Crêpes

Well last night I dabbled, for the first time, in the art of crêpe making.  A crêpe is just a fancy word for thin pancake.  Well, here's the recipe and a summary of my experience.  Keep in mind - in Europe they weigh everything before cooking instead of doing it the easy way and using cups.  I've put both here in the recipe.

2 cups flour (250 grams)
4 eggs
2 cups of milk (approx. 1/2 litre)
pinch of salt
small bag of vanilla sugar (only for sweet crêpes)
3.5 tbsp. of melted butter (50g)

In the picture, you can see the preparation stage: put the flour in a bowl, and break the eggs on top.  Stir in the milk, but don't just stir the eggs and flour alone or you'll end up with cement.  Use a whisk to get the lumps out.  Add the salt (& sugar if you're making sweet ones).  (The vanilla sugar you might have to get at a specialty food store).  When it's mixed smoothly, cover with a towel for 1 hour.

Then, when you're ready, you dab a paper towel into the melted butter, and coat the pan with it.  This way, the butter doesn't burn.  Then you put enough batter in the pan to cover the bottom and cook away! 

You can make 2 kinds of crêpes (that I know of... I'm sure you can make more).  Salty ones and sweet ones.  In the salty ones (which shouldn't have any vanilla sugar in the recipe), you can put cheese, spinach and bacon bits.  It's delicious.  Then for dessert you can have a sweet one with sugar (white or brown!), and nutella and/or peanut butter.

It's all very easy.  Actually I didn't know about the vanilla sugar difference between sugary and salty crêpes, but it seemed to work and taste fine even with the vanilla sugar in the salty ones.  If you want to be professional though, I suppose you shouldn't put the sugar in the batter if you're having salty crêpes. 

Also, I asked the lady at the grocery store which was the best cheese to put into crêpes and she gave me the cheese in the picture - Emmental.  I'm not sure if that's available at home, but I suspect mozzerella would be just fine if you couldn't find emmental. 

That's all!  Today I'm going to go to the museum in Cinquantenaire park again.  There are a couple there, but I'll be going to the Royal Art History Museum.  It's quite big and I didn't get to see it all the last time I went there (I think it was in November!)

bye bye