Pancake Day - a traditional Leftover Tuesday

Last Tuesday was Shrove Tuesday - otherwise known as Pancake Day or Fat Tuesday'. It has long been a great day for left overs - people made pancakes to use up all the rich ingredients they couldn't eat during Lent. Lent is the period between Ash Wednesday and Easter, where in many Christian traditions some form of fasting takes place. Any excuse for pancakes, I say.

In our house, it was a great excuse to use up some left overs in the freezer, and a good excuse to join Leftover Tuesday, hosted by Rachel at Rachel's Bite. The leftovers in question were some cooked chicken (from my last batch of stock) and some homemade cream of mushroom soup. I thought we were the only weirdo's in the world who would make such a thing. I don't think I'd ever eaten mushroom by itself before, though it featured often in my first cooking adventures (things like tuna casserole). And it only ever arrived in a can. But Ryan saw a recipe in Donna Hay one day, so we made it. And I've recently discovered we aren't the only ones - tiger fish at Teczcape has a great recipe too.

But back to Tuesday. I made up a generic crepe recipe (there's a couple on www.taste.com.au if you don't have one), and while it was sitting I threw an onion and some garlic in a pan. When it was all nicely translucent, I added the mushroom soup and the chicken, and let it simmer until it looked like dinner. I took it off the heat and stirred through some baby spinach.

Looked appetizing, didn't it? It smelt much better. Ryan made the crepes - he's much better at flipping things than me. I rolled the chicken mix up in the crepes, then heated them through in the oven, with some grated cheese on top. The final product looked pretty good.

Crepes are great like that, you can wrap up just about anything, and they make it so much more interesting. And they don't taste too bad either...