off to the park. We found our spot, ate our food, laughed at the guy playing guitar in the park with his dog[srsly, such a weak baiting move on his part] and enough food to go around for several people and for me to take home and have dessert for the rest of the week.