A Toast to the Wild Berry

Gotta love summer - fresh caught fish pan fried and finished off w/ white wine, parsley,tarragon and butter - the French way. Wild raspberries for dessert, alone, or w/ vanilla yoghurt, or cream, or ice cream. Or as my favorite - the galette - an open faced rustic tart or pie.

When you eat them alone, they are not alone - they are in company with their own sweet/tart nuance of flavor, aroma, and their history of rain, sun,extremes of heat and near frost, the birds and the bees and bears, too. A passing fox, deer, a coyote, grouse, wild turkeys and more. And finally me. Lucky me.

I raise my glass.

A Sweet Little Tart

Luscious wild red raspberries have been ripening at the rate of a pint a day for the past wk; congregated on and around an old log and brush pile on these 13 acres of Platte Lake land. The recent rains have no doubt encouraged this profusion of bloom and sweetness. My young black lab/ spitz eats them too, off the low hanging shrubs.

I have eaten them w/ cereal, plain, and with cottage cheese and w/ yoghurt and juices blended in smoothies, and also made a galette of them - a rustic free form open faced tart( pie) w/ the addition of a few domestic blueberries.

Berries and sugar is all you need, plus a pie dough crust, which I experimented with by melting the butter in a microwave, adding it to the flour, salt, sugar dry ingredients along with cold water at the end to get the desired consistency. I am kind of a lazy cook and was looking for an easier way than cutting the butter into the flour. It worked, resulting in a flaky tender crust that had enough body and strength to support a cooled slice eaten by hand. Perfect. I am a pastry lover, and fussy, and it shouldn't be too sweet.

If you asked Mona Lisa Vito( the Marissa Tomei character) in the My Cousin Vinny movie if the pie was luscious and sweet but not too sweet she would say," It wuh."

Single sheet of pie dough:
Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 cup( 1 stick) melted butter
1/2 cup cold(ice) water

Method:
Mix dry ingredients together in a bowl, add melted butter and ice water and stir with wooden spoon just enough so it is all moist - don't over miz - form into a ball, place on waxed paper, place another sheet of waxed paper on top of the dough, flatten somewhat w/ hand, and roll out w/ rolling pin so it is a couple of inches bigger than your pie pan or dish. Remove the top sheet of waxed paper and using the remaining bottom one carefully but in one motion flip the pie dough onto the surface pie pan or cookie sheet or cast iron pan or whatever you are using. Poke holes all over dough w/ a fork, add a pint of berries evenly
distributed over dough, leaving a 2" border of berry free edge, sprinkle a quarter cup sugar over berries, fold dough over berries around the perimeter, dot w/ cold butter pieces according to how much you love butter, sprinkle a little sugar on dough perimeter, and bake in a 400 degree oven for a half hour or until berries are bubbling and the crust is golden .

Eat hot right away w/ ice cream or whipped cream or sour cream, cool and then eat more until it is gone.
Method: