Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) (21 page)

A
fter watching an episode of Julia Child and Jacques Pepin’s PBS show,
Cooking at Home
, I’m inspired to make crêpes. I’m not sure how old Julia is during the filming of the series, but she’s definitely older than any host of a cooking show I’ve ever seen before. She often gets a bit winded just standing there talking. And yet at the same time, when she and Jacques make crêpes side by side on separate burners, she keeps up with the much younger chef, crêpe for crêpe, flipping them sans spatula and with the kind of ease and nonchalance that I have when pouring myself a bowl of cereal each morning.

The two of them show me how to make crêpes Suzette as well as a gâteau de crêpes, which is essentially a stack of crepes with some sort of filling in between each layer, the entirety of which you might cover in a chocolate sauce. Julia and Jacques stuff theirs with thin layers of jam and chopped nuts, but Julia says (and repeats) that you can fill it with whatever you like. When Jacques cuts out a wedge, revealing what must be one of the top ten prettiest slices of food in existence, I know I have to make one.

(Full disclosure: I
have
actually made one before, but I cheated, using the Kenny Shopsin method of dipping flour tortillas in a mixture of heavy cream and eggs and frying them up as a sort of crêpe-imposter. It was delicious, but it also wasn’t a true gâteau de crêpes, now was it?)

I like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s directions on how to make crêpes. For starters, he refers to them as
pancakes
—a British thing I presume—which reminds me that that’s all they are, just a French word for thin pancakes. Second, in
The River Cottage Family Cookbook
, he tells us, “Sooner or later you’re going to want to toss them. Don’t do it with the first of a batch. Wait until the pan is used to cooking the pancakes before you try to toss one.” I like the idea of waiting for the pan to be ready. And soon enough, I’ll know exactly what he means.

By the summer of 2010, Matt’s and my life together is as stable and consistent as it’s ever been. I’m working four or five days a week at the ceramics store, and while I don’t see a future there per se, it allows me the time and the freedom to cook, to post a new recipe every Sunday on Bon Appétempt, and to work through my professors’ notes on my novel. Though my thesis
passed
and I now have an MFA, I also have pages of my professors’ edits to consider before I try my hand at sending it out into the publishing world.

And though Matt did take the LSATs in the winter and he did well enough to get into some of the better law schools, when it looks like he is going to be offered a permanent position at the PR company where he’s been regularly temping for months, we decide to postpone the application process. In
his spare time, Matt has been working on his own book with Geordie, turning the fairy-tale script into a young adult novel. All the while they are still meeting with Disney to develop a new show called
Supersonic McMaverick
.

For the first time in our lives, we have figured out a way for our day jobs to support our art. For the first time in two years, we can breathe financially. And by our second anniversary, we can actually celebrate. We’re doing it—for richer or poorer!

As for Bon Appétempt, I can’t say that I have tons of readers relying on my weekly updates, but
I
rely on my weekly updates. Writing a novel can be rewarding, like solving some kind of lengthy word problem, but it can also feel like a drawn-out fool’s errand, like a bunch of moveable and deletable words on a computer screen.

The blog, on the other hand, feeds me with not just one tangible product but two. There is the food, which is undoubtedly getting better, and then there is the blog post, which I can publish by myself whenever I feel it’s ready to go out. Not to mention that the aesthetics of the site are improving, as Matt is now the official photographer.

Just as Jacques and Julia did, I brush my nonstick pan with butter and ladle the thin batter onto one side of the pan. I quickly swirl the pan around so that the batter spreads to the edges and then wait until the edges appear lacy. When I think that side has cooked enough, I double-check by pulling up the edge of the crêpe with the fork. When it becomes a bit mottled brown, I grab hold of the crêpe with my thumb and forefinger, directing it across the pan to its other side. Matt, who is standing nearby, is impressed.

“Nice work.”

But Mr. Fearnley-Whittingstall is right. After successfully cooking a little stack of crêpes via this method, I do want to toss one.

In the video, once Jacques thinks one side is cooked enough, he whacks the side of the hot pan to loosen the crepe before tossing it, but I’m not that brave. Instead I grab the pan by the handle and give it a strong jerk. When the crêpe responds by slipping around in the pan, I tell Matt, “OK, I’m gonna flip it.”

It’s a strange feeling. Though I’ve never flipped a crêpe with just the flick of my wrist before, my wrist seems to know what to do. It’s ready to go. It’s my head that hesitates, that momentarily imagines the crêpe falling onto the burner and catching fire. But fortunately, my curiosity wins out. My wrist goes for it. The crêpe is tossed and lands perfectly on its other side. I can hardly wait to do it again.

You need a lot of crêpes for a gâteau, about fifteen, and once I’ve reached the end of my batter, I feel a little Pepinesque. I’m not banging the side of the pan with the raw heel of my hand, but it no longer seems like a bad idea.

To put my own very slight twist on the recipe, I’m using apricot jam—as opposed to what appeared to be strawberry in the video—and chopped walnuts. I lay down a crêpe, follow it with a thin layer of jam followed by a spoonful or two of the nuts, and repeat. I pour chocolate sauce over the whole thing, though I heed Julia’s warning not to cover the top entirely so that you can still see the brown speckles of the uppermost pancake, declaring its status as a crêpe cake.

In
Anam Cara
:
A Book of Celtic Wisdom
, the poet and philosopher John O’Donohue writes, “Where things are moving too quickly, nothing can stabilize, gather, or grow.”

He then tells a brief story about a man exploring Africa who is on a deadline to make it to a certain destination by a certain time. The man has hired three or four native Africans to help him make this speedy journey, but after three days of intense traveling, the Africans stop. They will go no farther. The man pleads with them, telling them how important it is that he makes his deadline, but they won’t budge. After continuing to ask them why, he finally gets an answer. One of them says, “We have moved too quickly to reach here; now we need to wait to give our spirits a chance to catch up with us.”

I sometimes worry about what would have happened to Matt and me had things turned out differently, had he become a Hollywood director at age twenty-three like he’d planned. I sometimes worry about what would have happened had I not followed my impulse to make that giant chocolate peppermint cake, if it hadn’t fallen over so spectacularly, if I hadn’t started Bon Appétempt, and for the first couple of years of its life, when I would ask my mom why she refused to read it, if she had responded with something other than an indifferent: “How do you spell it again?”

Because all of these so-called failures allowed us to come up with our own definition of success.

Because all of these so-called failures gave our spirits the chance to catch up with us.

Because all of these so-called failures taught me that though writers would like readers as much as chefs would like eaters, at the end of the day, if there are none of either to be found, we can continue creating anyway just to feed ourselves.