While at Monterey Market on Saturday morning, my inner hobbit called to me. "Oooh, mushrooms! Mushrooms!" So I gathered a little bit of each variety of fresh wild mushroom available - oyster, porcini, trumpet, lobster and maitake. Sadly, there were no morels. (My inner hobbit also woke me up on Monday morning, enunciating "POE-TAY-TOE!!!" But that's a whole other story).
You see, a few days ago, I had a hankering for crepes. I wanted something besides the standard strawberry nutella crepes, so naturally, I figured on using cheese as a part of the filling, and I adore mushrooms and cheese together. So you see...
The next morning, after borrowing Tiffany's crepe cookbook, I broke out my crepe pan, and whipped up a sweet butter batter and a buckwheat batter.
After carmelizing a couple chopped shallots in clarified butter and olive oil, I added some minced garlic cloves, then the mushrooms (denser ones, like porcinis, first, and lighter ones, like maitakes last), and sauteed them until they softened, seasoning with white pepper and kosher salt. I added a dash of red wine, and as an afterthought, threw in some fresh parsley and spinich leaves, leaving them in long enough to wilt. I filled a butter crepe with this mixture and stuffed a few slices of gruyere in, and took a bite. Wow! It was like eating vegetarian foie gras. Next time, I may add sherry and cream in the filling. Instead of Gruyere, I might use Comte. Anne and I polished off the wild mushroom filling, but my crepe craving was not yet satiated. It was time for more experimentation.
One of my favorite summer dishes is a caprese salad - fresh mozarella, tomatoes, and basil. I thought it'd make a nice filling for crepes. I took as many different varieties of heirloom cherry tomatoes as I could find (tasting them all to make sure they were ripe), cut them in half, and tossed them with kosher salt, extra virgin olive oil and fresh basil. I filled a butter crepe with a slice of fresh mozzarella from my local Italian deli (Scalise's) and a scoop of the tomato salad. And I was right... it was excellent. It was also good with the buckwheat crepe. One of the things that always bothered me about caprese salad was that the tomato juices and olive oil is left at the bottom of the plate. By wrapping it in a crepe, those lovely juices don't go to waste. Next time, I may use fresh water buffalo mozzarella instead. We were getting full, but it was time for dessert.
I'd never heard of using goat cheese in a sweet dish before, so naturally, when I saw the recipe in Tiffany's book, my curiousity was piqued. You take soft, rindless goat cheese (I used Cypress Grove Fromage Blanc) and mix it with grated orange zest and superfine sugar to taste. I also folded in some creme fraiche to make it creamier. Then, I spooned blobs of it on buckwheat crepes, with slices of broiled figs and topped it all off with a dab of white honey and a few raspberries. It was sinfully good. The orange zest heightened the tanginess of the goat cheese, and the richness of the figs married well with the creaminess of the goat cheese. The raspberries gave a little juicy zip. I think that mascarpone will substitute easily for either the creme fraiche or the goat cheese.
I would have liked to make a concotion similar to croque monsiur - filled with ham and gruyere, topped with bechamel, then browned in the oven, but I have to lie down and have a coronary right now. "But what a glorious death that would be!!!"