Home cooking skills allow you to upcycle leftovers, and create delicious meals that also save you money. Here’s an example of how crepes from a night out get a second life as dessert.

Time: 2/5
A quick and easy upgrade to leftovers

Effort: 2/5
Easy, but only because I didn’t make the crepes myself

Eat, Reheat, Recycle

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: home cooking is a skill that borders on being a superpower. Cook for yourself often enough, and you start seeing opportunities to improvise in more and more situations.

Case in point: We recently went out for Peking Duck. For the uninitiated, it’s a fancy Chinese dish that involves marinating a duck in various herbs and spices, and roasting it until the skin is exquisitely crispy. The staff brings the duck out onto the table whole, carves the crispy bits off in super thin slices, and arranges them on a nice platter.

The dinner guests wrap these thin pieces of aromatic meat and crisp skin in pillowy soft crepes, along with side dishes like cucumbers and julienned leeks, and a sweet and savoury fermented bean sauce. This delicate little burrito makes for a most delightful few bites of contrasting tastes and textures, after which the guests repeat ad nauseum until they run out of either duck or crepes.

Since every guest makes their wraps a little different, you can never tell if the duck or the crepes run out first. This time round it was the duck, which raises the question of what to do with the leftover crepes. It seemed wasteful to throw the chef’s excellent craftsmanship into the dumpster, so I took them home.

To be honest, I didn’t know what to do with them at the time. They sat in my fridge for 2 or 3 days until I got the idea to switch things up and use them in a dessert. Something like bananas foster, but in a wrap with the duck crepes.

The breakthrough came in the form of this caramel rum spread that I got on a family trip to Bali. I don’t drink or cook with alcohol near often enough to justify keeping a bottle of rum in the kitchen, but I guessed that the rum in the spread might be enough to get the job done.

And I was right. This was a great dessert to go with the Pork Loin Chops and Roasted Cabbage. The entree was low carb, which made it possible to enjoy the indulgence of crepes while we were still deep in the trenches of a fat loss diet.

I don’t mean to make this post sound too much like “genius SWR creates genius meal”, even though I was quite proud of the results. Rather, I hope that by laying out the thought process that led to me putting crepes from the duck together with the rum sauce from Bali, I can show you how experimenting in the kitchen can give old food a breath of fresh air!

Posts since the last recipe that was actually served with rice: 1

Dramatis Personae

Served 2.

Several leftover crepes

I am very fortunate to have ready-made crepes because I don’t think I have the mental bandwidth to make them from scratch on a date night. Can you buy crepes from the store? If so, I highly recommend you do so.

1 banana

Overstuffing is the enemy, and there aren’t many crepes to go around. Any other bananas in the bunch can be used to top oatmeal or yogurt bowls, added to smoothies, or become banana bread.

1 tablespoon of caramel rum spread

Very niche, and specific to my situation. Remember, this blog isn’t for recipes per se. They’re more like a cooking diary from which you can draw inspiration.

If you don’t have this but do have rum, just use a splash of that. But if not, I think you can just go without the liquor without losing too much of the bitterness if you caramelise the sugar like I do.

1 teaspoon of butter

Probably the only fat with a distinct flavour that I feel like it belongs in a dessert. You ever had olive oil cake? If so, you are a braver soul than I am – the thought makes me shudder.

2 tablespoons of sugar

I have white sugar, but I turn it brown using a trick I borrow from Taiwanese cooking: heat it in the pan until it turns into caramel. It’s the same technique that  I use to create roasty toasty flavours for Lu Rou Fan (Taiwanese stewed meat) and Three Cup Chicken.

A dash each of vanilla extract and cinnamon

I have vanilla powder, but the liquid stuff works just as well. Be careful not to add too much – you only need a little, and it can quickly become overpowering.

The same goes with cinnamon. A little bit elevates the dish, a large amount overwhelms everything else. Remember you can always add more, but it’s impossible to take away.

A tiny pinch of salt

A little goes a long way in sweet foods. The crepes were already savoury, but it helps to introduce some complexity to the banana filling instead.

Corn starch slurry, as needed

Not the most traditional way to thicken a caramel sauce, but it’s what I’m familiar with (as it’s a pretty standard move for thickening stir fry sauces) and it’s much lower in calories than cream.

Keep in mind that a sauce thickened with corn starch slurry will thicken even more as it cools, so err on the side of caution as always.

Executive summary

1. Bring water to a simmer in a large cooking vessel, and start steaming the crepes.
2. Cut the banana, and ready the ingredients.
3. Melt butter in a saucepan, and cook sugar in it until caramelised.
4. Add water, stirring the caramel to dissolve. Add rum sauce, salt, and vanilla extract.
5. Add bananas. Simmer the sauce until reduced to your liking, thickening with corn starch slurry if desired.
6. Place banana and sauce in crepes and wrap carefully.
   

Play by Play

Last things first. Crepes go on a plate, which go into a steamer setup. Steaming is a gentle way to reheat something without moving them around, which also comes in handy when cooking delicate ingredients like shrimp or scallops topped with garlicky glass noodles.

Time to brown some sugar in butter. The pinch of cinnamon goes in as well, so it can toast in the hot fat and release even more of its aromas.

The sauce will take a while, which gives me an opportunity to peel and cut a banana. I like my slices pretty thin, and I don’t mind them breaking up in the sauce. Large chunks are also harder to wrap, so keep that in mind if you want to keep them in larger pieces.

Bananas and rum sauce in, let it simmer until the fruit absorbs some of the syrup. Save the corn starch slurry until the end, to fine tune the texture.

The crepes should become soft and pliable after being warmed up in moist heat. Once they’re cool enough to handle, food them gently around a small dollop of the filling.

I arranged my crepe pockets with the creases facing down. This stops them from unfolding, as well as having the unintended side effect of the thin bottoms giving a sneak peak into what’s inside of them.

Best served warm, and consumed in one bite.

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