In the kitchen with Salty

So you say you want to make something sweet for Father's Day? Oh, and you want it to be kind of fancy? Like fancy, impressive? Okay. Depending on your tolerance for butter-greased palms and boiling hot sugar syrups, you may want to try your hand at Fruit Galettes. It starts out simply at first... the recipe has less than ten ingredients and if you're like me, you think, "Eh? Simple." And if you're even more like me, you barely notice that the instructions for the pastry portion are three pages long. Yeah- it better be fancy impressive if you're gonna make me read three pages of roll, scrape, repeat.

The recipe I used came from a fantastic little read, eponymously named Tartine for the sweet little bakery in San Francisco. I chose local blackberries (picked last year in Magnolia and frozen) and cherries from the farmer's market in Ballard for the filling, with a touch of lemon zest for an added kick. And I rolled that butter and scraped that dough and flipped it in on itself to repeat the whole process a total of eight times all told. I even found a new trick to pit the cherries since that's one of the few kitchen gadgets Mr.Mr. and I have yet to acquire. If you cradle the cherry between your thumb and three fingers, anchor your opposite index finger against the other and slide the larger end of a chopstick into the stem cavity, a gentle poke is all it takes. Voila! ("And that, sweetie is how babies are made...")

And after many rounds of rolling and chilling, filling and crimping and baking and rotating, you have yourself some nicely browned fruit galettes. Now, I know this all sounds deceptively simple. And that's purposeful (what do you think I did with the other three pages of instructions??). If I spent all my time retyping recipes for all my invisible readers- I wouldn't have enough time to watch Battlestar Gallactica or Top Chef. So if this culinary challenge has your name [Invisible Reader #2] written all over it- leave a comment and I'll send you the whole darned thing. Bon apetit!