Galette's Budget

This past weekend I was invited out to a friend's cabin on Big Lake to celebrate the melting of the last vestiges of ice and the pulling-out of the boats and hammocks from the winter shed.

Puck and I were both invited.

To say an earnest thank you in a way that would survive the drive to Big Lake, I decided to bake a galette and set off to New Sagaya with Puck (he likes to be tied up next to the door and basque in the attentions of the cashiers and shoppers while I peruse the aisles) to buy the ingredients. There were apples, but that seemed to staid for such a bright, warm morning. There were oranges, but that seemed too citrus for a barbeque next to a recently melted Alaskan lake. And there were mangoes, from the Phillipines, which seemed....Well, it tempted me to relive my Brazil days by buying a sack of them, propping myself up in some sunny perch, and making a morning out of "chupar"ing mangoes, which means they seemed too nostalgic for the humble magnitude of a friend's cabin in a contemporary adventure.

So I picked up a sack of "freshly imported" pluots.

The first shock was the cost: $25 for the fruit alone, $50 total. (I had to buy cream and sour cream and a sack of organic flour, some fancy sugar and, because there were no cheap ones that day, a package of "fresh" Meyer lemons. And Puck was due for a new bag of Yummy Chummy salmon treats - so I bought him two bags. This sun - it inspires high living and generous times.)

The second rose from the research: pluot's aren't imported - they are a domestic ambition to merge plums and apricots.

But they are good. They were "fresh."

And one know that he or she is solidly on the path of a life well led when they can show up at a friend's Alaskan cabin, with the sun shining, the lake melted, the geese honking, the dog in tow, and bearing a dainty galette of pluot baked in a well-loved cast-iron skillet.