Sunday, November 22, 2009

Some days you have to flip a lot of crepes...

Those of you who are my Facebook friends know I went to a crepe making demonstration yesterday with the Legal Baker (http://www.legalbaker.blogspot.com/). It all looked so effortless and fun. The venue was very generous with freebie gifts. I wound up buying a Scanpan brand crepe pan and resolved to finally learn how to make the delectable thin pancake I have enjoyed for years.

Armed with recipe cards from the venue I headed home and once there I looked up Julia Child’s crepe recipe. Looks straightforward enough, I thought. To make it even better I already had all the ingredients on my shelf.

This morning I awoke to Gesine having blogged about crepes:(http://www.confectionsofamasterbaker.blogspot.com/ker.blogspot.com). Kismet! Have to make crepes! I am totally in the flow! The zeitgeist! The quantum reality! It’s total crepe energy this weekend! As Deepak Chopra is fond of saying: “I got your message in the field” (insider quantum reality joke: nyuk nyuk nyuk).

It was rapidly made clear to me that I am no Julia Child. I am no Gesine Bullock-Prado. I am no Legal Baker.

Such a comedy! Even the cats were laughing their furballs off. I mixed up the batter (easy!) and set it in the fridge to settle out for an hour. Returned, fired up the miraculous Scanpan, and commenced to pouring batter.

Well, it takes a certain touch. And I realized after the first pancake came out thick as an IHOP griddlecake that I lacked the touch. I recall the instructor yesterday just grabbed the edges of the thing and flipped it over. She must have long ago killed off the nerve endings of her fingers because that sucker is way too hot to flip that way!

I tried the old Julia Child flip-it-in-the-air technique. Ah, no. By now the cats were snorting milk out their noses it was so funny. The pancakes had the right flavor (I was using Gesine’s recipe) but the texture and thickness and shape were all wrong!

Finally I got it right. Figured out how much batter to put in the pan; when to nudge it with the spatula, and how to get it to slap over to cook on the reverse side. Finally! Wafer thin pancakes! And it only took me an entire bowl of batter to figure it out.

I immediately stuffed one with cherries and ladled on some lemon curd (making do with what was on the shelf – I hadn’t thought through the filling bit too thoroughly). Sweet. I filled another one with spinach soufflĂ© from last night. Savory.

So… other than the magic of laughter, where’s the household magic in all this? Oh, to be sure, I did laugh the entire way through the experiment – those crappy crepes were too funny. But other than that…

I think the lesson is somewhere in the notion that: In life some of our initial attempts at whatever we are meant to do may be a little unlike what we might have originally intended. It’s up to us as individuals to regard the result, compare it to what we intended, and then fine-tune our actions to try again. And again. And again. And finally it will come out as you wish it to be

And what really helps is to have friends to laugh with and at you (with love!) and stay with you on along the way.

Now…. Maybe I’ll make some hollandaise for that spinach crepe….

2 comments:

  1. Your crepes sound lovely, can't remember when last I made some. We like ours with a little butter, cinnamon sugar and a little squeese of lemon juice
    just found your blog ... nice.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Happy to have you here, Rina! Lemon juice.... ah, that's what's missing! Thank you!

    ReplyDelete