The galette

Although she is in Washington, D.C., and I am here in Minnesota, my dear friend Nathalia and I have been on the same wavelength in terms of cooking this summer.

We have both been having fun trying new recipes with in-season produce, thanks to our respective CSA boxes. I've both learned a lot and gotten a bunch of inspiration from her, including last week's summer squash enchiladas. (I was eager to see what regional differences existed in our CSA boxes, but we also got to talk through what on earth we might do with garlic scapes around the same time earlier in the summer.)

Our kitchens are more than 1,000 miles apart, which is the actually the closest we've lived to each other since we graduated from college seven years ago. Our blogs are one good way to keep in touch with the daily details of each other's lives, and it has been especially fun for me to see what a marvelous cook she has become. It would be So Much Fun to live in the same city and get to cook together, but for now, we discuss from afar.

So it's nicely fitting that Nathalia was the person to introduce me to today's project: the galette. This spring, when I visited Nat and her husband in Washington, she whipped up this pretty dish that looked a lot like apple pie but easier and more fun, with a pie crust base that folds over the edges instead of completely covering the filling. (It kind of looks like pizza combined with pie, which should help you understand the draw for me, but it has even more flexibility because the filling can go sweet or savory.)

Recently, I saw a recipe for Lemony Ricotta Summer Squash Galette while flipping through Better Homes and Gardens and, with a bounty of summer squash and zucchini in this week's CSA box, I decided to try it this afternoon. I made the pie crust with guidance from Smitten Kitchen in the morning and let it chill until late afternoon, then got the zucchini, summer squash and ricotta filling moving. (I was very excited because the only ingredient I needed at the store was the ricotta, which is downright serendipitous.)

I loved the colors and shapes during the prep!

That's one medium summer squash and one zucchini. There's one more summer squash in the fridge that I'll use up later, but I didn't want to crowd the galette.

Here it is, egg-washed and ready to go into the oven.

Also, it smells like a pie while cooking in the oven but functions as dinner - a major plus in my book.

Forty minutes later, this comes out of the oven. Hello!

If you have extra summer squash and zucchinis on your hands - or heck, even if you don't - I recommend that you give this galette a try.

Natty doesn't know it (until now), but she (and her apple galette back in April) gave me the encouragement to try my hand at this recipe. It's one of a zillion reasons why I'm lucky she's my friend.