Why am I making Mini Blueberry Gallettes this morning?

 

Last night when I could sleep (which had very little to do with several cups of coffee and big luscious hunks of dark chocolate after 4p.m., so don’t judge). Instead of turning off my ipad after four straight hours of reading, I made a last ditch effort to find a happy thought and turned to my no fail blogger: The Pioneer Woman.  And she had just posted this delicious what she calls “Mini Blueberry Gallettes.”

 

Basically, they’re blueberry tarts.  And they’re cute (super-cute in the pictures I’m trying to follow).

 

Without prior planning, I happened to have all of the ingredients on hand, so I [originally] thought this meant today was meant to be:

 

I had just bought a couple of pints of blueberries yesterday afternoon! (At $1.19 a pint that’s better than picking!)

 

And I happened to pick up heavy whipping cream too! (Presumably for my coffee but I also got half-n-half so, it was meant to be.)

 

Aldi had a sale on frozen pie crust earlier this summer. (At 2-pack for 25 cents; even if it is cheap carbs, I couldn’t resist!)

 

My husband has been juicing lemons so we happened to have ONE!  (How many times have I passed up a wonderful recipe that called for “lemon zest” or “orange zest” because there was no way I was running up to the store for one ingredient? I also recoil at the memories of many a failed substitute made in earlier baking days in my mom’s kitchen.)

 

And there was cornstarch!  (Something I don’t usually have on hand but which was left over from a non-toxic paint project we mixed up when all the cousins came over.)

And I had recently added mint to my potted kitchen herb garden and it was high-time I used some!  (Mint has got to be the easiest thing to grow!)

And the rest is history. I preheated the oven (that my toddler managed to open for the first time earlier today, and which caused quite a commotion with a bumped noggin – I keep saying, “No MORE KITCHEN FOR LITTLE BABIES!”  But it never really seems to take.)

 

And I “may” have doubled our monthly electric bill by letting the oven pre-heat at 425 just a little longer than necessary.

 

But that said, this is how it looked in progress…with a little baby girl still running around her momma’s kitchen.

 

I kind of ran out of blueberries, even though I used the “generous” 2-cups called for in the recipe (maybe I was eating some).  So, I improvised with strawberries. Using the same juice because there was some left over in the bowl.  But then there were leftover strawberries and I felt like I couldn’t win…until I just ate the strawberries.

 

I even did the whole “egg white” thing.  But I got egg yolk everywhere trying to do it with bare hands, and then some of the yolk and shell in with the white and I hope this is OK for brushing, but it just has to be.

 

(Oh, and what exactly do you do with half an egg yolk?  Do you save it to add to the pan the next time you do scrambled eggs?  Give it to the neighbor’s cat?)

 

I used my Dollar Tree Betty Crocker silicone basting brush and sprinkled on enough sugar to cover a multitude of sins and hoped that it will.  And here they are brushed, sprinkled, and ready for the oven.

 

It doesn’t exactly look as pretty as The Pioneer Woman but that’s just because I am not The Pioneer Woman.  (I realize this is not a necessary disclaimer but I would feel a lot better if it actually was.)

 

And with the baby down for a nap, I set the timer to 15 minutes and scrubbed down my counters super fast and pulled out my good napkins so it would feel like a test kitchen when I opened the oven door and found them baked to perfection…

 

 

It took a dough knife to pry them from the baking sheet.

 

They may not look the same but my claim that they “taste the same” as the Pioneer Woman’s can never be disproved since she baked hers yesterday and I’m sure they’re all eaten by now.

 

(Although, in all fairness, the strawberry ones tasted like warm jelly sandwiches. But I’m not sure why I just told you that.)

 

It’s all in presentation though. Before my husband tastes one tonight, he’ll say: “Honey, you should be a food blogger!”  And I’ll tell him I’ve already had two offers since posting this but France is too far away.

 

And then I had a few minutes of Mommy Office Hours to delve into this post – after retrieving the missing keyboard key that had been carried to the kitchen by little hands and locating the hidden wireless mouse…which wasn’t in the ball pit after all, just under the desk.

 

And I reworked my original grandiose blog post title (“Reflective Mom Makes Mini Blueberry Gallettes JUST Like The Pioneer Woman, Only BETTER”) into something more fitting (see above)…before this little thing woke back up and got a job on the taste testing team.

 

I realized soon enough that I didn’t want “stain treat blueberry stains” on my to-do list.  Yay.  But I couldn’t save the napkin.

 

Now, if “Making Mini Blueberry Gallettes” is what I was supposed to be doing today, I’d consider it a productive kind of morning.  But it’s not, namely because I have a queue of five text messages from my husband that are reminding of this.

 

Now the kitchen is back to normal, that gooey pan has been scrubbed, the dishes dried and put away (we all excel in different areas), this blog will be posted Mommy Office Hours or not, and my errands are getting done…now.

 

Blueberry and strawberry Gallettes (the mini-kind) hot and ready!

 

Does this make you wanna come over?

 

-RM