Monday, February 03, 2020

Crêpe day

Sunday was crêpe day, otherwise known as la chandeleur (candlemas), another Catholic holiday that's celebrated in typical French fashion: with food. It's traditional to eat crêpes on that day. We're not Catholic but we like the food. So we traditionally eat a meal of savory crêpes made with buckwheat flour (a Breton tradition), stuffed with ham and cheese (and sometimes mushrooms), and topped with a fried (or poached) egg.

Making buckwheat crêpes in the larger of our two crêpe pans.

I had enough batter for three crêpes. I must confess that it's the batter I made last year, left over and frozen. Freezing the batter works great with no loss of quality that I can discern. The savory crêpes are much larger than dessert crêpes which makes them able to hold more filling. I make them one at a time and keep them warm under a kitchen towel. When they're all done, we add ham and cheese, fold them like an envelope, and put them in a slow oven to melt the cheese. While they were in the oven, Ken fried some eggs for the topping.

 Ready to serve. We each ate one and a half stuffed crêpes with a green salad on the side.

For dessert we make the traditional crêpes with standard all-purpose flour and eat them with jam or just butter and sugar. I didn't take any photos of those this year, but trust me, they were tasty.

In other news, we had a mysterious power failure at about four this morning. It's interesting that the power going off in the middle of the night wakes me up. One of our circuits shorted and we don't know why. After some testing and fiddling and a good deal of head scratching, we discovered it was just the one circuit.

So, we got the rest of the power back on, but the breaker for that one circuit won't hold. Fortunately, there's nothing critical on that line.

Time to call an electrician. Joy.

8 comments:

  1. The crepes look delicious...I'm not familiar with that tradition for Candlemas.
    Hope your electrical problem is resolved without too much hassle or expense.

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  2. Power outages at night wake me, too. And wonder if it’s the sudden silence... no more electrical hums that we’re normally not even aware of. I do love crepes. Do you remember the restaurant in Noe Valley that specialized? Can’t remember the name, but it was on 24th. Heaven! Hmmm. I’m now craving.

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  3. So... galettes au sarrasin would these be?
    Rest assured that your meal will be seen by little French-language-learners in St. Louis County, Missouri, today!

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    1. Les galettes de sarrasin sont aussi appelées appelées galettes de blé noir.

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  4. I see a story about the electrician's visit in our future!

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  5. I love galettes and yours look delicious!

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  6. I will be celebrating la chandeleur aujourd'hui! I plan on making a dessert crepe for a mid-afternoon pause!

    From reading Ken's blog, if the breakers are really old, (you have probably already thought about it), but why not have the electrician replace all of the breakers in that box to avoid any future issues? My father and I (assistant, only!) wired the basement in my former newly-built home in Illinois. As a licensed Oregon electrician he was able to do the wiring and get all the wires into each breaker switch in the box, but an Illinois electrician had to come out and connect that new box up to our main line.

    Once the heat went out in the middle of the night and I woke up freezing. I asked my husband to turn up the heat on the thermostat. 15 - 30 minutes later there was no difference, so I got up and this time I tried to turn on the light so I could see how much I was turning the dial... and that's when we both realized the electricity was out!

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  7. thickethouse, it's a French thing, I suppose.

    mitch, I think you're right. But no, I don't remember that restaurant. I do remember a soufflé restaurant over in North Beach.

    judy, yes! I wonder how the French learners will react to a fried egg on top? I remember being kind of weirded out from seeing a fried egg on top of pizza in Paris. I think I'm over it now.

    sillygirl, right you are!

    bettyann, and they're easy to make at home, which makes them even better.

    mary, interesting! We did have all those old circuit breakers replaced back in 2003. We're all modern now! Except, of course, the house really should be re-wired, but we're not up to dealing with that.

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