21.4.13
Crepes on a Sunday night
The provisions in my fridge are getting sparser and sparser. The lettuce leaves turned dark and wilted into something almost beyond recognition. The bok choy has dried into hay-like stalks. I'm about to leave on a long trip, so making a proper food shopping excursion doesn't make much sense, and my friends are not helping by inviting me to lunches and dinner. Last time I needed a snack, I fished out a pickle from a jar and wrapped a slice of turkey breast around it. The result was tastier than you would expect. I finished off the pickles and turkey slices, which worked well because there were two of each. Then I started eating the cans that have accumulated in my cupboard. Sardines from Riga, some sort of pâté, then the sour cabbage, and finally chick peas that went into making hummus—the only other things you need are garlic, salt, olive oil and lemon. The lemon I had in the fridge was hard but still had some juice in it. Luckily I made a quick stop at the supermarket to buy an extra one just in case.After another day of running around, I forgot to eat a proper dinner again, and there was almost nothing left to snack on. My first idea was to eat some olives, but when I opened the container, there was something green on them. Then I thought to make shakshuka. I had an onion, some remnants of canned tomatoes, and most importantly, the eggs. I opened up the tomatoes only to find out that they had molded over. I thought long and hard and realised my only other viable option was to make crepes. Buckwheat crepes, for which, with a little creativity, I had all the ingredients: buckwheat flour, oil, rice milk, and the aforementioned eggs. But when I went to back to the cupboard, I could only locate the buckwheat flour. My white flour had finished. I couldn't make crepes with no white flour. Buckwheat flour doesn't bind properly, and I wasn't about to make that mistake at 11 pm on a Sunday night.
In desperation, I thought, I'm almost as tired as I am hungry. I should just go to sleep. But the hunger won out. I put on a coat and went to the supermarket. It's a simple Gristedes on a block where you wouldn't think to find a Gristedes because it's all restaurants and trendy shops for pre-teens and tourists.
There's something odd about being in Gristedes on a Sunday night at 11 pm. People are doing their shopping, but in slow, hushed tones, as if you're walking in a dream. I even dreamed a little bit myself while looking for the flour, which took a while. Gristedes is like a Minotaur's labyrinth. Take a wrong turn, you could meet a dead end, or a shorts-clad jock so absorbed in whatever's coming out of his ipod that he walks right into you. In this lofty night-dream I asked myself, what should I fill the crepes with? Cheese, of course, was the obvious answer so I went along the dairy isle, looking for some options.
Then something happened to shake me out of my reverie. The cheese options were either shredded yellow cheese, Kraft singles, or those little pressed balls covered in red wax. Where the hell was I? Isn't this New York City? Isn't it the law that all supermarkets in the village must at the very least have a decent cheese selection? I had seen bodegas in Crown Heights with a better choices than this. I touched the different cheeses, not knowing which option was worse than the next. They were all foul. I finally picked the most innocent looking crumbled Gorgonzola and went in search of a tomato to accompany it. After a series of wrong turns I found myself looking right into a case which proudly announced, "World Cheese Selection". Aha! That's where the Bries and the Bleus and the real Irish Cheddars had been hiding! I stashed the crumbled Gorgonzola somewhere, grabbed a block of cheese that looked much much much better, and rushed out.
When I got home, I found out I barely had any rice milk, so I cut the recipe in half and poured in some water, but the crepes came out great, really great, blue cheese, tomatoes and all.
posted by a girl @ 21:45
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