Fall Pear Galette

I thought for sure I would make a savory galette (and I will be making the carmelized onion and butternut squash recipe from Smitten Kitchen at some point) but when I stumbled on this recipe on Cooking Light it was love at first sight. Pears, cheese, caramel. Need I say more?
The recipe itself said to use a pre-made refrigerated pie crust but where's the challenge in that? No. I must make my own. I pulled out my handy Betty Crocker Cookbook and found a recipe in there that I have used before. Problem being, I didn't have enough Crisco so I had to make the oil-based crust and well...it just wasn't the same. It was super-crumbly, tough to roll out and just looked plain sad. Luckily, galette does not need to be pretty. Rustic, I believe was the proper adjective for a galette. My crust was rustic looking. It looked much better with a layer of cheddar cheese on it (what doesn't look better when covered in cheese, right)
I peeled, cored and sliced up 5 bosc pears and tossed them in nutmeg and lemon juice. Then I added a little flour. WAY too many pears! Three would have been plenty. There is no way I could have piled all those pears on my sad little crust and had anything to fold up on the edges. If I had paid attention to the comments on the Cooking Light website, I would have known this. Live and learn. So I put on as many as I could while being able to pinch the edges of the crust up enough to hold everything together. Popped it in a 400 degree oven for about 20-25 minutes, let it cool a bit and then made up some caramel on the stove to pour over the top.
To my surprise, the crust cooked up nicely and was perfectly flaky. The cheese and pears combo is a nice one cold and even better when the pears are baked and sweetened on top of melted gooey cheese. Caramel drizzle? Can't really ever go wrong there. The only thing I wished I had was a little vanilla ice cream with it. The warm/cold collision would have made it even better.

Posted by -colleen