Golden Scallion Crepes and Dipping Sauce

I love talking about good food. The details, minutia, and subtleties of what makes particular ingredients so good is the talk I enjoy. As we all know, when you start with the best ingredients, you’ll end up with the best meals. This is exactly the path taken in the recipes in David Tanis Market Cooking: Recipes and Revelations, Ingredient by Ingredient, and I received a review copy. Whether he’s writing about heirloom beans, the fleeting season for perfect tomatoes, or the “vast and remarkable difference between the taste of conventional factory chicken eggs and that of those purchased at a farmers’ market,” it’s the details about the ingredients that matter here. Once you’ve gathered the best you can find, the rest is easy. The recipes aren’t difficult, but they are all devoted to made-from-scratch cooking with instructions for homemade mayonnaise and yogurt to name two. In the recipe for Cucumbers in Yogurt, he explains that commercial Greek yogurt available today is too creamy and bland with a lack of acidity. By making your own, you can control the flavor by letting it ferment longer. The recipes are presented one starring ingredient at a time with varied flavor influences. Among the cauliflower dishes, there’s Seared Cauliflower with Anchovy, Lemon, and Capers and Indian Panfried Cauliflower. For winter squash, there’s Hubbard Squash with Parmesan and Brown Butter and Sake-Steamed Kabocha with Miso. I’ve made the Glazed Shitake Mushrooms with Bok Choy and Sesame, and it’s a nice mix of spicy and well-seasoned shitakes over simply steamed greens. My favorite part of the book is near the end with The Art of Seasoning. There’s a section about chiles that has inspired me to grab as many from our local farms as I can now that the season is at an end and roast and freeze them. I also have my eye on the recipe for Taqueria Pickles with carrots, jalapenos, onion, and garlic. Next time I have a bunch of fresh, lovely carrots, I’ll be deciding between North African Carrot Salad with Preserved Lemon and Roasted Coconut Carrots with cilantro and mint. To start cooking, I flipped to the beginning for the Alliums United chapter. I had some green onions from the farmers’ market, and Golden Scallion Crepes sounded like a great way to use them. 

The crepes themselves are actually vegan with no eggs or dairy. The dipping sauce does contain fish sauce though. For the crepes, the batter was made with rice flour, and I used brown rice flour, ground turmeric, salt, and water. It was whisked together and left to sit for one hour. I cooked the crepes in coconut oil in a small skillet. The batter needs to be stirred well before ladling about one half cup into the hot pan. It does spatter a bit in the oil. The batter needs a couple of minutes to cook and set, and sliced scallions were added on top while cooking. Now, I had a little difficulty with flipping the crepes. They wanted to stick to the pan despite the oil. I loosened all around the edges with a spatula and carefully moved the spatula to the center of the crepe to completely loosen and flip. Still, a couple of crepes ended up broken. The dipping sauce was a mix of thinly sliced chiles, minced garlic, grated ginger, lime juice, a pinch of sugar, and fish sauce. To serve, bean sprouts, grated carrots, mint, and basil were added before folding each crepe in half. Lettuce was served on the side for picking up the crepes. 

The crepes are a simple, tasty vehicle to convey all the fresh, bright flavors of vegetables and herbs and the zip of the dipping sauce. They become like a handheld salad with the lettuce used to wrap the crepes before dipping. I could go on and on about the flavors of the fresh chiles and just-snipped herbs, but there’s much better talk of good food and recipes to go with it in this book. 

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