My relationship with pie is ... complicated?  I love making pies!  Truth be told, I enjoy making pies more than I enjoy eating them.  Making great pie can be viewed as a challenge, and serving it to friends and family is deeply satisfying:  a pie that you make from scratch is, in my humble opinion, almost infinitely better than a pie from the grocery store.  

I don't remember the first cake I made, or the first brownies.  But I vividly remember my first pie.   In my college days, a sudden snowstorm prevented my housemates and me from going home for Thanksgiving, so we improvised the holiday meal from what we had on hand.  For some reason, I was assigned the chore of making pumpkin pie.  

You could not call it an unqualified success:  the crust turned out quite odd, and the filling did not set properly.  To add injury to insult, I burned my hand taking it out of the oven.  Nevertheless, it tasted pretty good, and we enjoyed it.  I was left with the determination to make good pies.  By the time I had mastered pie crust, I was hooked.

Almost everyone has a favorite pie, and if you want to really impress someone (or improve their day by leaps and bounds), make them their favorite pie.  Years ago, my friend Mark confided a hankering for peach pie: I had to break it to him that peaches were not in season, so it would have to be made with canned peaches.  "That's fine," he said. "I'll love it."  And he did.  Now I live where the fruit stands sell wonderful local peaches, and it's the time of year when you can eat peaches to your heart's content.  So here it is: the peach pie I always wanted to make.   I hope you can share it with someone and make their day.

Notes

If you use the gluten-free pie crust recipe, this will be a gluten-free pie.

When fruit pies are warm from the oven, the filling will be very liquid.   If you want a visually appealing pie, it's best to let the pie cool to room temperature before serving.  

In the pie pictured here, I used a small cookie cutter to cut shapes out of the top pie crust.  This is a good substitute for a lattice crust, faster and less likely to fall apart when handling gluten-free pie dough.  The effort was somewhat wasted on peach pie, however, as there's not much color contrast between peaches and crust.  This is why my directions suggest cutting slits for steam instead.  

Inspiration

I started with the "Fresh Peach Pie" from The Fannie Farmer Baking Book, and improvised from there.  The idea for using cookie cutters to produce substitute for a lattice crust came from The How Can It Be Gluten-Free Cookbook.