Crepes For Coffee

Breakfast is my favorite meal hands down. It sets the mood for the whole day. So imagine my delight when I saw crepes featured on PBS’ “Mexico: One Plate at a Time”.  A crepe is basically a paper-thin pancake wrapped like a burrito around some kind of sweet filling of your choice. Well, it looked easy enough for me to make, and my own version is even easier. Here’s the skinny on skinny crepes: Put 2 cups of Trader Joe’s pancake mix in a blender. Melt 2 tbls of butter on medium in a small round non-stick skillet. Pour butter in the blender while leaving the pan still hot and greasy. Also add to the blender 2 eggs, 1 ½ cup milk, and a tbls of Madagascar vanilla. Depending on your filling, you could even add a pinch of TJ’s pumpkin spice blend in it. My blender has a setting for smoothies on it, so that’s what I pushed to make sure everything was well shaken and mixed. With me so far? Great, so here’s the fun part: pour enough batter in your hot skillet to cover the bottom. Whatever is in excess gets poured IMMEDIATELY back into the blender. This leaves the skillet just barely laced in batter, which allows the bottom side to cook within about 30 seconds. With a spatula, cut off any excess that stuck to the side. Feed to your dog or hovering child. Flip the crepe quickly when bubbles appear all over BY HAND.  Cook this side about twice as long. Lift out by hand onto plate, fold like a burrito, and remember these babies get cold within seconds. I guess you could cover them to help keep them warm until ready to serve, but that could risk actually steaming them. Crepes are meant to have crispy edges, not mushy ones. At this point, have your husband join in on the fun by starting the coffee. We have friends in Hawaii who started their own organic coffee farm, and that’s how I got started drinking it. To me it tastes better and you can get it cheap at TJ’s. On to the filling: this is where you can get really creative. Almost anything you have on hand that is sweet will work. Honey, whipped cream, berries, melted butter and powdered sugar, chocolate syrup, flavored syrups, whatever the heck you want! Put it all  on the table and let your family decide. Or put it on your bar and let your guests serve themselves buffet-style. I wish I had this recipe when I had friends over for brunch recently! Anyway, in my fridge I had two items I wanted to use up-- some plain Greek-style yogurt and half a jar of cranberry-apple jam. I mixed the two and used that for the “burrito” filling. WOW! I never ate this good even when I actually went to Mexico!