Summer stains my hands with blackberries and all is forgiven.

My favorite kitchen activity is baking. I particularly love crispy, buttery doughs and juicy fillings and sweet-tart pairings, and, predictably, all those things usually amount to pie. And the best pie ingredients are found in the summer, when fruit muscles out all the leafy greens and root vegetables at the markets and piles of sweet, juicy, colorful, ripe summer fruits suddenly burst onto the scene. But I never want to dedicate any of my summer fruit to a pie, preferring to slice it open and eat it as soon as it hits its peak ripeness. Cooking any of it only seems justified if there's such an excess that it couldn't all be eaten fresh without getting a massive stomach ache. So, in order to create such an excess and get my pie, I went out to the country with two of my foodie friends to go fruit picking.

To ensure the best of all worlds, we found a farm with both pit fruits and berries, collecting several pounds of peaches and nectarines and huge handfuls of blackberries.



It was wonderful to get outside this hot, cement city for a few hours (although the farm was plenty hot as well) and to be surrounded by greenery and orchards and fruits and bugs and all those things that us city people usually refer to as "nature" despite the obvious construction, maintenance, and care that goes into farming.

We weren't the only ones enjoying the soft fruit and the cool shade at the farm. I really love interesting, non-human-blood-sucking insects, almost as much as I love peaches.

After a few sweat-soaked hours in the sun, we each came away with a huge bag of peaches and a wealth of blackberries, which will, over the next few days, make their way into a galette, some white wine, and my mouth.

In fact, some already have.