A Would-Be Mother's Day Brunch

"A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials, heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine, desert us when troubles thicken around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts. "

-Washington Irving

Brunch has always been one of my favorite meals; there's a small part of me that knows it's ridiculous to pay more than $10 for an omelette, home fries and toast or a short stack of pancakes with a few strawberries and a sliver of an orange, but I've never really been able to resist it. I like the promise of brunch--conversation with friends, a cup of coffee that will be refilled endlessly and the fact that it's exclusively a weekend treat.

So when I saw that Blogher, the blogging advertising company with which I am aligned, and Gourmet were doing a series on Mother's Day and brunch, I immediately volunteered. And, amazingly, I was picked! Perhaps it was luck of the draw or perhaps it was the fact that, since the event was announced when I was in Finland, I was time zones ahead of the rest of the competition, but the point is that I got to write a little blurb about one of my favorite local brunch spots, La Note, in downtown Berkeley. You can read the blurb here.

La Note, a lovely restaurant that represents everything that is good about both simple French country cooking and the French decor, is where I would have taken my mother, grandmother and aunt today if they weren't all 3,000 miles away. We would have had coffee bowls and split a pastry basket, just like the Greek and I did yesterday morning when we woke up so early that not going for Saturday brunch would have been a crime. But, because that wasn't a possibility, I snapped a few pictures with my new iPhone, Priya (one cannot help the name that immediately springs to mind when encountering a new face or object. Some people just look like a Bob and some phones just look like a Priya), and texted them to her with the promise that, when she is next in Berkeley, we'll be turning my Mother's Day fantasy into a reality.

Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there!