Evie: “Would you rather be with a shark that ate yesterday, a tiger that ate yesterday, or a lion that ate 10 weeks ago?”
Me: “Well, the lion would be hungry, and I don’t want to be under water, so I guess I’d go with the tiger.”
Evie: “Wrong! You’d rather be with the lion because he’d be dead if he didn’t eat for 10 weeks!”
Ollie: “Here Grandpa, you can use some of our sun scream.”
Ollie: “Hey, did you write on my picture?”
Sara: “Oh, sorry buddy, I was researching tomatoes. I really like your picture though. What was it, a spider?”
Ollie: “A zombie.”
It’s actually a pretty good zombie picture. But how does he know what a zombie looks like??
The first Friday of the month is reserved for recipes. You can see additional First Friday Food posts here.
The Reason:
I’m still trying to burn through some of my stored-up food posts, and that means pancakes! So you’re getting another First Friday Food that is not on a First Friday.
As far as the reason to make crepes, one day it just occurred to me that I could make crepes. With whole wheat flour no less! We’re always looking for good pancake recipes, and crepes are a significantly different form of pancake.
The Journey:
First off, I’d like to specify that I originally learned how to make crepes from an actual frenchman. I don’t have his fancy pan or fancy crepe-scraping tool, but make no mistake, I know how to get the job done.
All that being said, flipping crepes is no joke, even if you don’t flip them in the air. There is certainly a skill to it. Be prepared to have ripped up and shredded crepes, even after making hundreds and hundreds of the things. Making crepes is somewhat stressful, and requires your full attention. But afterwards, you get to eat crepes, and the ripped up ones taste the same as the nice ones!
The recipe calls for the ingredients to be mixed in a blender. Do it! I tried everything I could to avoid it, including mixing with a mixer. It doesn’t work. If you get chunks in your batter, they will stick to the pan, and then you’re not going to get nice looking ones.
Also, use a LOT of butter on the pan, in between each and every crepe. You really can’t over-butter it. Just remind yourself you’re cooking like a French person, and throw an extra pat on there. You’ll thank yourself when you try to flip one.
The Verdict:
Making crepes is not that difficult, but it is a LOT of work. You have to make LOTS of them, because people will eat them way faster than you can make them. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
But, might I add, they make you look very fancy pants impressive.
Crepes are so versatile. You can basically put anything on a crepe. Even setting aside savory crepes, you have jellies, jams, curds, marmalades, peanut butter, nutella, and just plain sugar. You could have these every day of the week and not get tired of them.
Well, not get tired of *eating* them. But you will definitely get tired of making them.
Put all ingredients in blender and mix well. Let stand about 15 minutes.
Melt and swirl around a small pat of butter in an 8 or 10-inch frying pan over medium heat.
Angle pan and pour enough batter on one side to thinly and evenly cover the pan. Very quickly swirl the batter around to cover the pan in one thin layer.
Immediately use your cooking spatula to push down the thin edges of the crepe around the perimeter.
After about 1 minute (and once it is golden brown on the bottom) carefully flip it over without tearing the crepe.
Fry for 1 more minute on the other side (until it is golden brown as well) and then roll up each crepe.
We all need hobbies to take our minds off of the daily grind, and relax. However, there’s no reason these hobbies can’t also help to hone skills needed in the case of the inevitable.
At its heart, canning is about sterilization and food preservation, two things very near and dear to our hearts. The general idea is to heat the food and container to a temperature that will kill any bacteria, and then vacuum seal it to prevent contamination. Canned foods can last up to five years (or even longer in some circumstances), require no refrigeration or electricity, and are self contained in a package suitable for travel.
Low-acid foods, such as meat or vegetables, must be canned in a pressure canner. (Note: a pressure canner is not exactly the same as a pressure cooker!) High-acid foods, such as fruits or pickled vegetables, can be canned in a simple hot water bath. Recipes can be more or less complicated, but this can be as simple as filling a sterilized jar with fruit and sugar water and dropping it in hot water for 15 – 20 minutes.
The equipment for hot water bath canning is easy enough to come by. The hot water bath itself is easily improvised with a large pot and a fire. However, the more difficult part to obtain are mason jars, lids, and rings. Jars and rings are re-useable, but lids are not.
In my experience, small, local hardware stores are surprisingly one of the best places to get canning supplies. Since you will undoubtedly need to raid a hardware store at some point, be sure to stock up on lids. This should be especially easy, since the foolish or short-sighted will probably not be thinking of this long-term item. Jars can be obtained at the same place, but vast, undiscovered caches of jars are living in the basements of old ladies everywhere. Jars can be reused, so you can also start with a few and grow your collection over time. Just be sure that there are no chips or cracks around the edges of the jars, since these will prevent the jar from sealing.
There is a little bit of an art to canning, so it is smart to invest some time now, while you have the luxury. In the long term, you have a relatively sustainable way to preserve the vegetables from your rooftop garden (you are planning on having a rooftop garden, right?) to help sustain you for years to come. And the best part? This is a useful hobby to know in a non-post apocalyptic world: nothing beats homemade jam!
The Internet basically only exists to suck time away from us. This is especially true in my case. Some obsessive aspect of my personality really latches on to the Internet and can’t let go. I have to friend every person and read every status, tweet, or blog post of anybody I ever even remotely knew, as well as anybody they recommend, etc. I try to suck it all up and absorb it, but the Internet is endless. There is always one more website to read or blog post to write or link to share on someone’s wall. Slowly but surely, the Internet eats me until there is nothing left.
This is not the first time I have crawled my way out of this black hole. In defense of my sanity, as well as defense of all my other hobbies (including sleep), I’m going to throttle down a little bit. So if I don’t comment on your Facebook as much as I used to, or if I unfollow you on Twitter, Please don’t be offended. It’s not because you are uninteresting. Quite the opposite in fact.
Additionally, I will also be cutting down on my blogging.
On Jan. 3rd 2009, I started posting on my blog 5 days a week. It was a little bit of an experiment to see if I could. At that time I didn’t think it would last very long. It seemed impossible, and I also worried it would hurt the quality of the posts. A little over 4 years later, I am ready to call the experiment quits.
I’ve really enjoyed the challenge and I think that, not only did the quality remain high, but I think it actually improved. Blogging is still something I love, and it really became part of my personality during that time. I’ve received such nice feedback from people, and it’s really kept me in touch with a lot of people that I wouldn’t otherwise had any contact with. Lately, however, it has become too much of a burden. Sara could tell you how much time I spend fretting about things like, “I need another post for this week!” or “Is this really good enough for a post?” or “Why is my traffic going down? Was I boring this week?” or “Make the kids do something funny! I’m short on quotes!” This becomes doubly difficult when something’s going on, like stress at work, or queuing up posts for a multiple week vacation.
Since I receive no tangible benefits from blogging, there’s really no reason to add this kind of stress to my life. I will still continue to blog whenever I feel like it, which will no doubt be multiple times per week (maybe even every day!). However, I will no longer force myself to make an arbitrary post count.
Thanks to you who have enjoyed my blog over the years. I hope you will continue to enjoy it as it enters yet another new chapter.
Evie: “Ollie’s not letting me have my imagination!”
Evie: “Ollie’s following me around and being a copycat!”
Ollie: “No, I’m not a cat!”
Sara: “We should take your dad out to breakfast for Father’s day. It will be perfect, since we’ll all be there. And we can go really early, while the rest of the dads are in church.”
Me: “BWAHAHA! Oh my god, I would totally use that as a quote, but it would give away the whole thing.”
Sara: “Like your dad reads your blog.”
Me: “Like my dad reads.”
Ollie: “The story I’m telling myself is very long.”
Me: “Oh yeah? What’s it about?”
Ollie: “Cake.”
Posts
Recent Comments