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Crepe making means no more dusting

We “borrowed” the crepe maker months ago.

M-o-n-t-h-s.

And there it sat on the kitchen bar for weeks and weeks and weeks to the point where it needed dusting, so that didn’t exactly endear it to me.

Every time I looked at it I was reminded of two things:

1.) Better Half and I had vowed we were going to make homemade crepes.

2.) Better Half and I were failures because we had yet to make good on that vow to make homemade crepes.

Our inspiration was a post-Christmas appetite for some and wanting to have a different side dish other than plain old potatoes or buttered noodles or rice, which is nice, but boring.

Crepes typically are a Kiaski tradition at holidays, a dish to look forward to because crepes are as good as they are infrequent.

The Kiaski version is to fill them with mashed potatoes (not instant ones because that’s a sin); cottage cheese (small curd, 4 percent); finely diced onions sauteed in butter; and some seasoning (sorry, none of your beeswax.)

Announce you’re making crepes, and it elevates your status as a host and food provider. Put out some crepes, and the crowd goes crepe wild.

Every once in a while, Better Half and I would pass by the crepe maker and mention “Hey, we oughtta’ make crepes.” It was a theory that seemed hard to execute, though. A good idea if we could only remember to get the ingredients and find the gumption.

Of course, Better Half and I do everything in Kiaski time, which is a synonym for s-l-o-w.

In our world, everything is pretty much, “No Rush, Limbaugh,” as we joke to each other.

Or we adapt to suit our situation with the old Scarlett O’Hara line from “Gone With The Wind”“We’ll think about that tomorrow!”

But somewhere between winter’s end and spring’s arrival, we decided it was time to revisit the family recipe we had asked for and make like Nike and just do it.

Besides, I was getting very tired of this older style crepe maker serving as a very unattractive paperweight on the kitchen bar. And I was running out of furniture polish, too, come to think of it.

We had borrowed it from my brother-in-law Bud, the keeper of the crepe maker, the one he had used just as his mother and uncle had.

I honestly didn’t know how to operate it. I kept looking to see how it opened and realized, duhh, it doesn’t. It’s a crepe maker you hold upside down over the batter. It doesn’t open up and make a folding version.

So Better Half and I finally picked an afternoon to make crepes. After about four phone calls in 10 minutes for enlightenment, clarification and understanding, Bud the crepe master showed up at the kitchen door to offer crepe quality assurance.

It really was a lot of fun, and Better Half and I were like proud new parents with every crepe that we stacked on the plate. And we got the crepe filling and rolling process down to a science by the time we reached the 60-something mark.

We browned some in the skillet for a Kiaski taste test, later affirmed in the positive as well by our company we had made them for.

Ah, yes, Crepe success.

Better yet, my dusting days are over.

(Kiaski, a resident of Richmond, is a staff columnist and community editor for the Herald-Star and The Weirton Daily Times. She can be contacted at jkiaski@heraldstaronline.com.)

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