ONCE brunch: getting local on a Sunday morning

There's nothing quite like a home-cooked brunch. Usually, that means grilling some bacon and toasting some bread and frying some eggs.

But a ONCE brunch is just like a ONCE New Year dinner or a ONCE Halloween dinner or a ONCE trip through Hell.

Home cooking means everything is from scratch. And because Cuisine En Locale's JJ Gonson and her pirate crew are passionate locavores, it also means everything is from as close to home as possible.

So the feather-light Morning Glory muffins are made with local apples and carrots, local blueberries picked last season, and locally grown and milled flour.



The pancakes are served with syrup from nearby maple trees.



And they're made by the fabulous pancake man, working on electric hotplates in the face of power outages.



The granola is sweetened with local honey and served with homemade keffir and grapefruit from small-grove orchards in Florida (well, you try finding breakfast citrus in New England in February).



The bluefish are running — and coming to a sudden halt on a slice of fresh brioche, garnished with thin, sweet red onion and finished with a sauce of yogurt, cilantro, garlic and mint. Now that's how you balance a plate.



And the bacon ... and the sausage ... and the bacon ...



And the sausage ...



And the bacon with Ascutney cheese and local eggs in a fresh-made English muffin:



And the sausage with pancake (and looky, more bacon!):



Because brunch without a little of the magical animal is no brunch at all. And brunch with magical animal that has traveled a short distance and been reverently transformed into home-cured wonders is everything that brunch should be.