As all cultures have their meat-filled pastries, so do all cultures, including Mamcik’s home country Lithuania, have their burritos. Nalesniki (“nah-lah-schneekee”) are crepes wrapped around a meat and vegetable filling, topped with a mushroom sauce. This recipe is time-consuming and labor-intensive, but doesn’t demand advanced skills. It also was a perfect recipe for three sisters to cook together – one making crepe batter, one making the crepes, and one filling and wrapping them.

There’s a lot of exposition and explaining here, but it’s worth it.

Filling:

• 3-4 pounds roasted beef (usually rump roast)
• About 1 cup mushrooms
• Butter
• ¼ cup cooked grated carrot
• ½ cup pan drippings or cooking water from roast beef
• Maggi

Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Season beef with pepper and salt, then place in roasting pan and roast at 500 degrees for 20 minutes. Reduce heat to 275 degrees and roast for 20 minutes per pound. Alternatively, you can boil the beef; to do so, place the beef in a large stockpot, and just cover it with water. Bring the water to a boil, then reduce to simmer and cook slowly for several hours until meat can be shredded with a fork.

Deglaze pan in which beef was roasted and reserve ½ cup drippings (or reserve at least ½ cup cooking water). Remove all fat and gristle from meat. Sauté mushrooms in butter. Grind beef with mushrooms and carrot in food grinder or processor. If using a food processor, process to a coarse grind – don’t overprocess into paste. The mix should look like a fine crumble. Add the melted butter from the mushrooms and the pan drippings while grinding – the final mix should be crumbly but moist. Season with Maggi, and add more drippings or a small amount of water if the mix looks dry.

Set aside, and start the crepes.

Crepes

(makes 6-8)

• 3 eggs
• 1 cup water
• ½ cup flour
• Dash salt
• Vegetable oil
• Parchment paper

To make crepes, combine eggs, water, flour and salt in a blender, and allow to rest for a few minutes. Spread parchment paper on counter near stove. Lightly brush oil over the surface of a nonstick 8- or 9-inch saucepan, and heat over medium.

When pan is hot, pour about ½ cup batter into it (use ⅓ cup in a smaller pan). Spread batter into a circle. As it heats, bubbles will begin to appear; when the edges begin to brown and set, gently shake the pan back and forth to see whether the crepe slides around easily. When it does, and it appears lightly browned on the bottom and firm on top, turn the pan upside down over the parchment paper and tap the pan on the counter to release.

The first one will be a mess – do not panic. Throw it out. When the batter settles, and the pans have a better coating of oil and have been hot for an extended period of time, they’ll be fine. When you run out of batter, stop and make more. Re-oil pan and repeat.

When you get better at making crepes, you can graduate to this: have two nonstick pans oiled and ready, and plenty of counter space to cool two or three crepes. Start with batter in one pan; when the bubbles begin to appear in the first, put ½ cup batter in the second. By the time the first crepe is cooked and on the counter, the second crepe should be ready to come out of its pan. However, even if you are making large quantities, make single batches of batter instead of doubling or tripling the recipe. We have found that the batter loses its fluff, or worse, starts to turn a weird color.

We repeat: do not try to double or triple the crepe batter recipe to save time.

When the cooked crepe has cooled slightly, assemble the nalesniki. Spoon 1-2 heaping teaspoons of meat into the center of the crepe (the “raw” side, which is on top), and fold bottom half of circle over the meat. Fold the right and left sides over the meat, and roll up the crepe (the “cooked” side which was on the bottom, will be on the outside). Place seam side down in a 9 x 13 baking pan or on a tray.

Don’t try to stack the crepes before they are rolled; they will stick together and you will wail at the inequities of the universe. You have plenty of time to fill and roll up one nalesniki while your next crepe is cooking.

When all the nalesniki are assembled, they can be cooked immediately or stored in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours.

Nalesniki can be served plain, or with a sauce of melted butter and sautéed mushrooms, or you can try Mamcik’s quick sauce of 2 cans of prepared beef gravy, one can of cream of mushroom soup, and ½ cup of reserved pan drippings, with Maggi seasoning to taste and milk to thin if needed (this is our go-to option; she was a magnificent cook, and if she wasn’t above using Franco-American beef gravy in a pinch, neither are we). In any case, have the sauce ready and waiting on “warm” before beginning to cook the nalesniki.

To cook the nalesniki, melt butter in a large shallow nonstick pan. Place the nalesniki in the pan seam side down and sauté them until the crepe begins to turn medium brown; turn the nalesniki over and continue until the second side is browned. Serve immediately; if the family is willing to wait until all the nalesniki are cooked, keep the nalesniki covered and warm until they’re all done. You also can put them in a 250-degree oven and cover them with foil to keep them warm. (Of course, this does not apply to the nalesniki that mysteriously break during cooking and must be sampled by the cook, in the kitchen, to ensure quality.)

from our paternal grandmother, Wanda Mlynarska Labunski, pictured here in the driveway of our grandparents’ house at 5801 Grand, holding Ania – so October/November 1950