Crepes, They're in my blood.

While the french have many great dishes, one of the most well-known are Crepes. It is a common dish in my house. My youngest and pickiest child asks for them often. There’s something therapeutic in making them for me. Perhaps it’s because they feel nostalgic.
When I was a little girl I was fortunate enough to get to spend an entire summer with my french grandmother. She moved to the United States after meeting my grandfather while he was stationed overseas with the Air Force. She had never been to America and had to teach herself English. She would do a lot of things that I thought were strange at the time, I later would learn those things were just differences in culture. My name sounded odd layered in my grandmother's thick accent and she made things with “weird” names like Beignets, Baguettes, Crepes. She taught me odd songs in French and I would laugh after she would translate them to English and at 32 years old those songs are now the only French words I can really remember.
She would almost always cut herself a slice from a fresh baguette and layer butter over it and put a piece of fruit on her plate with it for her lunch. However, for my lunch she alternated between grilled cheese and crepes. The first time she said she was making crepes I had no idea what I was going to get. This made me nervous because I was somewhat picky and I was also very aware of the need to be polite and eat it even if I didn’t like it. As I nervously watched I became relieved. I corrected her that what she was making was called pancakes. She told me to wait and see, because they were not the same thing as pancakes. So I waited. She rolled up my crepe and I still had my doubts, a rolled up skinnier pancake is still a pancake after all. However, after taking a bite I knew I had been wrong. They definitely were not the same. I developed such a love for them that when I returned home after that summer I began requesting them from my mother. Of course, since my mom hated to cook she didn’t make them often, but she did make them from time to time and it became a “special” dinner for me. I was never truly taught by grandmother or mother how to make crepes. Although, I kind of half watched when they would make them. I don’t have their specific recipe or way of doing it embedded in me. I was nervous my first time making them, checking my memory against online recipes. At the time I attempted my first batch, the title “bad cook” would have been a compliment to my food, but I told myself my mom was just as awful with cooking and she did it well, so I can too. They came out perfect the very first time. I remember joking with my husband that the only reason I actually made edible food was because crepe making is in my blood. My grandmother passed away at the end of last year. I hadn't realized I went from making them often to not making them at all until my youngest pickiest eater made his request for dinner tonight. It made me think of myself as that little girl asking my own mother if we could please have crepes for dinner. I loved my grandmother an incredible amount but we were not as close as I would have hoped to be, but still I have that one summer full of nothing but good memories, silly french songs, and crepes.