When I go to expos with my book, it generally means skipping lunch. Stopping to eat would mean that the booth goes unmanned, generally when there is plenty of traffic to be missed, which essentially defeates the purpose of being there in the first place. That's ok. On all but the longest days, I don't even notice, since the excitement and constant interaction with new people tends to make the hours fly by.
At the last expo though, the first day was a long one. I had just enough time between people to recognize reall hunger bubbling up. A very cheerful young woman from another booth came bouncing by and ascertained that we authors would not be getting lunch. If this were a fairy tale, she would be the lovely, deserving, Rose Red. I supposed that would make me the dwarf with her beard caught in the tree, stuck as I was in my booth, and needing a little rescue. Huh. Why am I never the ingenue, even in my own story? Oh well. Dwarf I was.
Our Rose Red, with all the sincere, helpful spirit of her fairytale counterpart, stole back to the booth she was working and swiftly returned with a couple slices of that company's gf pizza (with the usual rice plus starch based crust) for me and a snack for another author as well. If you know anything about me at all, you know how I feel about rice flour and the horrifying things it does to texture. In short it's not pretty and I am adamantly opposed to the GF industry's long standing reliance on inferior ingredients. See, I do sound like a querulous dwarf, don't I? But at the time, I put my food standards aside and gratefully accepted the offering. I was hungry, and she was kind, and at that moment the whole thing was lovely.
But, it was still an expo. I snuck nibbles of the pizza between chats with attendees, whenever I had an odd, unengaged moment. I was grateful for the warm bits of food finding their way into my belly. The dwarf wins a quasi freedom. Except of course that the warm, fresh pizza soon became cool and then room temperature pizza, and as you might expect, the stolen nibbles became harder and harder to chew. Finally, after a longer than average stretch of constant talking with attendees and selling and signing books, I snuck a last bite of pizza that had gone so hard once cooled that I broke a molar when I bit down on it. As in actually cracked it down into the root and the severed chunk of tooth had to be worked out of the gum, and I'm cringing now talking about it so I'm gonna stop. Rice flour strikes again. Damn you Rose Red and your ironically cruel kindness. Ow. The dwarf emerges free, but broken, and not entirely as grateful as our heroine might wish.
So a cautionary tale it is. Never eat cold rice crust pizza. Or better yet, don't eat crappy foods made with rice flour at all. Either way this is why, querulous dwarf as I may be, I generally get to eat way better baked goods than other gf'ers, because I will not bake or write a recipe with rice flour. So at least at home, I'm in no danger of breaking teeth. (Insert advertisement for my baking book, here. ;-)
Ps. Yes, this is an entirely true story, except the part about me having a beard. I'm just not that hairy. And no, I will not tell you which company's pizza it was that I broke a tooth on. It could have been almost any mainstream GF pizza, since the formulas are all so similar and they all achieve a nearly rock like state once they've been out of the oven for an hour or so. It is an industry wide problem. And damn it, she was being nice! I'm not going to say anything that will get our heroine into trouble with her employer. Even as a dwarf, I'm just not that mean.
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