Further adventures in gluten-free baking

I didn't really have much interest in gluten-free baking when I first got my celiac diagnosis. Too fiddly, too expensive; and just the thought of bread made me feel a little ill.

Fast-forward 7 months: I went to London, found lots of GF products, came home disgruntled that the US had so few in comparison. And then the new Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef cookbook came out.

So far, I've made the baked eggs, the waffles, and the chocolate peanut-butter brownies. The waffles didn't turn out well; but I think that has more to do with my unfamiliarity with waffles than anything else. Tonight, I made the pizza crust, which is in the book as a cracker recipe.

I wonder if the scale I got recently* is a little off, because the book shows both grams and cups, and the volume of my measurements looked like it was more than it ought to be. But hey, all in proportion, right? And the upshot was that I had enough for this and for this.

The pizza is topped with a caramelized onion and shallot, a sliced Arkansas Black apple, an Apple-Chardonnay sausage from Trader Joe's, and some grated Gouda. Turned out deliciously, though next time, I want to find a more traditionally savory sausage (my choices were sweet apple, apple-chardonnay, and jalapeno.

I was really pleased with the crackers, maybe because I was able to roll them thin enough that they really do feel like crackers, not just thin bread. Mind you, I kept them in the oven for about 18 minutes -- first 10, then 5, then 1, 1, 1. That's a little longer than the recipe suggests, but it's fine if you keep a close eye on them.

A lot of the rosemary that I'd pressed in fell off when I broke the crackers, so I need to press harder next time (I was a bit nervous, never having made crackers before.) Next time, though, I'm going to make tomato-basil-garlic.

* I can hardly believe I've waited this long to get a scale. It's not that it's more precise for recipes, though it is - it's that it's so much easier than fiddling around with measuring cups. Do you know how many powdered, dry ingredients I've spilled while trying to level them out with a knife? Too many. Now I put a plastic container on the scale, zero it out, and dump things in gently until I get to the right amount. So. Much. Faster.