Adventure: Blintzes

These lovely concoctions are blintzes, which we made for the first time Sunday. Basically, they are crepes with a cheese-based filling inside. It reminded me of the cheese-filled pastas at cheap Italian restaurants.

In other words, tasty.

Carl and I love crepes, so when faced with the prospect of filling a crepe with cheese, we were excited.

We had a recipe, but, as usual, ended up improvising. Turns out, farmer's cheese just isn't a staple food item for us. It's a type of cottage cheese from which most of the liquid has been pressed out, according to my handy Food Lover's Companion.

Okay, we said, we're hungry. What DO we have? The answer was Neufchatel, a softer type of cream cheese. Not the same, but it has worked quite well in creamy eggs recipes before, so we tried it.

At first, as Carl blended the cheese with a couple of eggs, it looked like it could be a disaster. But, the eggs helped the mixture firm up considerably once we cooked it, and the soft cheese gave the filling a nice texture.

Meanwhile, I was making the crepes. I inherited/claimed a crepe pan from my mom minutes before it was consigned to the garage sale box several years ago. She has no idea how much I have used that pan. It's a metal pan with some sort of coating that makes it extraordinarily non-stick. It fries beautiful crepes.

Once the crepes and the filling are both cooked, you put some filling in the middle of the crepe and fold it up like a burrito. Then, you fry it again until it crisps up a bit.

We topped ours with various jams, our favorites being apricot, which brought out the tartness of the lemon zest in the filling, and a jalapeno-blueberry that Carl puts on everything.

As always, we made too many even though we cut the recipe by a third. But, not to worry, you can re-fry them again the next morning. They were just as good today topped with the strawberries we froze last spring!

Blintzes

Crepes:
3 eggs
1 3/4 c milk
1 c flour
4 tbsn melted butter
Pinch of salt

Mix with a hand-mixer until smooth.
Pour about 1/4 of a cup of batter into a medium-hot non-stick pan, making sure to tilt the pan a bit to spread the batter out as thin as possible. Cook until set (this batter doesn't bubble as much as pancake batter, so watch it closely), then flip and cook just until slightly browned (literally 20 or 30 seconds).

Filling:
1 8-oz package Neufchatel cheese
2 eggs
3 tbsn powdered sugar (or a little less)
Zest of one lemon
Cinnamon (how much do you like cinnamon? Add that much.)

Mix together, then cook like scrambled eggs, until the mixture thickens. It will look a bit like Ricotta cheese.
Spoon the mixture into the center of the crepes, and fold like a burrito.
Brush a little egg white onto the last fold, and fry in a hot buttered skillet, folded side down first, until crisp.
Top with jam, jelly, preserves or fresh fruit or whatever else you think would be good.

You can alter the recipe by adding herbs instead of the powdered sugar, lemon zest and cinnamon, to make it more savory instead of sweet.

To warm them back up, just re-fry in a buttered, non-stick skillet. I used a slightly lower temperature so as to warm the filling without burning the outside.