They go on for miles

[sovay]

I planned to spend this afternoon with rushthatspeaks. Neither of us planned to spend the evening making stuffed crepes. And yet. We had tofu, we had mushrooms; we had chickpea flour; we had a pair of recipes in Andrea Nguyen's book that told us how to pan-fry the first with a savory sesame relish and how to mix the second with rice flour and griddle it into crepes with a filling we weren't interested in; we thought it only made sense to combine the two. Rush said, and I quote, and full well I agreed, "And it'll be simpler than having to deal with making rice." Cut to: a full two hours later, after the endless chopping of mushrooms, after frying the tofu took easily fifteen minutes a side, after the relish has gone through five different changes of taste, after we have spoon-pressed the chickpea batter through a tea strainer to smooth out the infinite little lumps, after we christen the first plate "Deformed Rabbit" because each of its three intended crepes is a spilled mélange of tofu, mushrooms, and accidental papadum, after the second plate where Rush is getting the hang of the crepe twiddler (that is its name and we will hear nothing against it) so that it doesn't grind holes in the center of the batter and I am getting the hang of drizzling oil around the edges and letting the stuff fry longer than I think so that I can loosen it in one piece from the pan rather than five, not very long after the third plate where they look like completely reasonable side-folded crepes and we are simultaneously punch-drunk and still working with smoking-hot oil so we can't do anything but keep cooking—and gaudior is beginning to make plaintive sounds from the living room—we eat dinner. There are two extra crepes at the end, each served in their own bowl because we've run out of other dishes. If they don't look restaurant-quality, it's only because by this point we have stopped caring about presentation and have just dumped them out of the pan and plonked them on the table. I may post the pictures Gaudior took of exhibits A through edible if I can look at them without cracking up. I am not sure I have ever experienced a steeper learning curve in a single meal. I am not sure I have ever before cooked a meal which made me feel simultaneously accomplished and stupid. Because now we know how to make chickpea-and-rice-flour crepes, and if we'd only let them ferment overnight, we'd have had dosas. And in full possession of our faculties, without the assistance of cooking sherry or kitchen beer, we looked at a rice cooker and an unknown recipe for crepes and decided the crepes would be simpler.

(They were delicious.)

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You're both completely mad. Mad I say!

I have only made the standard kind of French crepes, but I do it with a palette knife and have no problems. Oh, and galettes, which are also a standard kind but with sarrasin instead of flour.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

The galettes my father made were like enormous shortbread cookies (with apricot on top), and it's hard for me to imagine a palette knife helping. Parchment paper was a revelation, though.

Rushthatspeaks:
I say smugly, having used the knife sharpener as heatproof cooking chopsticks a while ago

Wait! You mean a sharpening steel? Were you reaching for a butter knife?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

My knife sharpener is an odd object. It's not actually a steel. It's two long ceramic cylinders set at angles to one another sticking up from sockets in a metal base, and you sharpen a knife by pulling it quickly through the place the cylinders are closest together. It rasps away the sides of the blade and forms the bottom into the correct angle. However, the cylinders aren't fixed into the sockets, and I pulled them out of a drawer once and went oh hey these are heatproof they will work for me in this circumstance. Then after I'd turned over the tofu I went wait, those are the detachable bits of the knife sharpener. Fortunately it does not appear to have hurt them any. Or the tofu.

[sovay]

Mad I say!

And we should cook for you sometime!

Oh, and galettes, which are also a standard kind but with sarrasin instead of flour.

Oh, nice. I've only made the kind of galettes that are more like pastries. I like the idea of the kitchen palette knife.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I suspect I would manage to scratch my pan to hell with a palette knife, especially since I don't have a real crepe pan-- the sides of the pan are rather steep. One basically inverts it to get the crepes out, but they do come out okay. I can't damage either my crepe twiddler or my pan when I use the crepe twiddler, because it is a stick.

'Galette' is a better name for those than 'buckwheat pancake-style crepe', which is what they call them on menus around here for some reason. I have not tried making them at home but I like them and should.