My Love-Hate Relationship With Mardi Gras

I love Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday for all you non-French speakers out there). The day before Ash Wednesday when you get one last hurrah before you fast for fourty days for Lent. I love celebrating Mardi Gras with my students. I've done something every year I've taught with my students. Sometimes we make masks and parade around the schools "throwing" candy at other classes (by "throw" I mean "gently toss not aim to kill!" kind of throw). Every year, though, I make crepes.

Crepes are French pancakes. They're so thin though, you just have to fill them. There are dinner crepes where you fill them with meats, cheeses, veggies etc. and then there are the dessert crepes. This is what we have in my classes. The kids adore spreding Nutella, jam, whipped cream and filling the crepe with fruits like strawberries, banana, blueberries and then folding them up and topping them with whipped cream and possibly even some confectioners sugar or chocolate sauce. Yum! Who would love that?

Now comes the hate part. Making these suckers is a royal pain in the behind only because they take so darn long to make one crepe per student (I have about 120 or so students...it's taking forever!). I'd love to make more than one crepe per kid, but honestly, I've been at my griddle all morning and I've managed to make 50. Although people generally think most of the things I do are insane, even I am not insane enough to make twice as many crepes.

Generally, after you make the batter; which isn't hard at all, you need to let it rest for a couple of hours. The batter also doesn't make a whole lot of crepes...well, I guess it makes a decent amount if you're making them for dessert for a family of under 6 people. When you're making them for over 100 people, you need a lot of batter and a lot of room in your fridge to not only house the many gallons of milk, many dozens of eggs, but also to hold the stockpots full of batter when you're done mixing.

Then comes my pathetic attempts to make the crepes circular in shape. What a mess I wind up making. Half the time I'm lucky if my batter doesn't run the length of my griddle, let alone getting it in a circle shape. Sometimes I manage it; most times they look like weird amoebas!

So, once the lovely crepes are made, I need to find a way to store them until Tuesday. I thought I was being clever an dividing them up on some paper plates and then sliding the paper plate into a ziplock type bag. Problem? The plate is wider than the bag. Sigh. So now I'm hoping I have enough ziplock containers big enough to get five classes worth of crepes stored and transported to school...oh, and don't forget the fridge space I'll need. Yay, me!

Crepes Batter Recipe

3 eggs

3 tablespoons sugar

pinch of salt

2 cups milk

1 cup flour

1 tablespoon oil

1. Beat eggs and add sugar and salt. Mix well.

2. Add almost all the milk, reserving some for last step. Mix well.

3. Add flour and mix well.

4. Add oil and rest of milk. Mix well.

Let batter rest at least 2 hours before cooking.

Heat a pan. Add some butter to coat the bottom of the pan.

Add a ladle full of the crepe batter and when the bottom is brown, flip over.

Brown other side and slide into a warm plate.

Continue until all batter is used up.

Spread with with nutella, jam, add your favorite berries or bananas. Fold or roll and top with chocolate sauce, whipped cream, confectioners sugar or all of the above. Enjoy and "Laissez les bons temps rouler!" :D