I love Sunday brunches. I generally like “going out” for brunch, but every now and then, I like preparing a nice Sunday table for friends – especially here, in my new, peaceful and beautiful apartment!

Today I had two lovely friends for brunch. We ate, talked, laughed.. really nice time we had. As always, a nice conversation with friends around a table is priceless.

So, here are a few very simple ideas for brunch as we had today. Try them at home, as a “tool for conviviality”.

1. Cheese on bread

White cheese
1 egg
Toast bread
Aleppo pepper (or crushed chilli) if you want to spice things up

This one used to be one of our favorite dishes for our traditional afternoon tea with my family. I made it with white Turkish cheese as I am used to but you can use feta cheese as well, they are quite similar. The idea is very simple: mash the white cheese, mix it well with the egg and then put some of this mixture on the toast bread. Put in the oven, which is preheated to 180C, in the middle section. It gets ready quite quickly, so check constantly. If you want to make it spicy, then after baking for a while, open the oven and pour some pepper over the cheese on the bread, then continue baking a little bit more.

2. Mozzarella, basil and tomato on bread

Mozzarella cheese
Fresh basil leaves
Tomato slices (I used cherry tomatoes as usual)
Olive oil

This is extremely simple: put some olive oil on the bread slices using a brush. Then put mozzarella cheese, tomatoes and basil leaves on the bread. Put it in the oven, which is preheated to 180C, in the middle section, for about 8 minutes.

Actually I baked the bread in number 1 and 2 together at the same time.

3. Omelette

You can’t think of a Sunday brunch without omelette! And you can do any kind of omelette! Here are my ingredients from today:

Mushroom (my choice for today was: Suomalainen viljelty siitakesieni by Pirkka – yes, Finnish Shiitake mushroom)
Tomato (yes! cherry!)
4 eggs
Parsley
Olive oil
Salt

Slice the mushroom and tomatoes, as well as parsley into small pieces. Mix the eggs with some salt. First cook the mushrooms and tomatoes in olive oil, then add the eggs. Finally add parsley for finishing.

4. Sucuk (Turkish sausage)

We definitely need some meat. I chose this Turkish sausage because one of my friends today was a Finn who happened to love this sausage. And even the vegetarian half of this lovely Finnish couple likes eating 1 slice of this sausage at least! You can find this sausage in Alanya market in Itäkeskus or better yet, in Hauler Oriental Market that I recently discovered in Hakaniemi metro station (http://www.haulerorientalmarket.fi/).

You can also make an omelette with it but I chose to cook this one separately since one of my friends was, as I said, vegetarian and I wanted her to be able to eat the omelette as well!

It’s quite easy to cook this one: just slice it (and there are even some sliced sausage sold out there somewhere), put it in the pan with a very very little oil. Be careful not to burn it!

5. Tomatoes and olives

Tomato
Green olives
Olive oil
Thyme

Put the tomatoes and olives in a bowl. Pour some olive oil and thyme, then mix! That’s it!

6. Okra!

Well, I had some canned okra in the refrigerator. I just took it out, washed, poured some lemon juice over. Okra’s magnificent taste does the remaining work..

7. Cheese, bread etc..

Of course, do not forget to prepare a plate with different types of cheese (here in this picture you see Turkish white cheese and Jarlsberg), different types of bread (some freshly bought French baguette, toast bread, crackers) and butter.

Drinks: fruit juice, coffee, tea, milk for the coffee or tea etc..

Voila! If you eat enough of those, you really do not need to eat anything else the whole day! I just had a little bit of yoghurt in the evening for dinner and it was enough!