37 Things: Make Crepes

Besides "Throw a Dinner Party for 20", this is my last cooking item on my list of 37 Things I Want to do Before I Turn 38.

When we were in Paris a few years ago, my favorite thing besides the museums was the all the crepe stands scattered through out the city. We ended up eating many, many ham and Swiss crepes during our short trip. Grab one in the morning and they would keep you full all afternoon as you walked from museum to museum. Sometimes I see crepe stands at farmers' markets here, but they are not really mainstream. Last weekend I drove up to Seattle and my friend Jenn took me to a new cafe in Ballard called the Ridgeback Cafe and their specialty is crepes. (Good crepes, but slow, slow service!) It reminded me that making crepes was on my to-do list.

As you can see below, I can't ever just follow one recipe. Crepes are pretty easy to make but they take a lot of prep work to get the fillings and the batter and any sauces to be done all at the same time. Of course you could just make crepes and fill them with jam or Nutella but I prefer savory crepes to sweet. I used a crepe recipe out of The Silver Palate New Basics cookbook, and two Gourmet magazine/cookbook recipes for my bacon mushroom filling in a Bechemel sauce and a roasted poblano creme sauce.
The batter is easy to make, especially if you have a food processor, but it is the pan that it the tricky part. I used my new flat cast iron skillet and the crepes turned out delicious but mostly deformed looking and misshapen.

I finally figured out that it was easier to just pour more batter in and fill the whole pan to get a nice round shape.

Here we have the roasted poblano creme sauce on the left. (I indeed roasted the peppers first.) The crepes were looking pretty good by the end and the mushroom, bacon, and onion filling in Bechemel sauce had a lot of steps in the making, but tasted great. And it is not as bad for you as you think; I used over half nonfat milk and it still turned out delicious and creamy.
Assembled crepes waiting to be devoured.

It took nearly 2 hours and a zillion pans to make this and we finished them off in less than 15 minutes. Maybe next time I will just whip out some crepes and spread some jam in them!