Worth Getting Up Early...

Breakfast is not normally a meal that excites me cooking wise. I suppose that's because I'm not a morning person (it's not sleeping in until the clock hits double digits, in my book). I'll happily spend an hour fussing with prep work for dinner, but for breakfast a bagel sandwich with cream cheese and lox is about the most complicated dish I'll make. However, we took our family vacation in Paris this year, and I fell in love with crepes again. As it happens, I have a good recipe for crepes. So this morning I dragged myself out of bed 15 minutes early and messed up the kitchen for breakfast.

Crepes are another of those dishes that are incredibly simple, yet challenging because they are simple. If you're making soup you can really let your taste guide you. You can adjust on the fly and cover up a lot of mistakes. Added too much pepper? Try adding a little cream to mellow it. With crepes there is no room for error. But when they are right, they are amazing. To my mind the perfect crepe is springy and chewy, has a nice egg flavor, and is just turning crispy around the edges. I think that might technically make mine slightly overcooked, but I like the texture.

I forget where I read this, but the trick to crepes is keeping the pan nice and hot. So put your pan on the burner over medium heat before you make your batter, and let the pan get hot again between crepes. I find if I just leave the pan on the burner while I fill, fold and serve the one I just cooked,and maybe take a sip of coffee, the pan is just right.

Another beauty of crepes is how easy they are to customize. You can do a little filling buffet and let people doctor their own. Nutella, sugar and lemon, jam or preserves, honey, peanut butter....just raid the pantry and you're sure to find half a dozen or more potential fillings. And that doesn't even treat the crepe as a savory item to be filled with grilled mushrooms or prosciutto with swiss cheese.

Ingredients:
1 cup whole milk
2 large eggs
1 1/2 tbsp salted butter (melted)
3/4 cup all purpose flour
pinch of salt
1/2 tbsp sugar
12" non-stick pan

Whisk the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Put the eggs in a bowl. Add half the dry ingredients, then whisk until smooth. Add the butter and then the rest of the dry goods and whisk again. There may be tiny lumps in the batter - that's okay as they will cook out. But you should have a mostly liquid batter and it will be pretty thin.

Put 1/3 cup of batter in one end of the pan then lift the pan and swirl/shake it around. The goal is to get a single, thin layer of batter covering the bottom of the pan. I have a 12" pan and 1/3 cup is the perfect size. Just adjust your scoop size to match your pan - one or two trial runs should suffice. Let the crepe cook for about a minute, until the edges just start to get crispy. Loosen with a rubber spatula and flip (I just use my fingers). Once flipped it only needs another 20-30 seconds.

Put the crepe on a plate, add filling and fold into thirds. I'm sure you can stack these but mine never stick around long enough to worry about it.

This recipe makes 4 or 5 crepes but the recipe can easily be scaled up if you need to make more.