It was a Saturday morning, I was sitting on our black stools at the peninsula of our brown, granite kitchen. I was wearing my pink pajamas with red twilling on the edges with sheep on checkered clouds embroidered on the front. This was my favorite set of pajamas that I wore until the threads started to unravel.
My Dad hands me an egg.
“You can do it, crack it”. Crackkk.
I hit it too hard and it splattered on the counter and onto my shirt.
“Dad!” I cried.
“It’s okay” he says as he runs to wet a towel and clean me up.
I try again. Crackkk. Sprekkh. Everything made it into the bowl! Including the shell. One more egg. Crackkk. Sprekkh. Only 3 shells in this time.
He hands me the cups of flour and a whisk as he microwaves the milk with butter. This step is essential to making crepes in our house: always melt the butter in the milk in the microwave – it would be sacrilegious to make it any other way.
He pours in the milk, vanilla extract and I go to town with the whisk, gently at first and then faster as the flour mixes in. I’m annoyed at all the lumps I see and try to disintegrate it against the walls of the bowls. It doesn’t work.
My Dad pulls my stool to the stove where he greases the pan with a combination of melted butter and oil – another important step to ensure the right amount of slickness. Just oil will crisp the crepes too much and provide no flavor, and only butter won’t grease them enough.
I watch him as he pours a ladle of the batter into the center of the pan in one hand and twirling the pan with his other, seamlessly coating the entire surface in an even layer forming a perfect circle. The heat is at medium high, just hot enough to cook the batter without browning it too much. We watch as we see tiny bubbles form, just like when you start cooking chapatis.
He flips it, cooks it for 10 seconds, removes it and does the next.
“Can I try?” I ask as my Dad nods his head confidently.
He twirls the pan as I pour the batter. It looked less like a circle and more like an octopus. It’s hard enough to form a circle with one person let alone with two people. I filled in the gaps with more batter – no one would know!
“Okay you try” he says.
As focused as possible, pan in one hand, batter in the other, I shakily poured the batter in trying hard to swirl it at just the right speed to form a circle. It was an oval with a tail. The one after that had too much batter and ended up with one half being too thick and the other too thin. The thin side started to brown too quickly and became crispy. They may have been far from perfect but this was the first thing I had ever cooked. I was four.
We stood there for the next 30 minutes until we used up all the batter. Mom came in the kitchen, all of us around the table. My Dad likes to make his crepes with a squeeze of lemon juice and sugar. My Mom likes hers with blueberry jam and banana. I like mine with nutella, whipped cream and strawberries. Every weekend morning was exactly like this growing up and after a couple years, my sister became a part of it too. There were multiple mornings during elementary school where my dad would invite my friends and their parents over for 7:30am crepes before school.
I brought this tradition with me to college and shared it with my roommates on occasional weekend mornings. Whenever we have people visit, you can count on there being a spread of crepes in the morning.
My parents tell me I loved crepes so much that for a whole year after this, my Dad made me crepes every single morning from ages 4 to 5. I don’t remember this but being the Leo that I am, I don’t doubt it for a second.
Here’s a recipe so you can create the same memories.
This piece was written by Rachel Castellino, founder and video producer of Funny Table Media. She is currently obsessed with Japanese tomato cold somen noodles and cold barley tea.