Crepe Chaos

Today mom and I hosted a tea party for the world's most friendly little girl and her mom.  It was great fun.  We all had a great time talking wedding, catching up and laughing.  And apparently I got my ab workout for the day playing "push/pull" with K.  I had a Crabtree and Evelyn set with tea, biscuits and jam that I got in a Yankee Swap this Christmas, and it was calling out for a tea party.  Hence today's party.  And we even got to use my very own set of china for the first time!  It was a great afternoon.

I also made some mixed dried fruit scones.  I know, those are blueberry scones, but I altered the recipe a tad.  Instead of soymilk, I used regular skim milk with just a touch of vanilla added, and instead of the blueberries, I used about 1/2 cup of dried golden raisins, cranberries, cherries and blueberries.

But I was so busy having fun at a tea party that I forgot to take pictures.  Sorry.

However, I do have stories about crepes.  I tried making crepes in a pan once.  I thought I blogged about it somewhere back in those first few months, but maybe not.  Hmmmm.  Oh well.  Suffice it to say they didn't come out well.

But.  Mom has this contraption . . . it's like a convex heated pan thing and a concave enamel bowl.  Apparently they are from the 70s.  I have noticed the bowl before, but never the heating unit.

Apparently, it's a crepe maker.  Who would have guessed?  You put the batter in the bowl and then dip the heated pan into it.  It then forms a layer thick enough to be a crepe and stay together (or you at least hope it does . . . ) and it falls right off the pan.  Crazy stuff.

For a while, I thought that maybe it should have stayed in the 70s, but it did make 6 decent crepes for me.  Eventually.  After I scraped three off with a fork . . .  (the crumbs in the background are disintegrated crepes.)

But, I did get six.  It was good that there were only three of us eating them.

For the first three, I made crepes with roasted veggies and goat cheese.  Well, sorta.  Eeeeexcept the goat cheese we had just purchased not hours before was moldy.  Ugh.  No good.  And when you live at least 20 minutes away from the nearest large grocery store that would even remotely have goat cheese, you live with it.

So, I improvised.  Thankfully, mom always keeps feta cheese on hand.  And it came in handy.  I used that.  And it was good.  Don't get me wrong.  I just love goat cheese.  And now I have to make more crepes to try it with goat cheese.

At this point, I was wondering if everything for this meal would go wrong.  But it didn't.  After this problem, it was basically smooth sailing.  Sorta.

For veggies, we used mushrooms, red and yellow pepper and butternut squash.  The original intention was to use zucchini, but the only zucchinis in the store were very, very sad looking.  And we found this package of pretty finely chopped butternut squash.  I'd never seen it before.  It totally worked.  It roasted just about as fast as the other veggies.  It was prefect.  I just tossed the veggies in olive oil and dried rosemary and roasted them at 400 degrees for about 1/2 an hour, turning them after 15 minutes.

So, I finally put the crepes together, and baked them.  I thought at first that they were stuck to the pan afterwards and that there was no way I was ever getting them off in one piece.  But crepes are just sticky things in general, and with a little coaxing, they came off fine.  Phew.  Crisis number 3 (or 4 or 5 or 6 or . . . ?) averted.

Finally.  Dinner.   After a long day of antiquing with mom and finishing my collection of cobalt blue bottles for wedding purposes.

Then, I took the last three crepes and made dessert.

I just spread some nutella on one quarter or so of the crepe, and sliced banana over it.  I folded up the crepe into fourths and voila, dessert.  So easy.  And crepes, banana and nutella just go together.  Seriously.

So dessert went without crisis.  Then, I had an allergic reaction to something.  But I had already eaten everything in the meal before . . . so now comes the fun process of narrowing down what it could have been.  Oh well.  I guess my crepe dinner just turned out to be a little more than I had bargained for.