One of the few good things the previous owners of our house left us was a thriving rhubarb patch (three patches, actually). Steve has already put up rhubarb jam and rhubarb chutney and last night I baked a Nauvoo Rhubarb Cream Pie (did not turn out so well but may have been user error), the first rhubarb pie I've ever made without strawberries (and maybe the last). I must tell you that there are few things I enjoy so much as walking out my own back door to my own rhubarb patch to pick pie innards with a small boy in wellies trailing behind me. (Although, just at the moment, a vacation with no cooking to do and no small boys might be equally enjoyable.)
Our neighbor kindly tilled up our garden plot and soon we will be transplanting our seedlings into it, disrupting The Bairn's favorite pastime of sitting in the middle of the patch with a tiny spade eating dirt. This year we're growing three types of potatoes (already in the ground), three types of tomatoes, corn, butternut squash, fennel, leeks, green and yellow beans, two types of cucumbers, zucchini, and hot and sweet peppers. We also have crab apple and pear trees and currant and gooseberry bushes already established on the property. Our basic criteria for selecting plants to grow this year went like this: (1) Is it easy to grow? (2) Does it cost a million dollars to buy in the store? If the answer to either of those was yes, it was allowed in the garden plan.
Now Steve will do all the work and I will eat the harvest.
4 comments:
Oooh, rabarber... Sounds amazing. But, before you go back to including strawberries, you may be interested in some of these: http://www.rabarberpaj.se/en/ !! I made the "best rhubarb pie"-one the other day: http://www.rabarberpaj.se/en/enough-rabarberpajen/#more-398 and served with vanilla sauce, and it was YUMM! NOTE, the english version of the recipe has translated deciliter to cup, which is very bad. I.e. all cup measurements need be divided by 2 and a bit to get the accurate amounts. The rest is translated correctly, I think... Hm, or not. I'd go to the swedish version of the site actually, and use google translate. There's a lot of gibberish on those pages. Here's the Swedish one: http://www.rabarberpaj.se/basta-rabarberpajen/#more-398
Your plan sounds like my retirement plan for food. It is to let Steve do all the work and I eat the harvest. How very grasshopperish of me. Rhubarb is the perfect garden plant. It self plants, self weeds, and cooks up into a ton of tasty goodies.
KWB
If you're looking for a new rhubarb recipe, there's a really fun website called www.sortedfood.com and they have a rhubarb crumble cake that I made a couple weeks ago. Delicious. I'll post the link below.
(Bonus: they're British and cute, so the videos are especially fun to watch)
http://sortedfood.com/#!/rhubarbcrumblecake/
--Elizabeth
Theresa--Google Translate does the conversion wrong too, but Steve says he'll do the math, because he's very excited about that recipe! (Bought the almond paste today.)
KWB--I think Steve's planning to transplant some of the rhubarb to your house. We have too much!
Elizabeth--Thanks! The rhubarb is coming out our ears, so all recommended recipes are very welcome.
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