In The Kitchen With Dan

You're in the kitchen with Dan right here on Cadre. Hello. Hello. Hello. If you're new, I want to welcome you to Cadre. It's a fantastic place where we are all committed to health and wellness and sharing knowledge with each other. So if you're new to Cadre, I want to welcome you. And if you've been around for a while, hello to you, and thanks for checking in again. I am very excited today. I'm always excited when I'm on Cadre because I get to cook and I love to cook, and I love to show you what I'm cooking.

And today I am cooking one of my favorites. It is the crepe. But I've got a couple exciting, exciting changes that I've made since I purchased a product, so I'm going to show you that, too. It's really fun, but we can always go old school still. So I've made crepes for years and years and years with a pan with batter and a pan. I think I had maybe an eight inch pan. Do eight or ten, depending on how big you want them. So this is like the eight inch and this is a ten inch. Most people, you know, use the ten inch for general, general purposes, and I would go with the smaller one just because those crepes are easier to make and they're easier to fill and eat.

But today I'm going to show you this new deal, and it's so fun. All right, so let's talk about crepe batter. You can make crepe batter savory or sweet, and the only difference is sugar. So if you are making a crepe mix, you're going to be filling your crepes with sweet things like nutella and preserves. Then you can add a little bit of sugar into the batter. If you're making savory crepes, like chicken, mushroom crepes and shrimp crepes. Oh, my gosh, there's so many. Savory are my favorite, but there's so many different fillings for crepes.

But if you're going with the savory route, you want to leave out the sugar. Really, either way, it's going to be fine. A little bit of sugar is not going to matter either way. But if you're looking for the difference between a savory crepe and a sweet crepe, sugar is the difference. Now, you can make in this batch today, I'm not using sugar at all. I'm not sure what I'm going to use them for. I don't need extra sugar in the batter because when I'm doing a sweet crepe, the stuff I'm filling it with is sweet enough.

So I kind of rambled a long time about just adding sugar in the crepe. It kind of doesn't matter, is what I wanted to say. I could have just said that, huh? So making crepe batter is so easy, and there's a bunch of different ways you. Well, there's a couple different ways you can do it. You can mix it in the bowl yourself. You can use a hand mixer. You can put it in a blender. Martha Stewart actually has a great blender recipe for crepe batter. But today we're gonna do it in the bowl. And. Excuse me, I just needed that.

We are going to, we're gonna mix it right here. And there's only a very few ingredients. So we start with one cup of flour. I'm gonna put you down here so you can see one cup of flour. And to that, we're gonna add two eggs. Too large, it says, trying to practice this whole thing, but probably isn't the place to do it. All right, now we mix up the eggs and the flour, and we're mixing those together. And by doing this, you're going to help with eliminating clumps in the crepe batter. When you mix these two elements, first your flour and your egg.

And then once you get these mixed together, the liquid ingredients will incorporate better. I think I'm gonna go with plan b. The geese are outside going, you should see the little baby geese every year. They're so cute. Until they get really big. Oh, this is a big old mess here. All right, let me get a spoon. All right. So, yeah, we're mixing the egg and the flour and incorporating those together. And then we start adding our, our liquid. Now, for our liquid, we have a half a cup of milk and a half a cup of water and two tablespoons of melted butter.

So we'll start with the milk, and we just want to incorporate it very slowly at first. And this will help. Just making sure you don't have any lumps in your batter. If you do end up with batter that's a little lumpy, you can run it through a sieve, a screen, and we'll also do our powdered sugar through that. After we're done here, I'll show you guys. All right, we're getting it going, getting it going. Incorporating ingredients. Now, the more thin it gets, the more quickly you can add the ingredients.

It's at the very first stage where you want to be sure you're, you're mixing your liquid in just a little at a time. You know, that works with a lot of things. Like if you're making a cream soup, just say you've got a can of cream of mushroom soup from Campbell's or whatever, and you're making it. If you dump all your liquid in at once, it's going to be really hard to incorporate. It'll take a long time and you'll see all these little lumps in it. Tomato soups the same way. But if you incorporate the liquid slowly at the beginning, it makes it much easier for everything to marry together.

Okay, now I've got my half a cup of water and that I could just dump in, and we are ready to give this a vigorous stir. I'm gonna get my melted butter. Get ready to dump that in. Alright, let's get this incorporated and pour in our melted butter. There you have it. All right, that's as easy as it is. One more ingredient, and that is a little bit of salt. The recipe calls for one teaspoon. I think that was pink himalayan. Any salt will do. All right, so you want to just blend this up, whisk it until combined, until you're not seeing any lumps.

Then here comes the fun part. So, like I said, I used to always make crepes in a pan, but, well, that's the only way. And then I would hear like, oh, crepe maker, this and that. And I thought, well, that's just ridiculous because crepes are so easy. You just mix your batter up and then. And then you just make them in a pan. Why would you need a crepe machine? Well, I'm about to show you why it's so cool. All right, now for the fun. Okay, about to show you the new product. This is the crepe maker from Kachina.

All it is is the tray here, the heating element here. This is so much fun. All right, get our little area set up. And here we go. The crepe maker from Cucina. You dip it in the batter and you just kind of circle it around to make sure you're getting all sides. We learned when we were making these the first time, you can kind of fill in your holes. This is so much fun. All right, now, when I first made these, I thought, well, what about flipping it like, you gotta flip it? Well, you don't. You just don't.

The one side brown so perfectly. The top. What we're looking at now is cooked, you flip it over. When you assemble the crepes, you put your filling on the light side and fold it over, and you've got this beautifully browned crepe. Now, all I did was just tip this over and tap it into the batter. And, you know, the crepe is done or getting there when it starts to flake up off the side. And that's the same when you make the crepe in the pan. If you were doing this in a pan, you'd get a ladle or, you know, a little measuring cup, about a quarter cup of batter, put it in and swirl it around in the pan until it fills up the whole space, similar to what you do with an egg.

If you were making an omelet and I forgot I was supposed to put it back on this thing, I got to talking, I'm like, why is this taking so long? Just like when you're doing with an omelet, just make sure that the batter covers the surface of the pan. And when it starts to flake up on the edges, then you know, you're in good shape. Got our smiley plate out today. So, you know, as I was getting ready for the live, I thought, you know, what do I want to talk about this week? And I thought crepes, right?

Like, crepes are really, they're really. What is the word I'm looking for? They have multiple. Multiple uses. I'm drawing a complete blank. Not flexible. Well, anyway, I wanted to talk about flexibility and expectations. Alright, so. And how the two are. And how the two are related. Alright, so back to the crate before I dive into that. So check this out. You just pull it off and there you have it. And you can see right through. That's how thin this crepe is. You can see right through to the smiley guy.

Oh, man, do I love this. All right, we'll make one more and then I'll talk some more. All right, so I thought about expectations and flexibility and how the two are related, right? So when we go into a situation and we have expected it to be this or that or the other, we are, you know, setting ourself up for disappointment if things don't go our way, if things don't go as we've expected or, you know, thought of in our minds. Right. And so the better we are about limiting our expectations, the easier time we're gonna have.

A lot of times, most of the time when there's conflict, it's because somebody had expectations that aren't being met. Sometimes those are realistic sometimes, you know, they can be communicated in a constructive way. But so often in life, we enter into situations where we expect this. We are, you know, we're walking in with a list of things we're expecting out of the situation. When things don't happen our way, it can cause upset. So trying to minimize expectations, walking into situations with setting your intention in mind.

You know, those two things alone will really help you a lot in situations where you're experiencing conflict. So just try to limit expectations. Sometimes we have expectations that are realistic, right. But maybe they're not as realistic for somebody else. And, you know, the more we can be flexible, the better things are. So I still can't remember what that has to do with crepes, but anyway, that's so funny. And this one I did flip over to cook the other side, but there you have it, you guys. The cucina crepe maker.

It is available on Amazon, and it is one fantastic way to start a day or to celebrate a special occasion. Okay, so filling, right, the easy route. You can just get preserves. I've got, you know, orange marmalade and strawberry. You can use nutella and peanut butter. You can do peanut butter and jelly, strawberry, any kind of fresh fruit. Fantastic for savory. I love seafood crepes. It's so delicate, right? Seafood scallop, shrimp, crab with a, with a really good mornay sauce or a nuberg sauce. So just really think about what you love to eat.

You could even do a sloppy Joe crepe if you wanted to. You can put anything in these. They're just a wrapper, but they can be really fancy. So to top off any of your sweet crepes and make them look really pretty, just take yourself a little screen. Put some powdered sugar in the screen, tap it over your crepes like that, and you've got a nice dusting. If you want to make a design, put down, you know, like a cookie cutter, cover it with foil, put it down and do the powdered sugar over the form. And when you pull it off, everything will be covered with sugar except what you put down some cookie cutters.

You don't need to cover because they're solid, but yeah, those kind of fun ideas. And it doesn't even have to be like a cookie cutter. You can just take something like this, put it down and do the powdered sugar around this. You pull this off, you've got this nice little unpowdered circle that you can put your fruit in on top of, you know, to accentuate what you've made a little bit of green, some mint leaf. People will be very happy to be sitting down and having crepes with you. All right? So remember, stay flexible, set your intentions, and enjoy the week ahead.

I love you guys. Thanks for checking in. And don't forget to keep checking back for everything health and wellness related, right here in Cadre. Bye.