Eat Up Strawberries Now!

Somebody came to my house today, opened the fridge, saw a telltale stack of sheets of wax paper and hollered, "Crepes! I'm eating them all!"

Not so fast there, sister. You're gonna have to fight me for those.

I'll bet you are busy this month, looking for ways to enjoy strawberries. Around here, we let everybody else do the shortcake thing while we eat ours with crepes. (Oh, and we've discovered that they're heavenly when dipped in Nutella. What? you ask. The strawberries? Or the crepes? Well, both. I can't decide which is more heavenly.)

CREPES CHANTILLY

Crepes (below)
3/4 cup chilled whipping cream
1/4 cup powdered sugar
3/4 cup sliced fresh strawberries
Powdered sugar

Prepare Crepes. Beat whipping cream and 1/4 cup powdered sugar in chilled bowl until stiff. Fold in strawberries. Spoon about 2 TB of the strawberry mixture onto each crepe; roll up. Place 2 crepes seam sides down on each dessert plate; sprinkle with powdered sugar. Serves 6, about 340 cals. each.

CREPES

1 1/2 cups flour
1 TB sugar
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
2 cups milk
2 eggs
2 TB margarine, melted
1/2 tsp. vanilla

Mix flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Stir in remaining ingredients. Beat with hand beater until smooth. Lightly butter 6- to 8-inch skillet; heat over medium heat until bubbly. Pour scant 1/4 cup of the batter into skillet; immediately rotate skillet until thin film covers bottom.

Cook until light brown. Run wide spatula around edge to loosen; turn and cook other side until light brown. Stack crepes, placing waxed paper between each. Keep covered.

Makes 12 crepes (but my last batch made 16-18) at 105 cals. each.

Recipes come from my very spattered Betty Crocker Cookbook.

Other good filling are: applesauce, mint chocolate chip ice cream, nutella & bananas, pudding, jam. I'm sure you can think up more.

As for the Finished Book Pile, we have today War Against Parents by Sylvia Hewlett and Cornel West. You can use this book to fire yourself up before you attend a feisty school board meeting. Or you can just read it to make you want to crawl back in bed and hide under the covers. Either way, it offers a lot of its information in percentages, i.e. "90% of poor children don't get x, y and z" or "78% of working parents say they have a hard time meeting A B & C."

They describe how the GI Bill created a golden age for parents. Assistance with education and home loans was a great help for families. Unfortunately, a few societal changes have wiped out all the advantages those GIs enjoyed.

I was especially steamed by reading how companies lay off scads of people to boost their profits and stock prices, then give out-of-sight salaries and bonuses to their executives. In the same year. This is a most immoral practice, in my view.

Hewlett and West offer up a Parents' Bill of Rights, things like a living wage and parental leave.

It's a great set of ideas but, in the end, the authors fail to account for things like backlash and simple human will. For instance, we can compel companies to offer several weeks of paid parental leave, but what's to stop them from deciding to take their jobs offshore, where they don't have to fund such expensive measures?

Or, you can declare schools a drug-free zone, but there's always somebody who loves to be sneaky, carrying their drugs right past that drug-free zone sign.

Or, how about another idea of Hewlett and West's: unwed mothers should be "forced" to live with more experienced mothers, who will show them how to raise a child properly. Where are you going to find women who will rise to the occasion? I'm an experienced mother, and you don't see me stepping up.

Still, the authors try their best and you might enjoy their book.