I am not a baker.  I am not even a cook.  These last eight years, since the birth of Margaret, I have let food preparation serve singularly utilitarian ends.  I noticed early on that Margaret would rather play with me after work than watch me cook.  Likewise, I would rather spend time with her than spend time cooking.  So it went.  Then, with two children at sponge-like developmental ages, I began thinking of meals as learning opportunities: carbohydrates, proteins, fruits, vegetables, and fats.  These are the building blocks of our meals.  I wanted the girls to understand this concept and to develop awareness of which bites were which.  Once, when we went to a paint your own pottery studio for a school assignment (M had read A Single Shard and was learning about Chinese pottery and celadon glazes), I bought three oversized baby food plates on a whim.  The plates were divided into three sections, similar to the USDA My Plate illustration.  Showing the girls what I was doing, I painted the biggest section green for fruits and vegetables, the next one orange for carbs, and the final section brown for protein. (Yes, I had fun choosing colors and hues; I like crafting.)  The girls chose their own colors for their three sections, and we spent a merry hour painting together.  After they were fired and returned to us, we’ve been using those plates for two years.  Sometimes dinner can’t be so neatly separated into three sections, but more often than not, if I’m the parent who is not at work–it can.

“Girls, what do you want our fruits and vegetables to be tonight for dinner,” I ask, head in the refrigerator. “We have a head of broccoli, some carrots, and some green beans.”

“Carrot sticks!” Caroline yells, “And nothing else!”

“We need one more,” I reply.

“Fine, apple slices too.”

Despite the fact that these are the fruits and vegetables in her lunch every day that week–and most weeks, I agree.  It is, after all, 6:30, and I want to be done with dinner by 7.

“And what for carbohydrate?”

“Bread,” shouts Margaret.

“Pasta,” chimes Caroline.

“Tonight, bread with olive oil,” I arbitrate.  “And what for protein?  Veggie burger, hummus, salmon?”

“Hummus,” replies Caroline.

“That will do.  Who wants to peel the carrots?”  And dinner is on the table in ten minutes.

When people wonder how I work and still spend time with my kids, I want to share the secret of not cooking.  It’s a beautiful thing.  We eat sliced cucumbers, cherry tomatoes off the vine outside, and lots of fresh bread from Nantucket Bakery.  No one’s complaining.  Over the course of a relaxed week, I might grill some fish, steam some broccoli, boil pasta, even make pesto by throwing parmesan, pecans, olive oil, and basil from our garden into the cuisinart–but nothing takes me longer than 15 minutes.  Five ingredients is about my limit, and we eat a lot of fruits and vegetables raw. (My other secret is that Steve is a self-proclaimed and territorial expert dish washer and grocery shopper.)

So, that’s the context for yesterday.  What, we wondered, should we do on our first day of our new life in Utrecht?  I just wanted to walk around all day.  The girls wanted to see their new school.  It wasn’t raining (yet), so we set off to walk the winding route to their new school in order to see how long it would take us.  Turns out, although we traversed two bridges over canals, one railroad, and a petting zoo, it wasn’t far.  We headed home another route (always curious if there’s a better way), and our foot path along the railroad track took us by a private vegetable garden, complete with pecking hens, across another small canal, and by a construction site whose fence was lined with blackberry bushes in full fruit.  In fact, the blackberry bushes were most laden just beyond the barrier keeping humans from falling into the canal.

Steve was undeterred.

He climbed the fence, squeezed through the barrier, and picked berries along the dangerously steep wall between canal and construction site.  The girls, of course, wanted to come too.

“I wish I had something to put these in,” Steve mused, while giving us what he picked.  Because all of this bounty was only about two hundred yards (and across three canals) from our house, it wasn’t long before we were home and Steve found two canisters in the pantry. (As of yet the house’s contents are still a treasure hunt.)

Back on the footpath by the railroad track, we set to work picking berries.  As usual, I looked around for alternatives to the act that involved danger.  I found another bush accessible from the bridge and held the branch for Caroline to pick clean.  I also started thinking about what we would do with all of these berries.  Steve, as anyone who knows him is aware, sees picking fruit as a chance to get every last one, risk/benefit ratio be damned.  I knew we would go home with more than we could eat raw, even with the best yogurt that Europe has to offer.

Baking came to mind, which is a sign to me that something new has begun. Specifically, flaky, buttery crust came to mind.  That said, baking a pie did not come to mind.  Juggling a don’t-rip-it top crust, handling that much dough in general, is still beyond my ability and interest.   But a galette–a crust with edges merely pinched up roughly to hold the fruit–that sounded perfect.

Willing to forfeit the fruit-picking competition before even getting in the game, I returned home with Caroline to search for “blackberry galette” on the IPad.  Google gave me a bounty of choices, and I knew immediately which one I wanted to make.

Although I am not a baker or a chef, I’m related to women who read cookbooks for pleasure.  My sister Florida told me once that I’d really enjoy reading Nigella Lawson’s prose.  The intro to her recipe had me at “free-form” and sealed the deal at “rebelling”:

This is really a free-form pizza-like tart, which I made for the first time while we were doing the photography for How To Be A Domestic Goddess. We happened to have some polenta pastry left over and some spare blackberries in the fridge and I, suddenly rebelling against the planning and rule-following necessary to get all the food photographed, played around.  (http://www.nigella.com/recipes/view/blackberry-galette-151)

The mention of cornmeal made my mouth water.  Back in college, there was a bakery in Glen Ellen called Spice and Easy that made the most amazing blackberry cornmeal muffins.  It was worth a jog from Wheaton to Glen Ellen and home again carrying a waxed paper bag awkwardly in one’s hand just to have a Spice and Easy muffin.  At my ten year college reunion, I almost wept to see the storefront occupied by a Starbucks.

It took us two trips to the store and the effortless help of a grocery stocker (who was doubtful that his impeccable English was good enough) to locate cornmeal.  Thanks to the first trip, we can also now cook things with cornstarch.

It took us several minutes of engineering experimentation to assemble a small food processor from the melange of parts in the drawer.

I was set.

When I asked the girls if they would like to help me make a blackberry galette, Margaret replied that “cooking is like a chore.” This particular something new hasn’t dawned in her yet.

Steve, ever generous, asked if I’d like to make two–one to give as hospitality to our neighbors.  Sure I can.

Alone in the kitchen area while the girls practiced headstands on the couch ten feet away, I diced cold butter and pulsed it into the dry ingredients.

I divided and wrapped the dough in “cling-form” and refrigerated the two small disks.  I did the dishes.  Steve helped me figure out how to navigate the digital oven display to preheat.  I pulled the first packet from the fridge and found it sticky and in need of additional flour to roll out.  “Needs to be colder,” I thought, and put the second one in the freezer while I worked the first.

With one galette waiting to bake on the windowsill, I went for the second dough disk, only to find it frozen solid.  First mistake.

It warmed pretty quickly in my hands and I did better this time by leaving the saran wrap between the dough and the rolling pin, forming the crust directly on the baking paper that the recipe called for and that I was delighted to find in the drawer.

With both galettes filled and pinched, I popped them in the oven, only to realize once I relaxed that I had forgotten to sprinkle the requisite tablespoon of sugar to the top of the second one.  Second mistake.

Like the keep-it-simple-stupid cook that I am, I got the spoonful, opened the oven, and ever so carefully tried to sprinkle the lot without getting burned.  Most of the sugar ended up in two piles on the tart, but good enough.   Give the kids those pieces.

We ate dinner–a lovely salmon simmered in korma.  Steve had been concocting while I baked.  (In the absence of a wife who cooks, my man has taught himself.)  As we dished up seconds, I wondered why the timer on the oven hadn’t gone off.  The galettes were only supposed to bake for 20 minutes.

Upon inspection, they appeared to have been merely warming, rather than baking, during our dinner.  Warming isn’t good for butter-based crusts.  The butter, shall we say, kind of melts.  The digital oven must have turned off when I opened the door to apply the last tablespoonful of sugar.  Third mistake.

After applying reason then sheer volume of persistent button punching to the digital oven display, I still had no idea how to get the oven back up to temperature.  I applied my when-in-doubt-reboot computer strategy to the appliance and tried a different setting on the picture wheel not in my language.  Another twenty minutes gave us slightly flat, whoops I lost some juice, blackberry cornmeal tart. Would Nigella be proud?

All I can say is that I really enjoyed it.  After the girls’ baths, we indulged in dessert, and I decided that the second galette was really not visually attractive enough to share with a neighbor.  We gave them a bowl of raw berries instead.

Let’s be realistic; that seems like an authentic gift.