There was a time when making pies was one of my favorite things to do, and they always looked pretty when they came out of the oven. Then I discovered I couldn’t handle gluten and all of that changed.
But now, whining about making pies because I have to use gluten free crusts is a thing of the past.
Watching cooking shows is a good thing, and I learned a trick which, in retrospect, seems obvious. However, it never occurred to me.
Gluten free pie crust dough is soft, tears if you look at it cross-eyed, and tears even when you’re being a sweet as… well, pie. Sorry. Couldn’t help myself.
So here’s the trick 🙂
I have a really cool old bread board which has concentric rings on the back that tell you the proper diameter for various sizes of pie crusts. I also have two different glass pie pans, an 8″ and a 10″.
First, cover the bread board with plastic wrap and roll out the pie dough, covered with another layer of plastic wrap. This keeps it from sticking to every surface in the kitchen, another bad habit of gluten free pie dough. Or maybe that’s because I used to throw it around out of sheer frustration?
Then remove the top layer of plastic wrap from the top of the pie dough and slip the 8″ pie plate underneath the bottom layer of the plastic wrap. Center the pie plate under the dough.
Invert the 10″ pie plate and place over the ie dough sitting atop the inverted 8″ pie plate.
Then carefully invert the two pie plates with their sandwich of pie dough and plastic wrap.
Now remove the 8″ pie plate, and then peel off the plastic wrap.
Hurray! An untorn pie crust ready to be filled. Today I had a bowl full of thawed black raspberries which had been coated with my usual mixture of sugar/cornstarch/pinch of salt/bit of ground cinnamon.
I also have a round plastic cutting board which happens to be exactly the same diameter of the top of my 10″ pie plate, and I repeated the steps to create a top pie crust.
Then I decorated the pie and popped it into the oven where it is now baking.
This is exciting. Pie is pretty much Dan’s favorite dessert and it had been such a pain to make, until today, that it had become a fairly rare event, what with all the cussing and tears. Now I’m really happy we have so much fruit from our garden in the freezer!
Another project, which I promised Dan would be completed this century.
These boxes are full of yarn and spinning fibers left from our online fiber arts store. I’m going to do a complete inventory, and then I’m going to sort the yarns and put them into marked bins so that if I want to find a yarn I can just go to the right bin and grab it out.
I thought perhaps if I can sort through one box a week and complete the inventory of that box, that later reorganizing the yarns into weight categories (lightweight, sport weight, worsted weight, heavy weight), will only take another few days but at least I’ll have a plan.
I’ll do this in my spare time. I should be able to find some of that.