Pre-Wedding Checkup

My Beloved's younger daughter is getting married. She found a delightful man and they are planning a July wedding. Her mother called me the other day to ask if I wanted to co-host a wedding-day brunch for Katie and all the women who are coming from afar for the wedding; of course, I jumped at the chance to honor Katie - she's a pretty special young woman in my life.

We talked about a couple of places where we might hold such a brunch; one of them was Camino on Grand Avenue in Oakland, a place we had never been, so My Beloved and I were eager to check it out. It turned out that Katie wanted to treat us to brunch to celebrate my last birthday, too, so we all agreed to meet at Camino. We drank a glass of their carefully ground and brewed coffee while we caught up with all the wedding progress so far. Always a delight to have the bride-to-be all to ourselves!

Here's my brunch choice, a wood oven-baked egg with herbs and cream. The color on your monitor does not need adjusting - the yolk really was that rich an orange - and the flavor matched the color for deep, eggy richness. I was glad I ordered a single - two might have been too much. The egg was baked with about a tablespoon of cream plus minced green onion, fresh parsley and perhaps fresh tarragon? I'm not sure but, whatever they were, the flavors worked well together. The cream was just enough but not too much, and the egg was perfectly cooked with a firm white but liquid yolk. I used their homemade bread to soak up all the flavorful cream-and-herb goodness.

It was so good that it dispelled my horror of baked eggs, acquired when I was at boarding school in the south of France and was served baked eggs à la cockroach one scary spring day. When I protested, the school chef gave me an impressive Gallic shrug and proclaimed, "Tant pis! C'est la saison!" (Too bad. 'Tis the season). Needless to say, my enthusiasm for baked eggs waned dramatically from that day to this. Still, feeling fairly certain that Camino would never serve eggs with insects, I took a chance and was amply rewarded for my fortitude.

Katie had rabbit ragout topped with a poached egg and My Beloved went for the French toast with fruit compote - we were all happy with our choices. Clearly, this place checked out well as a setting for a pre-wedding brunch.