Gluten-Free Casein-Free Pie Crust

“I’d given up on pie until I tasted yours,” said my friend S, who recently went gluten-free and dairy-free. I think she’s exaggerating, but I admit I was pleasantly surprised to taste the GFCF strawberry-rhubarb pie I made when we gathered at her parents’ lakehouse with three other families from our Bradley childbirth class. Yes, that’s a total of five families with toddlers, plus a new baby. We’ve had gatherings and potlucks before, but this was our first on-site living and eating extravaganza. Everyone seemed to think the pie turned out pretty well. It was nice to have a large kitchen to play in and to have my son busy playing with other kids instead of using my legs as a tunnel, but I’m still always trying to do a lot of things at once, so I rarely know exactly what I’ve done.

The filling recipe will have to come later, but I’ll start with the crust. This is a simple, easy version I came up with after scouring the in-ter-nets, including Gluten-Free Girl, (whose book I look forward to reading). I’ve decided to post this recipe and whatever others seem to work fairly well both for my friend and so that maybe I can keep a little less paper around for my son to plant stickers on and possibly refine the recipe.

It worked for me, but I encourage anyone else to use their own experience and intuition to tweak as necessary. Chemistry is not my forte, so take all the additional suggestions with something like 1/16 tsp of salt.

Gluten-Free Casein-Free Pie Crust

Ingredients
1 ½ cups GF flour. I use a combination of rice and tapioca flours
¼ tsp salt
½ cup oil

(After the above): 4 Tablespoons cold (filtered) water

I used mostly coconut oil (virgin unrefined) and a little ghee (clarified butter without the milk proteins or sugars). If making a quiche or another savory dish, try olive oil. No soy-based oils or hydrogenated oils! If you can tolerate a little butter (as some otherwise dairy-free folks can), get the good pastured, grass-fed stuff and go for it.

Basic directions

1) Combine flour and salt.
2) Combine dry mixture with oil. Should get crumbles
3) Add 4 Tablespoons cold (filtered) water and mix
4) Fill a 9-inch pie pan. I honestly didn’t try to roll the dough out – just plopped it in the Pyrex and spread it out with my hands. Time is, well, time.
5) Bake in preheated oven (375 ish) for 10-15 min before removing to put in pie filling – maybe longer if the filling is very wet (like a key-lime pie or all berry with no thickener). Eyeball it. Your oven light works, right?

Optional additions (depending on recipe you’re combining this with):
Combine with dry (flour & salt):

• A little brown sugar
• A little cinnamon
• Additional salt (for a savory dish, as a counterpoint to very sweet, or to help with lack of buttery flavor)
• A little xantham gum and a tiny bit of baking soda if you’re trying to make more of a cookie-type crust.
  

Combine with wet (mixture of flour, salt and oil):

• A little molasses, agave or rice syrup
• GF vanilla flavoring
• GF almond flavoring
• GF maple flavoring (good for making graham cracker-like flavor, along with molasses)
  

Who wears short shorts?

It's time to show my knees again.

A year ago, last July 4th, a trip to a friend's pool pushed my skin irritation over the edge. The dermatologist had called it likely psoriasis, and my knees were red, itchy and flaky. It was getting bad on its own, and I was already embarrassed to wear a suit at her pool, but after the chlorine, I reached a new level of ouch.

The rest of the summer, my knees looked so raw, I wore capris all the time. If I knelt on my knees with thin pants or, at home, shorts, they seemed to catch on fire. By the fall, I'd started scratching my knees compulsively a few times a day such that they bled. It was like an addiction with an endorphin rush. I'd tried everything topical I could think of -- vitamin E, aloe, shea butter, calendula, msm, among others. Steroid cream hadn't done much, either, certainly not enough to make me feel okay about the chemicals going into my body and possibly my son's through nursing. There was an emotional toll on my son as well; he was learning to scratch himself as a nervous habit and also started coming up to scratch my knees as though he were helping me out. The pattern had to be broken.

On this Independence Day, I went back to the pool a changed woman. I was still scratching back in early April but now, other than a bruise, my knees look fine, even after the chlorine.

I could write a whole tome on this, but the short version is that my healing occurred, I believe, from work primarily on two levels: emotional/psychological/spiritual and physical (internal) with some assistance from external physical changes. I'll list these in reverse order.

Physical - External
After trying so many products, I think these two actually made a difference:

• Epicurean Ebony Tar Shea Butter Soap
• Miessence Soothing Line Skin Essentials -- cleanser, conditioner, lotion and also couperouse gel and mineral clay mask

Physical - Internal
My body is in a very different place than it was two years ago, a few months after my son was born. Among the recent changes are the following:

• A cleanse that included:
  
• Elimination of fruit and all processed food (including nut butter) and rice products for a short time, followed by limited quantities
• Daily juice of celery, parsley, garlic and lemon
• Lacto-fermented foods
• Sprouts and more raw and cooked vegetables
• Local pasture-raised eggs and more grassfed meat

• Overall more alkaline diet that includes kombucha with most meals
• Less frequent breastfeeding, less night waking
• Somewhat improved commitment to my yoga practice and increased attendance at yoga classes
• Regular exercise, including training for and running a half-marathon in June
  
• Physical therapy, acupuncture, craniosacral therapy, and Muscle Activation Technique (MAT) to heal from sprained ankle last August
  

Emotional/psychological/spiritual
Two years after my son's birth, I started to reach a place of acceptance about my c-section and a sense that it's not up to me to control everything in my life. Strategies that helped me on this journey include:

• Work with BioSET allergy elimination, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), and Byron Katie's The Work through the Center for Natural Cures
• Applied Kinesiology with chiropractic
• Work (reviewed) I previously did with Landmark Education
• Work with Bach flower essences, including Crab Apple, Gentian and Holly
• Work with Young Living Oils, including the blends Joy, Gentle Baby, and Valor
• Increased time writing
• Craniosacral therapy that included somato-emotional releases
• Reading (recalled) related to Buddhism, including Pema Chodron, and some meditation
• Reading (recalled) by Caroline Myss
  

I came to see that this health challenge was just part of a necessary process and that the itching would subside when it was time for me to be done with it. This skin problem was, at least in part, my way of processing my shame and guilt at having had to have a c-section, which gave me a sense of failure for not starting out my son's life in the drug-free, gentle way I'd hoped. Part of the reason the c-section was so jarring for me had to do with a longstanding belief -- a belief that has ancestral roots -- in the idea that something always has to be wrong with me. Going to the source to address this core belief -- through the strategies above -- helped me release my hold on this problem and its hold on me.