Not Wrapped Too Tight

So, my siblings, our spouses, and I are throwing a fiftieth anniversary party for our parents at the end of June. We are excited to do this. We are privileged to do this. We are also a little nuts to do this in the way we are doing it, but that’s another blog post.The menu calls for me to make 300 regular crepes and a few dozen gluten-free crepes, so the second half of this week has been dubbed Crepe Week, because I am making crepes every day and I can’t think of a better name. Next week will be called Fill the Crepes Week, I suppose, unless one of you more creative types can help me out with a better name.

Beyond pouring and swirling and flipping and stacking, I am also making final lists and plans for the menu and the supplies we need and so forth for the rest of the provender, and naturally all that included a Sam’s Club run early in the week. I decided with the amount of crepes I’ll be freezing and heating, not to mention all the other prep work in the offing, that it would be prudent to buy commercial aluminum foil and plastic wrap, something I have never done before.

There it is. It makes me feel so legitimate somehow as a cook, as though the next step might be to don a chef’s toque. Or maybe since I have this great foil and plastic wrap supply I should open a cooking school or a coffee shop or something. I know! A creperie! Being the owner of commercial food wrap just seems to call for some great action beyond what I normally do in the kitchen.

Oh, but then I’d have to cook what people wanted to order instead of what I want to cook, and I’d hate that. I’d always be saying, “You don’t want a ham and cheese crepe. I have some beautiful asparagus here. I’m going to make you an asparagus, caramelized shallot, and Brie crepe. You don’t like asparagus? What are you saying??? You neanderthal — I’m not cooking for you! Get out of my restaurant!” It wouldn’t be pretty.

Getting the plastic wrap box up and operating was certainly daunting. These instructions were what greeted me when I managed to pop out the perforated piece on top. I tried and tried to slip the instructions out, but I couldn’t, and the little bit I could read warned me not to discard the cardboard they were printed on because it would have the job of “supporting” the box or some such important-sounding task.

Finally I risked pulling back some adhered side tabs, fearing all the while that I was ruining my box, and we all know how respectful one has to be of food wrap boxes — one false move and you’re doomed to months (or in this case years) of tangled, tearing, unusable plastic. The peril! In this case, I turned out to have chosen well, because once I got the cardboard instructions out of the box I could see by the helpful illustrations that I was supposed to do what I did.

There were a lot of steps.

A lot of steps. But I soldiered on.

Success! After all that I felt I should have the rest of the day off, but I pressed, ahem, further on and tested the plastic itself:

Yes, friends, that is a chocolate bar made by my own Adolescent Male #2 in his 4H candy-making project. I love 4H — what a great program that teaches life skills like leadership and public speaking and gives moms everywhere homemade candy bars.

Next issue: where will I keep these monster boxes? Above you can see my wrap and bag storage in the pantry. That’s not going to work.

Here is a potential place, if I find a new home for the pasta basket. Please ignore the chips shoved almost into the basket. Apparently my children think it makes perfect sense to store two dry carbohydrate-based foodstuffs in the same basket. Silly children.

There you go. That works!

Postscript: Ah well, it turns out to only semi-work. When those monster plastic wrap boxes instruct you to pull the plastic wrap straight up when getting a length of it, they aren’t kidding. I tried to pull mine sort-of-up and out from its position behind the foil, and it wasn’t having any of that foolishness. It looks like I’ll have to remove the whole box from the pantry to a counter every time I want to use it. Maybe if I designed a professional kitchen I could have a special waist-height holder for my professional food wrap. Maybe we could go into the candy-making business or do crepes…