Forget Facebook, Twitter and text messaging for keeping in touch. Seth Klonsky and his domestic partner Jared Bell have gone back to the basics for maintaining friendships in the personal sense. Every month, the couple hosts gourmet brunches at their Normal Heights home, using electronic communication only to blast out the Evites.

“We saw our lives were getting busier and busier, and found that we weren’t seeing the people important to us as often as we like,” says Klonsky, who is an assistant director for UCSD’s alumni association, as well as a freelance event producer and technical director for San Diego LGBT Pride.

The “first Sunday” brunches, which the couple began throwing earlier this year for about 25 guests, affords Klonsky the added opportunity to unleash his innate love of food. Having grown up in culinary-centric Sonoma County in a family that celebrated fresh ingredients on the table, he seizes the opportunity to make nearly everything from scratch – biscuits, breakfast sausage, crepes, bread puddings and even last Sunday’s eggnog, of which he says: “It’s the only way to drink it. The stuff in the carton is just gross.”

Klonsky took an interest in the kitchen at an early age, although it wasn’t until college that he started making complete meals and delving into the alchemy of flavor pairings. Today, when he visits his parents, “We still talk about what we’re going to have for lunch during breakfast, and what we’ll eat for dinner during lunch. It’s part of our culture,” he quips.

In preparing for the brunches on San Diego turf, which aren’t potluck, Klonsky begins a couple days in advance combing the farmers markets, Whole Foods and major grocery stores for ingredients that will match his seasonal menus.

“Jared is as much of a food consumer as me, although I do all the cooking, which I’ll sometimes start as early as Friday evening,” he says.

Klonsky takes the less-is-better approach, serving only six or seven quality dishes each time to avoid giving guests a “restaurant brunch experience.” Past buffets have included such items as frittatas, maple-glazed bacon and a crepe bar stocked with garlicky mushrooms, roast turkey and eggs. Cocktails run the gamut from guava, pomegranate and cranberry mimosas to margaritas sweetened with agave nectar, a fitting come-on for homemade carnitas tacos and corn salad he once presented.

Though as any consummate host has learned, the soufflé doesn’t always come out of the oven puffy. Thanks to the graciousness of his guests, Klonsky didn’t sweat over a pear upside down cake gone wrong two months ago.

“When I inverted the cake onto a serving dish, it came out in brown, sticky clumps with the pears stuck to the pan. It was a disaster beyond saving.”

So he pushed it off to a corner in the kitchen, only to discover later that it was further disseminated. “People had picked from the salvageable parts.”

Klonsky is never short on menu ideas. “I read cookbooks the way people read novels,” adding that he weans from them techniques and concepts rather than actual recipes. At this month’s holiday brunch, for example, he cranked out cardamom bread pudding, puff pastries with goat cheese and mushrooms, sausage patties on buttermilk-thyme biscuits and other offerings built from crafty intuition.

In addition, he maintains a food blog (seklonsky.wordpress.com) for documenting dishes that he’s made in the past, both the flops and successes, and how he has tweaked certain recipes along the way.

“Food is the biggest part of my life outside of my profession,” he notes. “Part of the brunch experience for me is seeing our guests taste the food and getting their feedback. For everyone who joins us, it’s like a party.”