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They go on for miles
I planned to spend this afternoon with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.)
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.)
no subject
I think we can be genuinely excused for not realizing how differently a gluten-free batter would behave in a hot pan than a wheat- or buckwheat-flour batter under similar conditions—I have very clear memories of learning to make pancakes in the old house in Arlington and that thing with the oil around the edges was nowhere in it. (The tofu book is giving us a fund of not just good vegan recipes, but good celiac-safe recipes, and I should remember this for when it becomes relevant to guests.) The crepe twiddler was still imperative, as was our willingness to keep adjusting our techniques until the crepes stopped falling apart in the pan. I didn't think much about it until afterward, when we were reading dosa recipes. But we have this habit of discovering the capacities of different kinds of dough as we work them, like the spilling green oobleck of the onde onde or the hell-beast that was glutinous rice flour with palm sugar syrup, and at this point I think I should just assume that any combination of flour and liquid we haven't tried before will hate us until proven otherwise (and possibly hate us anyway, because glutinous rice flour. I am still all for trying the Shanghai spring roll skins, however, and that whole family of har gow).
Everything else, though, that was probably just us.
I love you.