Flourless to Stop Him by Nancy J. Parra Read Free Book Online Page A

to the radio is old-fashioned these days, but I like the homey feel of Christmas music and the sound of the local news.
    At least they weren’t giving the farm report on this station. While I didn’t need it, quite a few of my customers still got up and listened to the report. It was part of living in the country, surrounded by farms and ranches.
    I took out the dough that I prepped the night before and made donuts and rolled pastries. There was a nice rhythm to baking. It was almost like a dance. Most of the doughwas made ahead so that all I had to do in the early morning hours was bake, cool, and frost to fill my counter. While those batches baked, I made a couple dozen big muffins. More batches came out of the oven and went on cooling racks while fresh batches went into the oven.
    I had three batches of gluten-free rolls and breads to make. A couple of customers came in for bread on Tuesday and I had a daily order of ten sub rolls for the deli down the street. That order had been a coup for me. With the help of handsome rancher Sam Greenbaum, I had managed to convince the deli owner to add gluten-free choices to his menu.
    So far he’d been happy with the rise in demand. I bit my bottom lip and kneaded the first bowl of dough. Sure, the demand might simply be from people’s curiosity and experimentation with eating gluten-free, but for those of us who
had
to eat gluten-free, it was nice to have options. Since he’d already had gluten-free versions of deli meats and cheeses, the bread was the only missing ingredient for fast lunches.
    My thoughts turned to the impending visit of my cousin Mindy McCree. I was one of fifty-two of Grandma Ruth’s grandkids and even more great-grandkids. The members of my family tended to identify themselves by their birth number. I’m number two of six. Mindy was number seven of twelve. My uncle Alfred had twelve children. Six with his first wife, Betty, who had died in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. Then he had married my aunt Helen, who gave him six more children. Mindy was the oldest of Helen’s girls and about ten years younger than me.
    She lived in New York City and had spent her twenties traveling Europe on scholarships. Last I heard she was in law school and had been hired by some quasi-famous law firm. Grandma was proudest of her grandkids who took up the family cause of higher education. Not that she wasn’t proud of me and my bakery. She simply liked to point outthat I could be a lifetime Mensa member, too, if I only put my mind to it and took the test.
    I had enough to do keeping my bakery going; the last thing I needed was to prove my intelligence level. Besides, baking gluten-free was a creative challenge that kept me busy. Let my cousins be Mensa members and college professors. There was nothing wrong with my keeping the homestead as a base for the family. Was there?
    After I had baked the morning dough, I started in on the daily breads. Today I created tiny sub rolls and placed them on a greased cookie sheet, then placed them in the proofer to rise. Next I made four loaves of white sandwich bread and three loaves of potato bread. Once I completed the usual morning baked goods, I concentrated on cookies. Christmastime was the season for cookie exchanges at schools and churches and clubs. Most women worked full-time and didn’t have time to bake cookies—especially gluten-free cookies, so they relied on me to have a wide assortment available for their exchange offerings.
    Today’s cookies were pistachio thumbprints with cream filling and chocolate drizzle. Then there were usual chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin along with spumoni cookies with layers of pistachio, cherry, and vanilla. Next were pinwheels—a favorite of my father’s father, a robust man with Popeye’s strong forearms and a wicked mutter. If you listened carefully, Grandpa would say the most hilarious things. Most people today didn’t take the time to listen.
    Grandpa Henry had been kept