Newbie Iron Chef Something Awful Entry: I Am Full of Crepe

Dear Internet,

Hello!

I know. I know. I'm bad at communicating. That isn't to say I don't still love you, of course, I've just been very, very lazy. Sometimes I get too lost in reality to really sit down and write to everyone - I get distracted by other things like video games, or outings, or the cat. My brain is fickle; sometimes I want to talk for hours, other times I want to be left alone and allowed to think quietly, without having people knowing I'm thinking.

I never said I made sense.

However, recently thanks to a forum I like to frequent I've got back up on the talkative horse again. I decided that I would participate in one of the Goons with Spoons challenges - they call it 'Iron Chef Something Awful'. I entered in the Newbie category, where the challenge was 'breakfast'. Unlike the real show, one just has to create and take pictures of the process of cooking and creating your entry, and do a little write-up. The forum votes on which entry they like best, and then the winner (and a couple runners-up) get prizes provided by the 'Chairman' of that contest.

This was a lot of fun, if not hard (you'll see why after the jump). I don't know if I'll win or not. In fact, I'm fairly certain I won't because there were a LOT of really great entries with great recipes and ideas, but it was fun to try. And this was all over the course of a late morning/early afternoon. Not the hour that a real Iron Chef gets, but hey... I'm new.

This is a transcript of the exact post I put up for my entry. The title was 'I am full of crepe'. Also, this post is full of bad words and silly comments and terrible pictures because I am not a photographer, and I'm sure I'm going to offend people with it. You've been warned!

More after the cut!




I'll be honest in saying that I have come late to the culinary world - yeah, I cook well enough that whatever I churn out is edible since Mom made sure I could look after myself, but for the longest time I was locked into a pattern of recipes that I could make without much effort, and just weren't very exciting.


It wasn't until I was living on my own the past couple years - the at-the-time fiance (and now husband) and I had to temporarily part ways due to immigration issues - that I could experiment and try things I'd thought about trying, but was put off for any number of reasons. That's when I discovered that I like to cook, and I love to bake. There was little better incentive to keep fucking around in the kitchen, share it around, than when someone would say 'holy shit, that was great, can I get the recipe?'


There were plenty of mistakes along the way (don't misread a recipe when it calls for 4 tsp of yeast and add 4 tbsp instead, you end up with dough that burps, gurgles, and demands blood-payment in the form of your cat), but I've kept trying. When this round of NICSA rolled through, I thought - I can do this! I'll bake something delicious like a muffin full of fruit, or oh no no fuck that I want to make croissants by hand!--

no god dammit fuck you mother nature


no air conditioning in the upper flat of a house


this means baking is out


fuck

Julia Child to the rescue.

My mother-in-law has this cookbook (for whatever reason she keeps in the bathroom for reading material, I don't even know) which is the collection of Julia's shows on PBS, by episode, with the recipes and her instructions. After flipping through it (not while on the can) and falling in love with how matter-of-fact she wrote the recipes, I decided I'd take a crack at her crepes.

NICSA III: BATTLE BREAKFAST MENU

Crepes Two Ways
- Spinach, Mushroom and Bacon Crepes with a Balsamic Dijon Sauce
- Maple-Walnut Mascarpone Crepe Stack
Fruit Salad
Get Your Own Juice Dammit I've Been Cooking Breakfast

My husband is a wonderful man. However, he has the palate of a four year old. He refuses to eat vegetables, doesn't like most fruit in its natural form, and once told me when we started dating that pumpkin pie was a fruit. When I decided I wanted to do crepes for this, I knew I had to come up with an alternative for him or he'd just eat all my bacon and leave me with nothing. Fucker.

Let's start with the crepes.

Julia Child's Crepes

1 cup cold water
1 cup cold milk
4 eggs (US grade large)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups flour (sifted directly into measuring cup)
4 tablespoons melted butter
Cooking oil (for greasing pan, not pictured)

The cookbook says I should just chuck everything into a blender and spin it down for a minute. However, while I may have a bitchin' assortment of kitchen stuff, I do not have a blender. I ended up using an electric mixer to whip this stuff all up, which is a-okay in Julia's book. Or so she says. _{please don't judge me}

Pour your flour into a bowl, and mix the eggs in one at a time. Not shown: awesome one-handed cracking technique.

This doesn't look like batter at all ffffff--oh.

Mix in the water, milk, and butter one at a time, gradually, until you end up with this.

Strain the batter through a fine-mesh sieve, into another bowl, and get all the nasty crud out of the batter. I was kind of weirded out by all the crap that was left behind. It reminded me of spatzle, sort of.

Once strained, cover with saran wrap and let it sit for two hours in the fridge. Julia informed me that this lets the flour molecules swell up and soften, and make for a better crepe. It sounds like junk science to me, but I'm not arguing with a lifetime of professional French cooking, you know?

While the crepe batter chills out, let's go get started on the other stuff.

Fruit Salad

Take raspberries, blackberries, and one lonely peach you need to eat up. Wash the fruit, cut up the peach, throw it into a bowl.

Add a few squirts of lemon juice and this stuff. Do not eat the whole bottle at once, no matter how much you want to. Save it for coffee. Or crepes. Or snorting a line of it off a hooker's tits.

Fruit becomes this. Cover and let it sit in the fridge until it's time to eat.

Maple-Walnut Mascarpone Cream Filling

1 8-ounce container mascarpone cheese
4 tablespoons maple syrup
dash of vanilla
1/2 cup toasted walnuts

Mix together the cheese and the maple syrup in a bowl with a splash of vanilla. You can add more maple syrup if you want it sweeter, but I figured since there'd be a little syrup on top of the crepes at the end, I'd limit how much I put into the filling to start. I want them to be pleasantly sweet, not diabetes inducing.

Not shown: toasting walnuts half-assedly in a pan. Too goddamn hot to turn on the oven. Also, because I lack anything that can 'pulverize', I decided to break out the Magic Bullet that really only ever sees smoothie-duty, and throw them in there.

This blurry picture is proof that the walnuts were indeed pulverized. Mix them into the maple-mascarpone mixture.

Fight the urge to hide in a corner and eat the whole damn thing with a spoon. Holy shit, this was fantastic. Quick, make something you don't want in your mouth RIGHT NOW.

Balsamic Dijon Sauce

1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon white sugar
1 teaspoon water
salt
pepper

There's no real finesse to this. Put it in a bowl. Mix it.

Done. I added a tiny bit more Dijon because I prefer the taste of mustard to balsamic, but this had a nice tang that I figured would go great on the savoury crepes. And hey, speaking of which!

Spinach, Mushroom and Bacon Filling

6 slices bacon
1/2 pound fresh mushrooms, sliced
4 tablespoons unsalted butter (cut into 1-tablespoon and 3-tablespoon sizes)
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup milk
spinach (the original recipe I found called for frozen spinach, but that seemed gross so I went with, like, two fistfuls of bulk fresh spinach)
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
salt
pepper

Cook your bacon. Be sure to set the six slices aside and out of your husband's reach or you're going to be short. Crumble the six slices up into a nice bacon-bit consistency. While cooking your bacon, do some other stuff that needs doing:

Hassan...

CHOP!

Also trip over MacGyver the cat who insists on laying in the busiest, hottest part of the apartment and meowing loudly about how hot it is. _{fucking idiot}

With your bacon finished, add 1 tablespoon of butter with 1 tablespoon of bacon grease into a pan, and melt it down. Then add your mushrooms and saute until they're nice and golden and damnit I'm getting hungry.

Now at this point the recipe says I should start over in another pan, but I already have more dishes to do than I want to think about right now, so let's try and take one pan out of the equation. I put the mushrooms into a bowl, cleaned the pan a bit, and then got to work on making my roux with the three tablespoons of butter and the flour, hoping the tasty bits of bacon still stuck to the pan would help flavour it.

oh fuck am i doing it right what the fuck aaaah it's going to burn oh shit

Okay so burning crisis avoided with the addition of the milk. Whisk until smooth and gravy-like, then start adding in the other stuff that's been waiting patiently.

Bacon, mushrooms...

... spinach and cheese!

Now to let this stuff get all familiar with one another. The recipe I followed said 'cook for ten minutes', but I stirred it around, kept an eye on it, and tasted the spinach after about six. It was pretty tender, and I thought it tasted pretty good at this point (after adding some salt/pepper to the mix), so I took it off.

Jesus Christ I hope this tastes better than it looks.

Meanwhile, DING the crepe batter has passed the two hour mark! Let's get making them, shall we?

Julia's recipe said to use either some fat bacon, or cooking oil to fry the crepes up (thank God non-stick pans were okay, I don't have a cast iron pan). I ended up going with a silicon pastry brush dipped in a bit of canola oil just to give a faint sheen of oil to the pan.

Wait for the pan to almost-smoke, then take it off the heat. With the 1/4 measuring cup (or use a ladle that's about 1/4 cup, whatever floats your boat), pour out the first crepe into the hot pan. Roll it around to cover the base of the pan, and if there's too much dump it back into the bowl. Fortunately for me, 1/4 cup was just about perfect for this pan (the base of which is 8 inches).

It only takes about a minute for the crepe to be ready. According to the recipe, you should be able to shake the pan and the crepe should come loose - that means you can flip it, after checking to make sure it's appropriately brown.

Ta-da! Awesome.

Not shown: repeating this another 14 times and keeping the others warm with layers of tinfoil.
Not shown: eating the first crepe as a quality control check and realizing it's awesome.
Not shown: finally mastering how to flip crepes without a spatula and not get it all over the stove, awww yisssss

Get Your Own Juice Dammit I've Been Cooking Breakfast

Tell your husband to go to the fridge and pour juice because it's finally ready. If he is a good husband, he will do so with a 'yes dear'. Then he will steal a piece of bacon but you will let it slide.

FINISHED PRODUCT

Fill your crepes when all is said and done. For the savoury ones, I went with a basic fill-and-fold; for the sweet ones I did more of a stack. I spread the maple-walnut-mascarpone mixture thinly on top of one crepe, then added another crepe and repeated until it was six crepes high.

Get the fruit salad out of the fridge and dish out two ramekins worth.

Get the two new white plates you bought last night specifically for pictures and plate on them because no one wants to see your 35 year old hand-me-down Corelle dishes, seriously.

Garnish the sweet crepes with a dollop of the mascarpone deliciousness, a drizzle of maple syrup, and a few extra toasted walnuts.

Drizzle some of the balsamic Dijon concoction across the savoury crepes, and marvel at how you've produced something that looks pretty damn fancy.

Decide not to take pictures in the dining room but in the kitchen because the light is better.

Spinach, Mushroom and Bacon Crepes with Balsamic-Dijon Sauce

Maple-Walnut Mascarpone Cream Crepes (and a couple extra slices of bacon)


EXTREEEEEEEEME CLOSEUPS

Breakfast was late, but totally worth it. Would I make this again? I might want to tool around with the savoury filling more - maybe more cheese, less roux-gravy. I would definitely do the mascarpone filling again, however. It was fucking amazing and so goddamn easy to do that this may become my default crepe/pancake condiment from now on.

Thank you for reading all my words!