galette is the new pie.

You heard it here first ...

{Chopped up peaches and pitted cherries.}

This weekend, in the midst of crossing things off my massive to do list (seriously, I actually crossed them off ... on the internets ... 'cause I'm cool like that) I decided to make a galette to serve after dinner with Lisa on Saturday.

I'm going to bore you with tell you a story of my first experience with galette. I first tasted one after a photo shoot for a cookbook I worked on in my first publishing job in Halifax. 'Cause, you know, it'd be a tragedy to have leftovers just lying around! (Actually it would be, because, good lord, the mice!) I didn't actually know what a galette was but I love apple pie, and it looked sort of like apple pie, so I dug right in. Oh. My. God. It was delicious and unfussy (granted it was also made, and styled, by a professional chef). I decided then that I would one day make a galette, which at the time, seemed to be a terribly complicated dessert to me.

This past Thanksgiving, I made my first pie and a few weeks ago realized that making a galette couldn't be that hard. Turns out: SO EASY. I also think that it tastes better than pie because the pastry cooks more evenly (or I just haven't mastered evenly cooked pie crust, one or the other). Anyway, follow this recipe to make the pâte brisée (I know, so fancy) and then fill it with whatever delicious fruit you have on hand (and some sugar and butter). I used cherries that were on their last legs and a peach that I, ahem, dropped on the floor by accident, so it was super bruised. Only, use half the pâte brisée, not the whole thing, like I may or may not have done by accident, because a galette doesn't really need a top, even if it is delicious that way (seriously, no one should eat that much butter).

Now that I've waxed poetic about an unfussy pie. What are y'all cooking these days? Anyone else excited that fall means having the oven on without dying of heat stroke?

{Mix some sugar into the fruit.}

{One of the things I've learned about pastry is cold, cold, cold. Keep the butter cold, keep the water cold. It'll make it really flaky. I don't know why.}

{I mix the butter into the flour with my hands which does not help with the cold rule and probably makes Julia turn over in her grave. It does seem to work though.}

{Another helpful hint: when it says let the dough rest, they mean it! Put it in the fridge and don't touch for at least 15 minutes. It really, really helps.}

{Plop the fruit right down in the middle of your rolled out pastry.}

{Throw some butter in with the fruit to make things juicy.}

{Yummers.}