I will be brief. The exceptionally talented blogger Suburban Sweetheart, my coworker and friend, loves breakfast potatoes. She adores them. They are her everything, in a Barry White sort of way. She ALWAYS gets them with any meal at which they are available, and has only the highest and most discriminating breakfast potato tastes and standards. And her Ideal Potato, in a Platonic sense, is the brunch buffet breakfast potato at the Marriott Crystal Something Hotel.
When she speaks of these potatoes, her head cocks slightly up and to the left. Her whole body tenses slightly, as though she is straining toward the image in her mind's eye. Her brow lifts and her eyes widen and become unfocused, as though directed inward with a Buddha-like concentration. I think she even tears up. She really, really likes these potatoes.
Being Hungry Sam, I've understood her passion in a general sense. But this last weekend, brunching after a hard morning of tikkun olam-ing, I had the glorious opportunity to taste the object of SS's long-unrequited desires. I had the Potatoes.
Please, please, allow me to be more precise. I had the Brunch. I OWNED the Brunch. WE owned the brunch. In the 17 minutes my friends and I had before the buffet closed, we ate nearly every bit of food at the buffet. I personally ate NINE POUNDS of food. See?
That plate is my first of 3. Plus there are more out of frame. And I think I ate a little off my friends' plates, hence my ridiculous expression, which is meant to communicate victual-related victory. Altogether, we enjoyed plate-cracking loads of:
- scrambled eggs
- The POTATOES (2 varieties, both cheesy and non)
- strawberries
- melons
- blackberries
- omelets
- chicken sausages
- pineapple
- waffles
- blintzes
- probably other things, but I forget.
The meal is like a dream; I almost don't believe it happened. So much food, so fast, and just so damn good (which is obviously important; everything was impeccably prepared). The potatoes were everything I'd hoped, everything I'd dreamed, and almost as satisfying as eating them was seeing Suburban Sweetheart doing so herself. This brunch, these potatoes are enough to make me willing to return to the high-rise hell that is Crystal City. And that's saying something.
PS: I'm pretty sure I can make said ridiculously stupendously mouth-wateringly superb potatoes with some minor variations on my recipe.