French Toast with Sour Cream and Jam

In addition to being the season of renewal, spring is also the season of the festive brunch. Dispute this, I dare you. In what other season are you a participant in such a quantity of brunches? None. Spring is beyond compare in the brunch-engagement category. And you may even find yourself hosting a brunch one lovely spring weekend, which may cause you to cry out with consternation, “How, pray tell, will I ever be able to maintain my frugal ways while hosting a fancy brunch?” How odd and yet fortuitous. I have the answer to that very question. Mind you, the Mother’s Day brunch I prepared with a glaring eye toward parsimony was for four, but it can easily be doubled or even quadrupled without getting into those triple-digit spending areas. I’m sure my mother was thrilled to hear me rattle off how little I had spent on her brunch, but whether she was playing good sport or not, she had to be impressed at how scrumptious the meal was regardless of how unabashedly – ahem – cheap it was.

Now, granted, having chickens puts me at a distinct advantage in any breakfast-spending category, as we consider the eggs free. However, even at the high-water mark of 26-cents per egg for store bought, egg-based dishes remain an economical option. On the menu for Mother’s Day: scrambled eggs ($2.93 for 4 servings), ricotta forte tart ($5.20 for 8 slices), banana muffins ($5.37 for 12 muffins on the very high end of banana and walnut use), roasted white creamer potatoes ($3.23 for four servings), roasted rareripe onions ($1.57 for 4 servings), and the star of the brunch show, French toast with sour cream and jam. I purchased a day-old loaf of bakery bread for half of the regular price, and used half of that loaf for JR’s lunches during the week. I still had enough for eight slices of French toast, which was more than the four of us could eat, so this recipe could be for eight if you’re serving other side dishes, or it could be for four if you choose not to serve a slew of other sides. In any event, the bread for this recipe cost me one measly dollar. The full price bread was $3.99, I bought it for $1.99, and then used half of that for this elegant dish. Is it any wonder so many cultures use bread as the basis for numerous cucina povera-style dishes? So inexpensive. So filling. And here, so pretty and so tasty.

To aid you in that oversharing goal, here is how the French toast breaks down: The bread was, as we’ve discussed, $1.00. The eggs were a maximum of 26-cents apiece if you bought them at the grocery store. That’s $1.04. The milk is 21-cents per cup. The butter is around 18-cents. The sour cream is half of a container that cost $1.39, so that’s 70-cents. We’ll throw in 10-cents for the confectioners’ sugar. The jam is your favorite jam, but let’s say we use about a quarter of a fancy-ish $3.60-per-12-ounce-jar jam, so that’s around 90-cents. The thyme you should be growing in a pot if you don’t have a garden (I don’t mean to lecture, but truly, now, do the math on keeping a plant versus buying fresh herbs for $1.99 every time you need them. Yeah. That’s right. Way less expensive to keep the plant. Way.), but if you had to go out and purchase that which you should be growing (oh, there I am with the lecture again – whoopsie.), it would cost $1.99 for the grocery store package, and you will need around 50-cents worth. The honey costs in the range of 40 cents per tablespoon, so add another $1.60 to the tally – this is only a drizzle per slice after all – and our total is $6.23 for 8 slices of fancy pantsy French toast, a total of 78-cents per slice, rounding up as we do.

Dinner tonight: I am working on a recipe for Pasta Carbonara for the book, so, sadly for the here-and-now, this one will not be on the blog, but happily for the future, it will be available in book form in May of 2010, and, really, time flies, so you’ll have it in hand in no time. In any case, Pasta Carbonara is a delicious, silky, eggy pasta dish, and costs a mere pittance. Estimated cost for two: $3.76. The pasta is one-half of a box of that fancy Whole Foods store brand bronze die-cut pasta that I like, and the entire box cost $1.99. The eggs cost 52-cents. The butter costs 70-cents. The Pecorino Romano cheese costs 50-cents, and the pancetta costs $8.29/pound; we will use an ounce each, and that costs us $1.04. And on those days when I find pasta on sale for a dollar a box, this costs only $3.26 for two. I love me a dollar-per-box-of-pasta sale, I surely do.