It’s been almost a year since my first food column. After a year you start getting short on ideas – for headlines, and food.

But somehow they keep on coming to me. Either from my own brilliant (ha ha, just kidding) mind, or through suggestions from friends, new ideas for stories about food, and my love for it are seemingly never ending. My friend, Andy Bielli, has been at me for a while to do a column on brunch. So, okay Andy, let's do brunch.

The word brunch is a portmanteau of breakfast and lunch, according to the dictionary. “In linguistics, a portmanteau is defined as a single morph that represents two or more morphemes.” Sorry. I just had to share that. I have no idea what a morpheme is. I'm sure Tom Witt knows but I won't give him the satisfaction. I'll Google it sometime.

Brunch is a combination of breakfast and lunch, okay?

Brunch is kind of an enticing concept. It’s generally considered a weekend thing, and more common on Sundays than Saturdays. Weekends are something most people look forward to anyway, and a late morning lazy Sunday brunch is a real treat.

Plus — you know what's coming don't you — You can drink alcohol with brunch. Of course you can drink alcohol with lunch too, but having a drink with breakfast is definitely frowned upon. Especially in a little town where everybody knows everybody. Not that I've ever tried to get away with it. Even alone, at home. Something about a manhattan with scrambled eggs is just unappealing. Seriously.

But a bloody mary or a mimosa with a late morning scrumptious, fattening brunch? Bring it on.

Brunch foods can be decadent. Why? Because it’s brunch. The word summons up images of Belgian waffles with strawberries and mounds of whipped cream, like I had at the New York World’s Fair in the summer of ’64. It was held at Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, and my family went with friends from Long Island. My most vivid memories of that day were of my new madras jacket, and the huge waffles with strawberries and whipped cream. The aroma of them permeated every square foot of the square mile the fair inhabited. I swear I can still smell those waffles.

On the nywf64.com website, I read: “A recreation of a medieval Belgian Village proved to be very popular also. There, Fairgoers were treated to a new taste sensation in the form of the “Belgian Waffle” — a combination of waffle, strawberries and whipped cream.”

The Fair's theme that year was “Peace Through Understanding,” dedicated to "Man's Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe." (Hmmmm. Let’s not get off on that subject.) At the center of the fairgrounds was a 12-story high, stainless-steel model of the Earth with the orbit tracks of three satellites encircling it. And guess what. I don’t remember that, or the Vatican pavilion that featured Michelangelo's “Pieta.” I was too enamored with the aroma of the waffles.

Luckily I went to Italy many years later and gazed upon that Carrara marble work of art (breathlessly — I’m not exaggerating) in St. Peter’s Basilica, at the real Vatican.

Where was I? Oh — brunch foods: Waffles, eggs Benedict, crepes, cinnamon rolls and sticky buns, frittatas, griddle cakes, popovers, fresh, hot donuts, scones, french toast, hot biscuits with plenty of butter, and bacon. Lots of bacon. And bloody marys and mimosas. And coffee with Bailey’s Irish Cream. Hello.

Brunch is pretty much anything you want it to be, as long as it’s decadent.

On Sunday (Feb. 12) Andy and her identical sidekick Adele, along with 10 or 12 other friends (I hope!) will be doing brunch at the Carriage House Restaurant in East Boothbay. Owner/chef Kelly Farrin says he’s ready for us, and we’re thinking that between the company, the good food, and the mimosas and bloody marys, there will be no shortage of laughter. Feel free to join us! Email me — suzithayer@boothbayregister.com — so I can add you to the list of lucky people.

See ya next week.