Three-Cheese Blintzes with Apple Topping

A warm welcome to all the new Kissing the Cook followers!


Back in the 60’s, an enormously popular ad campaign assured us that it was ok for people of any culture to eat Levy’s Jewish Rye Bread. Today, it is in that same spirit of culinary inclusion that I give you Three-Cheese Blintzes with Apple Topping, along with my complete assurance that you can enjoy them regardless of your heritage or beliefs.


Blintzes, for anyone unfamiliar with them, are a delicious take on crepes that, although often associated with Jewish cuisine, are actually more broadly eastern  European. (You’ll sometimes even find them on good diner menus, alongside meat loaf, open-face turkey sandwiches, and 24-hour breakfasts.)  Many fillings are available but blintzes are most often filled with a sweet cheese mixture made with cream cheese and either farmer cheese, cottage cheese or, in more modern versions, ricotta. The three-cheese recipe below uses a combination of cream cheese, farmer cheese and cottage cheese. (While ricotta certainly can be used, being of Russian extraction I went with the cheeses that more directly address the blintz’s eastern European origins. My grandmother, originally from Kiev, used cream cheese and cottage cheese in hers.) It’s worth noting that my wife, who does not like cottage cheese or farmer cheese, likes these blintzes very much!




The crepes I used are the sour cream crepes I posted a while back. Click here for the recipe, or use your own favorite crepe recipe.


Aside from three-cheese filling, this recipe also varies from the usual blintz preparation in another important way. Blintzes are normally cooked twice: once to cook the crepe, and once to fry or bake the filled blintz to brown its outside. (Those recipes generally include beaten eggs in the filling, which makes the frying or baking a necessary step.) In my version, there are no eggs in the filling; the frying/baking is replaced by simply warming the finished blintzes, leaving the outside cooked, but not overly browned.  Again, it’s the way the ones I grew up eating were made. Topped with a delicious apple topping and some confectioner’s sugar, they not only can be a great dessert, but a wonderful (and just the right bit naughty) main dish as well.


A note about the topping: I selected apples because they’re available year round. If you want to make your topping with seasonal fruit, using the same general method as described below for the apples, it should work just as well. (I confess my one reservation about the apples is that they don’t add enough color to the appearance of the dish.)


The following recipe makes 6 ten-inch crepes.
Make 6 crepes, lightly cooked (see separate recipe), and set aside to cool.


For the filling, combine ½ pound farmer cheese, 1 cup low fat cottage cheese, 8 ounces softened low fat cream cheese, 3/8 cup sugar, 1/8 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 tsp salt, and the zest of ½ lemon. Cover and refrigerate while you prepare the topping.


For the topping, put 1/3 cup sugar and the juice of ½ lemon, into a saucepan, and stir until the juice is distributed and the sugar is dissolved. Add ½ teaspoon kosher salt; a pinch of ground nutmeg; and 5 large red delicious apples, peeled, cored and chopped into ¼” pieces, and turn the heat on very low. Cook until the apples are softened but not mushy. Put the topping aside and let it cool.


To prepare the blintzes, lay a crepe out flat and put about 1/3 cup of cheese filling half-way between the center-line and edge nearest you. Fold the edge nearest you over the filling, then fold in the left and right sides, then roll the crepe away from you to form the blintz, folding the sides in again if necessary. Repeat until all the blintzes are made.


To serve, top each blintz with some of the apple mixture, then heat gently until warm but not hot. Sprinkle some confectioner’s sugar on the plate as a garnish, then put a warm blintz with apple topping on the plate. Garnish the topping with a bit of confectioner’s sugar. Serve warm.
This is special dish I really hope you’ll try and enjoy.


For a cookbook-style, notebook-ready copy of this recipe, just ask in a comment or e-mail and it will be sent from me to you!


Till next week, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)

Oh Crepe!

Ok, I admit it. I messed up.

Normally I'm fairly rigorous about my mise-en-place, that French cooking term which translates, roughly, to "Exactly how dumb would you have to be to start cooking without checking first if you have all your ingredients?" (It does lose something in the translation.)

A couple of weekends ago, my vision of a perfect-50's-television-family Sunday morning breakfast of freshly made peach crepes came crashing back to reality when, part way through mixing the batter, I found I didn't have the milk called for in the recipe. Rummaging through the refrigerator, the closest thing to milk I could find was sour cream. Hardly an ideal substitute, but it's my firm belief that if an idea is the only one you have, it doesn't matter much if it's good or bad. (MacGyver would be so proud.)

As you might expect, the sour cream made for a much thicker batter than would the milk. If you've ever made crepes, you know that, while they're not at all hard to make, the thickness/thinness of the batter is critical. I found that increasing the amount of water called for in the original recipe brought the batter back to its intended thickness, while still allowing the nice flavor added by the sour cream to come through. The disaster for which breakfast was originally headed was, I am happy to report, avoided. It turned out so well that the sour-cream version has now become my go-to crepe recipe.

Crepes, of course, are one of the great, versatile foods. Fill them with fruit for breakfast, with meat for dinner; I've even heard of filling them with lunch meat and cheese, similar to a wrap, for lunch. Remember, it's your crepe. Have fun with it! (My son did try using peanut butter and it was terrible. Even crepes, it would seem, have their limits.)

For the filling, a peach-compote of sorts was easy to make using an approach that will probably seem familiar to anyone who has ever made fruit jam.


To make about 8 crepes, combine 1 cup of all-purpose flour, ¼ teaspoon of salt, 2 tablespoons of butter substitute (melted), 2 egg-substitute eggs, 1 cup of low-fat sour cream and 1/2 cup of water in a bowl and mix well with an electric hand mixer on high. Add additional water, ¼ cup at a time, until the batter is the consistency of heavy cream. Cover with plastic wrap and let rest in the refrigerator for 1-2 hours.

After the batter has finished resting, heat a non-stick sauté pan over low heat. When it's heated, remove it from the stove, melt about a teaspoon of butter substitute in it, and add about ¼ cup of the batter. (Unlike pancakes, crepes are very thin.) Swirl the batter around to cover the surface of the pan, put it back on the stove and increase the heat to medium. (I recently saw one of my favorite tv chefs, Michael Chiarello, add a teaspoon of toasted chopped hazelnuts to the batter at this point. What a great idea!) When the crepe is browned on the bottom and firm enough to be flipped (usually about two minutes, but keep an eye on it), flip the crepe or use a spatula and your fingers (carefully!) to turn it over and cook it on the opposite side until it has the desired brownness. (If you're new at flipping, don't be discouraged if the first few flips don't work out. It's really the only challenging part of making a crepe, and it does get much better with just a little practice. The first time I made crepes I had to throw out the first three or four attempts. Stay with it. And this is a case where a good pan really does make a difference.) Repeat the process until all the batter is used, rebuttering the pan after each crepe, and stacking the cooked crepes as they finish. Keeping the stack covered with a clean towel to prevent them from drying out.

Of course, even good crepes need a nice filling.


For the filling, combine in a medium saucepan 1-1/2 cups of sugar and the juice and zest of 1 lemon. Heat it over very low heat, stirring often, until the mixture is melted. (This should take a few minutes.)

Once the sugar mixture is melted, add 6 peaches, sliced into eighths, ¼ tsp ground nutmeg, and 1 tablespoon of butter substitute, and increase the heat to medium. Cook until the peaches are soft and the liquid is reduced. Turn off heat and let the peach mixture rest to allow the liquid to thicken. Fill the crepes, roll them up, sprinkle them with a little confectioner's sugar, and serve warm.

(An equally nice apple filling can be made by using apples instead of peaches, and 1/2 tsp of ground cinnamon along with the nutmeg. I used golden delicious and it was delicious, but experiment with whatever your favorite apple is.)


After you've filled and folded over the crepe, don't forget to sprinkle confectioner's sugar on top!

Till next week, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)