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!