Oooh la la!

A few months ago, I started a cooking group with some fabulous foodie friends. We rotate homes, meeting once a month, to feast on amazing dishes based on a theme. So far the themes have been Chinese New Year, North African Cuisine, Childhood Favorites and World Cup Soccer. Say what? Soccer? We're a creative bunch...the idea was to choose a dish from one of the teams in the playoffs. Germany, Italy, Japan, France and the U.S. were represented.

I was Team France. We were encouraged to wear soccer jerseys or at least don the team colors. I showed up in a French maid's outfit. Yes, I'm that kind of girl. ;0)

My culinary contribution was chocolate crepes filled with strawberries. I bought a wonderful, 8", blue steel crepe pan and perfected a great gluten-free recipe. The base is buckwheat flour. While buckwheat sounds like something we groovy gluten-intolerant people shouldn't eat, it's actually not related to wheat at all. It's a pseudocereal in the family of amaranth and the much loved (at least in my kitchen) quinoa.

That pan has been getting a lot of use in the last week...chocolate crepes for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Oooh la la, indeed!

Chocolate Crepes with Grand Marnier Strawberries and Vanilla Whipped Cream

Grand Marnier Strawberries (aka Boozey Berries)

Wash, dry and chop at least a pound of strawberries. This will be enough for about six 8" crepes. Put them in a bowl and sprinkle them with about a tablespoon of sugar. This is called mascerating and the sugar will mix with the juice from the berries and create a very flavorful strawberry, simple syrup. If you have Grand Marnier in the house, reduce the sugar by about half and pour in a splash or two of the Grand Marnier onto the strawberries and mix well. If you don't have Grand Marnier in the house, put on your shoes, go to the liquor store and buy some. ;0) Set the berries aside to mascerate at room temperature for at least an hour.

Crepe Recipe

2 eggs

2 cups whole milk

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

1/2 cup (minus 3 tablespoons) buckwheat flour

3 tablespoons good quality dutch processed dark cocoa

4 teaspoons pure cane sugar

Whisk the ingredients together, cover and let the mixture rest in the refrigerator for at least fifteen minutes.

Vanilla Whipped Cream

Whip the heavy whipping cream with good quality vanilla and a little sugar, both to taste. Did you know that if you chill your mixer bowl and beaters or wire whisk attachment in the freezer before use, you'll get a stiffer whipped cream?

Once the berries are nice and syrupy and the crepe mixture has rested a bit in the fridge, stir the mixture well before use. Brush your crepe pan with oil. Grapeseed oil is perfect for crepes because it has a high smoke point and you need the pan good and hot. Also, grapeseed oil is virtually flavorless. Olive oil wouldn't be a wise choice for a sweet dessert crepe like this because of its strong flavor. It could work for a savory crepe but may smoke, so grapeseed oil is my favorite all purpose oil.

Set your burner on medium and after a few minutes if a few drops of water sizzle when dropped on the pan, you're good to go. For an 8" pan, you need exactly 4 tablespoons of crepe mixture for a crepe that's not too thin or too thick but, as Goldilocks said, just right. Play around with the utensils in your kitchen beforehand to find a small ladle or tiny sauce pitcher or such that can hold 4 tablespoons, as you'll want to pour that amount in all at once and quickly swirl the pan for even coverage. Keep the pan on medium heat and don't walk away from the stove. Once the edges start to firm up and get crispy (after approximately two minutes) you'll want to carefully flip the crepe by using a small spatula to pry the crepe up a small section at a time. Cooking time really varies by stove and you'll get the hang of it, even if you botch up the first crepe or two. The recipe makes at least 10 or 12 crepes, so you have plenty to experiment with.

Fill the crepes with your wonderful, syrupy, boozey strawberries and top with whipped cream. A drizzle of chocolate sauce across the top wouldn't hurt either. Bon appetit!

Afterthoughts: The crepe mixture will keep in the fridge for two to three days in a covered, airtight container. The mascerated strawberries breakdown after several hours and get mushy. Pick up an extra pound of berries and prepare as detailed above right before use or try raspberries or some other fabulous concoction to go with the second round of crepes.

Foodie Fight

Many of you know what I’m talkin’ about. You’ve been fighting with food. Your body’s been battling with itself, perhaps unbeknownst to you until recently, because of what you’ve been eating. Perhaps this has resulted in allergic reactions, intolerances and aggravated auto-immune conditions.

So you've made the change because you're sick and tired of being sick and tired, having stomach problems, experiencing achy joints, feeling bloated, developing hives or acne, feeling moody, experiencing sinus problem and a whole host of other "indelicate" issues we really don't want to discuss about on a food blog. Well, welcome my friend. You are not alone. One in twenty-five Americans has food allergies. The number of people with food intolerances is even higher and those who suffer from auto-immune conditions may have far more serious problems due to what they eat.

For me, gluten is the biggest offender. Dairy, soy and corn don’t go over too well in large quantities, either. I still eat those in moderation because they don't affect me in the horrible way gluten does...and you can take the girl out of Wisconsin, but you can’t take the Wisconsin out of the girl. I just haven’t been able to completely break up with cheese or frozen custard (more on that later). So, what does a foodie who loves to bake, cook and eat do when she’s diagnosed with gluten and dairy intolerances? Well, initially I got angry. Like most changes in my life that were not my idea, I entered this new phase kicking and screaming. Well, not literally, but there was a whole lot of grumbling. But then I mustered up all my creative powers to redesign my eating habits and relationship with food and, at the risk of sounding overly dramatic, redesign my philosophy on life.

Food was wagging a war on my body, so three years ago I started fighting back with healthy ingredients, a new attitude, my computer, my library card, understanding friends who also happen to have food restrictions and/or are great cooks, and whatever else comes up along the way to help the process. And I’m astonished at how much better I feel. After just two weeks of eating gluten-free, I woke up and thought “Oh, this is what it feels like to wake up and not have a stomach ache everyday of my life!”

So, I hope you’ll join me on my continuing quest to better health and a new relationship with food. I hope you’ll find my ideas, information and recipes helpful, healthful and tasty. I hope you’ll bear with me as I continue to modify my culinary creations so that they’re yumliscious and accessible to people with all sorts of dietary restrictions and philosophies. Grab a gluten-free cookie (stay tuned for recipes) and a beverage of choice (no gluten in wine!), pull up a chair and join me!