Welcome!

“If you are a dreamer,come in.

If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,

a hoper, a prayer, a magic-bean-buyer.

If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire,

for we have some flax-golden tales to spin.

Come in! Come in!”

-Shel Silverstein

So, my boyfriend (hereby named Capt. Spaulding) and I are sitting at my favorite meal of the week (hereby named brunch) and we start talking/conspiring/plotting. Not to take over the world, but to start a blog: a brunch blog about brunching in Chicago. And so it begins.

Why brunch, you ask?

Because it is, in my humble opinion, the very best meal of the week.

Sunday brunch is the absolute best brunch, followed by a Saturday brunch.

The ultimate triple cup? A three day weekend filled with brunches. My first date with Capt. Spaulding was a three-hour brunch. I knew he was a keeper after that. I secretly judge people based on their reaction to brunch. I don’t care what time it is on Sunday- it is still brunch if it’s at 8 am or 2 pm or anywhere in-between. No, it’s not breakfast, it’s BRUNCH. Got it?

I digress.

Of course there has to be an interesting twist, otherwise this wouldn’t be an interesting blog. In short (which will be expanded on a later posting), I now live a vegetarian, gluten-free lifestyle. Partly because of the environment/animal issues (veggie), but mainly because of my own health (veggie and GF), I’ve made this transition over the past year. Which brings us to the name of the blog; people find out about my diet and ask me “What do you eat?!?!” My response is always “Sticks and Twigs.” In reality, I actually eat some pretty amazing food- WAY more interesting than the foods I ate before. But it wouldn’t be fun without some humor mixed in, now would it?

So, Capt. Spaulding and I will be venturing out to our favorite places as well as some restaurants we’ve never tried. We’ve built a rating system based on service, food (and choices I have to fit in my crazy diet), coffee, and house potatoes. Because what good brunch place DOESN’T have good potatoes? Capt. will give his input on meat products (to appease some of the crowd) while I’ll give the lowdown on good vegetarian foods.

We may even expand this to other culinary adventures- namely my cooking (quiet from the peanut gallery!). There are a lot of challenges in being a vegetarian celiac. Either I find vegetarian products/recipes that relay on gluten-based products or I find GF recipes that have meat as a prominent ingredient. Adding an omnivore significant other to the mix makes things even harder. Capt. Spaulding is luckily very open to eating vegetarian dishes, but I’m always trying to find recipes that are so good, he doesn’t miss the fact that there isn’t any meat. I think for the most part, I achieve that, but it still remains a challenge.

Please feel free to give feedback, and don’t judge my use of parenthesis. Enjoy!