Not Avocado and Cheddar Crepes

We were supposed to have avocado and cheddar crepes.

Whaddya mean "Ewwwwwwwww"? Hey! Come back here!

Lacking a certain je ne sais quoi.

Avocado and cheddar crepes are tasty! They aren't as good as brie and avocado crepes, but they're pretty damned good. The coolness and firm creaminess of the avocado counters the hot, salty oiliness of the cheese, making for a very satisfying taste experience, whether in a crepe or in a sandwich.

And avocado and cheese crepes are even better when smothered in maple syrup.  Though in all fairness even cardboard tastes awesome smothered in maple syrup.

OK.  Are we good now?  You're gonna try this at least once, right?  No?  Well, too bad, this is my blog and my food.

Anyways, all the avocados were bad despite looking firm and being bought only two days prior, so we just had cheese crepes.

The Ulterior Motives Behind My Croissants Purchase

I bought croissants for the first time in a while.  I was on my way home from the grocery store when I decided that I'd stop by the local pastry shop.  The pastries they make are OK, but their croissants are pretty damned tasty.

I used to not be able to get croissants on a Saturday.  They used to make a few in the morning and then let them run out.  Presumably this was because morons were running the place.  The front-of-house was staffed by a bunch of disinterested and dopey-looking private school girls and I assume the back-of-house was staffed by similarly disinterested people.  

But things changed recently.  Now there  are these eager young'uns at the counter who are somewhat above HS age.  They may confuse chocolate croissants with almond croissants, but at least they don't have a chit-chat about what Taylor wore yesterday to the mall while you stand there waiting for them to acknowledge your existence.  

Most importantly, I was able to secure four croissants, two chocolate croissants and two cheese danishes on a Saturday.  I also bought a caramel donut, which was a "new feature".  It was an impulse buy.  They had samples and a zillion of them on the counter, calling to me.  

Anyways.  I had the donut and half a chocolate croissant with espresso, made with my home Bialetti.  That was a fucking tasty donut!  The dough was soft, but not mushy and because it wasn't super-sweet, it countered the oozy sweet caramel insides.  It took a lot of willpower not to go back and buy a dozen of them.

Now, you might wonder how two adults and a small toddler can eat through all that flaky pastry.  Well, the answer is that I deliberately bought too many croissants so that they'll go stale and I can make Nigella's croissant pudding.   OK, I make a variation on it that doesn't involve cooking sugar (instead I just add maple syrup, because maple syrup is awesome and I live in Canada and I can get it all the time). But I'm looking forward to that in a day or two, once the croissants are nice'n'stale.  

À la recherche du pain perdu

In French, French toast is called "pain perdu" because it's made with old, stale bread (pain=bread, perdu=lost).  Spousal Unit and I are big fans of making French toast out of the stale bread hanging around the house.  Today we made French toast with some week-old sourdough bread.   

We use three eggs.  Many people will tell you to use fewer, but we find that three eggs for half a loaf works.  We also add maple syrup in the batter because a bad cook told me to do that once.

The bad cook in question was the original cook at the vegetarian place I used to frequent when I was in grad school.  She made these gawd-awful wraps and chickpea mushes that gave vegetarian food a bad name.  The only thing she made well was French toast.  One day I asked her the secret of her French toast and she said "maple syrup".  She put maple syrup in the batter.  That made the bread caramelize and gave it a woodsy-sweet taste.

She eventually left -- or was fired, I don't know.  She was replaced by this fantastic cook who turned the place around and totally made it happening.  He got rid of the wraps and added black bean burritos and hemp burgers and blueberry upside-down cake and brownies and then this local celebrity started hanging out there because he was in love with the waitress, but then she left to be a nanny somewhere and he stopped coming and then I graduated and the place was sold and it's probably totally different now.

Anyways.

Because of that first gawd-awful cook, I started adding maple syrup to my French toast batter and never looked back -- except for that time when I made Nigella Lawson's doughnut French toast, but that was because her boobs told me to.