sunday sticks it in

Sunday brunch, long part of the NYC mythos, has yet to appear in these blog pages. Well, here's my NYC brunch debut, which wasn't really anything to write home about.
We ate at Phoebe's in Brooklyn. The atmosphere was very relaxed, and I was immediately pleased to see cans of Genesee Cream Ale tucked into their refrigerated display case up front. The back yard sports a few tables that stayed mostly full our whole time there. All in all it seemed pretty popular, but I'm not exactly sure why.
The menu was fairly reasonable for brunch, but the food that came out was not worth my $8. We all had the steamed eggs, which are like scrambled eggs, but cooked via a cappuccino milk steamer. There were scallions, red peppers, mushrooms and tomatoes mixed in with the eggs, and while I'm sure some people appreciate the low-fat take on egg preparation, the technique did not live up to the culinary magic that eggs can and should be. What came out on two drooping leaves of lettuce, topped with some unoffensive white cheese with a salsa fresca on one side and roasted yams on the other, was a rubbery lump of 3 eggs worth of protein with under-prepared vegetables haplessly suspended, unable to make a break for more appetizing platings. Their 7-grain toast was quite good and the roasted yams were much better than I expected them to be, but for a signature dish they should really work on improving the technique of their appointed egg steamerists.

Later that day I had a lunch/dinner fusion meal, fusing more the time and function than any real menu differences. I mixed cucumbers, carrots, hot sausage, mushrooms fried in hot sausage grease, and bleu cheese into couscous drizzled with sesame and chili oils. It would have been a great power lunch or an easy, one-bowl dinner. I ate it late enough to be dinner, but considering I slept through most of the afternoon and I was up until after midnight, it felt more lunchy than anything.

That evening, in my friends' apartment in Red Hook I caught a few long tosses of Tostito's Hint of Lime tortilla chips. those things are seasoned perfectly for eating 4 or 5, so that's what I did. Any more and they become a bit overwhelming.

And that was it for the evening. Though I felt a little snacky, I decided a few big glasses of water before bed would be better than a raid on the crouton box.