Cooking 101–Wheat-free Crepes

Actually, since my digestive system doesn’t tolerate wheat, nearly everything we cook at home with flour is with brown rice flour that we grind ourselves or a combination of our brown rice flour and Pamela’s Bread Mix and Flour Blend. With this recipe I used straight rice flour. Unless I note otherwise, you can directly substitute regular flour in all of our recipes.
Crepes are simple to make, but they take a lot of time. The crepe mound with cheese sauce we had for dinner last night was a joint effort for Ben and me and it still took over an hour. You can make crepes ahead of time and refrigerate them, then make the mound later, since it’s heated in the oven. I’m pressed for time this evening, so for right now I’ll just give you my recipe for crepes.
By the way, it took so long to make dinner last night (and the crepe mound is so rich) that I didn’t make the whipped cream mousse until this evening (and it’s incredible, so I’ll give you that recipe later as well).

This is not, by the way, quite the way Julia made her crepes, so they probably won’t be just like hers.
You will need a blender, a mixing bowl, a rubber spatula, a 1/4 Cup or 1/3 Cup measuring cup (this will depend on the size of crepes you’ll be making; I made mine about 7 & 1/2 to 8 inches in diameter, so I used 1/3 Cup; if you have a smaller fry pan and baking dish, 1/4 Cup will make 6 to 6 & 1/2 inch crepes), a small non-stick fry pan and a baking dish. The bottom of the baking dish should be just a little bigger than the bottom of your fry pan.
In the blender, put:
1 Cup cold water
1 Cup low fat milk
4 medium eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 & 1/2 cups of rice flour
4 Tablespoons of melted butter (make sure it’s melted, otherwise you’ll just have chunks of butter in your batter)

Blend together for a couple of minutes and then stop to scrape down any flour remaining on the sides of your blender pitcher, then blend again for half a minute or so.
Heat up your frying pan (if it’s not a non-stick you’ll have to grease the pan before putting each measure of batter into it) on medium high heat (I used 7 on the scale of one through eight and then high) and measure out your crepe batter into your measuring cup. When the pan is good and hot pour the batter into the pan and swirl your pan around to coat the entire bottom. After about a minute and a half or two minutes flip your crepe over. I had to loosen the crepes with a plastic spatula for mine and then slid them to the side, grabbed the edge and flipped them over. About another 20 seconds to half a minute will be enough to finish cooking them.
Voila!
My measurements of 1/3 Cup per crepe rendered a dozen crepes and it took about 35 minutes or so to mix the batter and cook the crepes one at a time.

Life 101–Perceptions

The mound of crepes with spinach and cheese sauce is in the oven. The first few crepes were a little funny looking, but by the end, they were looking good, albeit not at all resembling a shape you could call round. I didn’t do everything the way Julia taught how to do it, but the sauces were delicious going in, so we’re watching the oven door and the clock pretty closely.

 

Yesterday we drove into Columbus to deliver pots. It was the first real snow of the season and we woke to the wonder of the enchanting beauty of a freshly blanketed landscape. The air was as crisp and cool as an iced glass of water on a hot, thirst-swollen tongue. A soft haze from the gentle snowfall filtered the whitened landscape, washed with yellows and greens from the grasses poking through the blanket and with the charcoal grey of sagebrush, trees, rocks and shrubbery in the distance, creating an image as illusory as a painting.

As we ripped along the highway returning home, the snow seemed to be flowing past us in a fierce wind, blowing and snowing with the force of a blizzard that made us shiver to see it when, in reality, the snow was falling with a rare gentleness, piling light upon the fence posts and wires.

How strange that our personal perspectives, seen through the filters of our experiences and built upon the base of a belief system, can paint life so extremely different than reality.

I have a related set of recurring dreams that just this week I began to understand. In the dreams I’m either wandering out of a church and cannot find my car, or I’m rushing through a shopping mall full of meandering people and I’m searching for Ben. I’m not actually lost, but I cannot find my way home. A third type of dream I have is that I’m at an airport with a group of friends or relatives, but we cannot all get on the same plane. Sometimes I’m on a plane with only one or two people I know, but usually I must fly alone on a very small plane that I have to board by climbing a long spiral staircase.

Writing these dreams down makes the meaning seem obvious now, but I woke Friday morning after such a dream and as I was drinking my first cup of coffee beside the wood stove I had a sense that I’m blundering through life in a filtering fog that leaves me blind to anything beyond my immediate surroundings and, so, cannot see which way to go. The problem, of course is that we humans are not gifted with sight that allows us to see more than our immediate lives. We have the media to show us what exists ‘out there,’ but we’re so caught up in our own immediacy that we cannot recognize anyone else’s perspective as legitimate.

What I want, then, is to learn how to see beyond my own blindness. This is not a goal or a project like the others I’m working on, because I don’t know how to go about it. But, then, if I don’t make it a goal or a project, how can it ever come to be? Perhaps it will have to be some sort of exploration through writing.

I’ll have to explore this further.

 

The crepe mound just came out of the oven, so I’m of to satiate my baser needs for the moment.

Cooking 101–Lesson 2

The second primary lesson I just learned (or maybe this is the third?) is not to expect people to eat a rich dessert right after a big turkey dinner.

The dinner was great and so was chocolate soufflé, but we gathered to eat at 6:00 p.m., so we were all still very full and half comatose when the soufflé came out of the oven. Soufflé doesn’t keep. Ben and I suffered through eating our share and also suffered for it all night, but Lori and Dawn couldn’t eat much of theirs, so a big portion of my labor of love (or would that be lust, for chocolate?) went into the compost pile.

And I figured out that I really prefer mousse over soufflé. Whipped cream mousse, that is. Soufflé is fun and delicious, but no matter what you put into it, there is that decidedly eggy flavor, even to the dark chocolate variety. Now, I love eggs and I love egg dishes, but dessert, to me personally, just should not be an eggy thing. So, I looked up mousse recipes on the internet, since Julia’s chocolate mousse is, essentially, an uncooked soufflé. We’re delivering pots in Livingston tomorrow morning, so we’ll stop at the grocery and get a few things and this weekend, I’ll make a mousse for dessert. For supper, I'm going to make a stack of crepes with entrée filling and cover it with cheese sauce before baking. This is a Julia sort of dish with lots of butter and cream and cheese.

By the way, Ben and I haven’t started on our exercise program yet and we just relented – with grave reluctance -- to the weather and put our bicycles away. We’ve done few things semi athletic since our landscaping season ended,  but it’s getting late in the season and even though we haven’t been eating as many goodies as we have been lately, we haven’t lost any of the girth on our waistline emergency supply. But, then, as hard as we worked all summer, we didn’t lose much of that. Without working we’ve already re-packed what little we worked off. And, to make matters worse, I have noticed, from our big turkey dinner last weekend, the waistline of my tight pair of pants is pinching a bit more than usual. From a single meal! That’s something new.

So, the challenge to lose the extra on our emergency supply has just increased in intensity a notch or two. Yeehaw!!

 

Now that we can’t get into the mountains for a good excursion until ski and snowshoe season, I’m staring at them every day and longing for a good hike, so I’m reminiscing. Here are a few heretofore not posted pictures from this past summer.