the saga of the gluten-free pie crust
I’m relentless.
My husband and I hosted both our families for Thanksgiving this year, and I decided I would make a gluten-free pumpkin pie.
Pumpkin pie is in the top five things that I miss most about being gluten-free (along with my mother-in-law’s dumplings and apple cider donuts).
Armed with my favorite gluten-free cookbook, Baked to Perfection, I was pretty confident. I’d made pie crust before successfully and I planned to make the crust over the weekend, freeze it for a day or two, then bake the pie the day before.
So, the Saturday before Thanksgiving I set about to make the pie crust.
Except… it would NOT come together.
I kept adding little bits of very cold water but I could not get the pastry to come together. It just kept crumbling.
Grrr. So I tossed it. I decided that I hadn’t kept the butter cold enough and would try again.
The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I remembered that I had Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free pie crust mix in the basement. So I went out to the store to buy shortening and I followed the instructions exactly.
Only the dough wouldn’t come together.
Sooo I watched a YouTube video and tried a third time with the next pack of pie crust mix. NO DICE.
Now I was starting to panic, because I really wanted pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving.
So the next morning after picking my kids up from their “half day” at 11am, I sent my husband to the store for the exact type of flour I’d had success with in the past, and I embarked on PIE CRUST #4.
And it worked. THANK GOD AND THE PIE WAS DELICIOUS.
I don't have a photo of my pumpkin pie but here's my GF blackberry pie from last summer!
This, by the way, is the exact quality that got my first book published.
I’m relentless. (SOME MIGHT SAY STUBBORN.)
I sent Catchlight out to 125 agents, all of whom declined to represent it. I put it in a drawer.
I got it out of the drawer and shopped it around indie publishers. I entered contests. I talked to people I met about it.
Then I entered a contest for the second time (without having changed a single word of the manuscript). This time, instead of not even making the final round, it won.
And the prize was a book deal.