Disaster Crepes...

The problem with having a run of good fortune in the kitchen is that the longer you go without completely and utterly screwing up a meal the more disappointed your food critic spouse is when it all goes ass-end up.

I was still riding high on the risotto I'd whipped up out of random things found in my kitchen (a favorite risotto recipe of mine, by the way) and then managed to pull off a great stew of cheap ingredients and a liberal application of Tabasco sauce.  Who's the kitchen goddess?  Oh, I do believe I am the kitchen goddess!

But pride cometh before the fall...

Which is a stupid saying.  Who the hell has pride after they fall?  I mean, generally speaking, falling on my face does not instill me with a sense of pride.  Way to point out the obvious, you stupid idiom!  It's like "it's always in the last place you look."  Of course it's in the last place you look!  When you find it, you stop bloody looking, don't you?  Even if you found whatever you were looking for in the first place you looked, it would still be the last place you looked, now wouldn't it?

I can see you are highly elucidated by my ingenious logic.

Although I am not sure if a person can be elucidated.

Anyway.

Since there was left-over stew I was thinking, "Ah ha!  I can make this meal go even further by having dumplings on less stew, thus stretching the stew for two extra nights instead of just one!"

Small problem.  Stew is magic.  No matter how much liquid you think you have when you put the stew into a tupperware container, there is less when you reheat it.  Secondly, dumplings act like a lid on reheating stew, making the stew hotter under the dumplings than you may realize.  Thirdly, once you start cooking your dumplings in your stew, you can't stir your stew.

You see where this is leading.  I burned the reheated stew.  And it turns out that my husband is less than impressed with dumplings.  Biscuits, yes, he digs biscuits.  But his dismay was apparent as he pushed the dumpling around his bowl with his spoon, tapping it from time to time as if wishing it to magically become a potato, the majority of which were now cemented to the bottom of the pot by a mortar of burnt beans and dissolved carrot.  Next time, he asked, could we just have the stew as it is?  It was just fine that way, he said.

Two words: Justifiable Homicide.

I really could have used the moral support of my beloved here.  Not the cranky person who sat himself down to dinner after standing in the dinning room doorway for several seconds loudly sniffing the air.  Yes, Dear, I Burned Dinner.  Don't Make Me Get Your Slippers And Shove Them Up Your Butt.  How About THANK YOU OH MY DARLING GODDESS FOR PREPARING THIS MEAL FOR ME ON LESS THAN 5 DKK THUS LETTING ME BUY MORE RUGBRØD FOR MY LUNCH TOMORROW?!  If You Don't Appreciate Dinner, There Is Always Toast.

This morning, keen to provide a fine repast, I decided to make crepes.  I've had success with crepes in the past here. But in that post I did mention my problem with the melted butter.  I *know* I had a problem with the melted butter.  It clumps when you pour it into cold milk.  I tried mixing the batter in a different order today and it was even less successful than all of my previous attempts.  And when you use your last two eggs to make the batter, do-overs are NOT an option.  WHY DID I NOT LISTEN TO MYSELF?  "Next time I think I'll use oil" I wrote on my blog.  "USE OIL" I had scrawled in large letters across the recipe.  But I haven't tested the batter with oil.  What if it tasted weird?  Oh, it wasn't that difficult to make with melted butter, was it?  Of course not!  So I have to spend a few more minutes mixing it...  FU, AG.  FU.

On the plus side, they were edible.  None fell on the floor.  But worth the tears, the anguish, and the sore arms from beating clumpy batter?  Worth the burnt fingers as I tried to flatten out the folded and bunched up crepe piled in a small discarded heap in the pan?  Worth my husband coming in and saying, maybe he should make some toast?  No.  Nothing is worth that.  Nor was the 7-10 I would get if I beaned my boy on the head with the skillet.  Or so I kept repeating as I flipped another lumpy crepe.

"Did you make Dessert Crepes or Dinner Crepes?" people always ask.  As if the sudden realization that I made the wrong recipe at the wrong time of day would somehow explain why hot melted butter would congeal into small cold butter lumps when poured from a hot pan into a cold batter as chemistry would dictate, rather than seamlessly blending into the mix.

I made neither this morning.  I made Disaster Crepes.  And as a service to mankind I will refrain from passing on the recipe until I finally make a successful Damn Crepe.