Blintzes

Back in August, while we were moving into our new place, I had this crazy idea to enter a cooking competition over at the Something Awful Goons with Spoons forums.  Melisa was not impressed as our house looked ridiculous!

I did it anyway.

My original plan was to basically copy and paste this big in-depth post I made on the SA forums for their competition.  Unfortunately it appears that since I was lazy and waited so long to write this up the post has been put into the archives and I can't see it anymore :( So instead I bring you lots of pictures and whatever I can remember.

The competition was for non professionals to make some sort of breakfast item from scratch.  I tried to think of something that I had had in my childhood that wasn't super common and maybe had some sort of Jewish roots to it and I came up with making Blintzes, which I had never done before and hadn't eaten in years.  Melisa had never had any either so that was a nice bonus.  A blintz is basically a French style Crepe with some filling in it lightly fried and I figured, how hard could it be?  Well it wasn't too hard but it was pretty involving and did take a while.  After scouring cooking books and the Internet for a while I finally came up with 2 recipes I was happy with (both made by people's grandmothers) and ended up combining them to create a slightly different recipe that I thought would maximize the tastes from both.

Step 1 was to assembly the crepe ingredients:

We have 4 eggs, 4 cups of milk, 2 1/2 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of salt, and butter for frying.  First the Eggs are beaten

and then blended with the milk

and then mixed with the salt and flower (I accidentally almost used kosher salt, which would NOT have combined well, luckily I had pulled out the box of table salt by the time I needed to use it)

Once that is all mixed up nicely, you want it to be super smooth, you've got your crepe batter!  Next step is to ladle it out on a hot pan with some butter in it and start frying these babies up!

You want to pour a little bit of batter into the pan and then roll the pan around to make a thin crepe.  Fry the crepes only until they are just done, it's important not to brown them.  They must stay soft enough to roll them easily later.  Thin and soft:

This is what happens when you forget to butter the pan back up : (not to worry, you should have lots of batter, enough to make 15 or so blintzes)

Next assemble the ingredients for the filling.  I used 1 egg, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1/2 cup of sugar, 1 lb of pressed cottage cheese, 1/2 lb of cream cheese, 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon and 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla.

Mix the sugar with the egg, than mix in the dried cottage cheese and cream cheese, and than the cinnamon and vanilla.  The process follows:

When it's all combined the result should be a nice creamy cheese mixture like so:

Perfect for filling crepes with!  First place a crepe down.  Take a couple spoonfulls of filling and place it on in the lower half of the crepe. Fold the bottom on top of the filling, fold the 2 sides in, and than roll the crepe up.  This is the way you roll a burrito and is the traditional way to serve a blintz.

I wound up with quite a few blintzes :D

Now comes the most crucial part where a ordinary filled crepe becomes a blintz!  Fry them heavily in butter.  Oh Jewish food, so fatty.  Lube up a pan with lots of butter and then lay the blintzes down.  Fry them on medium-low heat until both sides are golden brown and delicious.

The finished collection of delicious blintzes! (seasonal fresh cherries are optional):

Finally plate a couple blintzes, put a dollop of sour cream on each and enjoy!

Delicious Blintz cross shot!