Ham Sandwich Indicted!

Sometimes, the universe conspires so perfectly to create a weekend of such magnitude and blessings, that it is nothing short of breathtaking.  Sometimes, the love, passion, and joy of six people is so great that a seventh one decides she has to join the party.  That was the case this weekend, when I went up to Petoskey, on the far Northern tip of Michigan, to visit my very pregnant friend B, her husband, and his father and brothers that also happened to be in town. Being that we're a group of people for whom food shortages are not an option (and because I couldn't sleep at 6am that morning), I brought up a peach-cardamom coffee cake, based essentially on this Cook's Illustrated recipe from The New Best Recipe  cookbook . I should have known I had no need for such worries as a lack of baked goods, however, as B married into an amazing family of very accomplished bakers and cooks, and for dinner that first night they 'threw' together a meal of homemade focacc...

I really like it when a recipe describes something as "rustic." It's an immediate signal that whatever I'm about to produce can be casual in appearance, with flavor being a more important concern. Don't get me wrong, a skillfully latticed cherry pie (for example) is great, but sometimes, it's 8:30 at night on a Thursday and you just have to do something with those berries otherwise they're going to meet a tragic demise wasting away in your refrigerator. The NYTimes had a recipe in June for a Foraged Fruit Tart , that I had printed out for the specific reason that it was "rustic" in the best way a pie/tart recipe can be: make the dough, roll it into a circle, dump the fruit in the middle, and fold up the edges. Bake. Eat. Technically, this style of tart is called a galette, but that just seems to be fancying up something that is really quite casual. I took the tart pictured above to my coworkers, and it was very well received--it apparently made ...