Hello, Rhubarb Tuesday

Yesterday I finally got around to baking with the rhubarb harvested over the weekend, plus some rhubarb serendipitously stumbled upon while out for a walk; we strolled past a tiny house on Phinney Hill, and sitting there in a pot were half a dozen ruby-red rhubarb stalks with a sign that said "Free Rhubarb."

This being Seattle, one might think that a sign reading "Free Rhubarb" referred to a wrongly incarcerated pit bull or the like, but no. It really did mean, "Here. I have a lot of rhubarb. Take some."

In our household, there is never such a thing as too much rhubarb, which is why we grow it both in the backyard and in our P-Patch. As a plant, it's pretty when you look at it up close, with its crimson stalks and tightly curled new stems. The leaves, those famously toxic leaves, are huge green platters, often growing to nearly two feet across. Best of all, it's low maintenance.

Unfolding leaves among stalks

Perhaps because its leaves are poisonous, a rhubarb plant also seems like something of a curmudgeon. Chard, which also has colorful stalks and green spinach-like leaves, just seems cheerful. But rhubarb's a bit sullen. Maybe this impression stems from the time I dug up a big rhubarb plant to move it to a better spot in the garden.

The stalks grow from a thick underground stem called a rhizome. The big plant I dug up had an equally hefty rhizome, which was as orange as a sweet potato, with gnarled roots grasping in all directions.

I really felt as if I were digging up a very angry mandrake root and so heaved it into its new spot as fast as I could; it looked like something from a fairy tale that shouldn't be dug up, ever. Like this thing:

You'd think I'd have a grudge against rhubarb, since one of the pet rabbits I had as a kid died from eating it; he'd gone for a romp in the yard and did a Mr. MacGregor's Garden, slipping in among the vegetables and sampling the rhubarb leaves. (Then again, maybe he'd just realized that he was called Tiffany, a name I gave him when we thought he was a girl. Until he fathered a litter of baby rabbits, that is.)

But rhubarb is so scrumptiously tart and smacks up so deliciously against sweet ingredients in a recipe that all is forgiven. (Sorry, Tiff.) A 1949 cookbook I have declares, "Rhubarb, though it cannot rightly be called a fruit, is one of the most refreshing of plants."

(Maybe it was fate that led me to live in Washington State, which is the nation's leading rhubarb producer with about 60 percent of the crop. Nearby Sumner, Washington, proclaims itself as the Rhubarb Pie Capital of the World. Beat that!)

 

Favorite recipes include strawberry-rhubarb pie with a crumb topping--not for nothing is rhubarb known as "pie plant." Rhubarb crisp and rhubarb applesauce also can't be beat. Another favorite is rhubarb coffee cake. This recipe is adapted from one in the cookbook The Joy of Rhubarb by Theresa Millang.

(Rhubarb, incidentally, is also the name of the first pony my horse-mad daughter ever rode. Though she didn't hop on him the first time he stood patiently waiting for her at Remlinger Farms. Oh, no. I urged her on by saying "Rhubarb really wants to carry you!"--ignoring Rhubarb's equine version of "yeah, right"--but my 3-year-old would have none of it. She glowered at me and said in a low voice, "YOU ride the pony.")

Rhubarb Coffee Cake
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups sugar

Doesn't look like much but tastes amazing.

2 eggs
1 cup sour cream or 1 cup plain or vanilla  yogurt
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
pinch of salt
2 cups chopped rhubarb

Topping:
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1 Tb flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1 Tb butter, softened

1. Preheat oven to 350. Grease a 13 x 9 baking pan. (Ha, I just noticed the book says to grease a 13 x 9 "square" baking pan. I challenge you to find such a thing.)
2. Beat butter and sugar til smooth.
3. Beat in eggs, sour cream or yogurt, and vanilla.
4. In separate bowl, mix dry ingredients, then fold them into the wet ingredients.
5. Add rhubarb and stir, then plop it all into the baking dish.
6. Cut the topping ingredients together either in a food processor or with a pastry blender until they resemble coarse crumbs, then sprinkle over the batter.
7. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes or until a fork comes out clean.

Cake Wrecks, Ultra-Yellow Labs, and Cat-a-Pull-Its

The author in a Zen-like
Becky Home-Ecky cake-
frosting moment. This is
a deceptive sort of calm.

The past few weeks have felt like one of those dreams in which you suddenly find that all your belongings have, for some unknown reason, been placed outside as if you are being evicted, and passers-by are examining them in wonder, picking them up and putting them down, always with the prowling threat that somebody might take something, and it's your job to run around and try to gather everything up and bring it back in the house, only you can't because people are constantly trying to catch your attention like you're a sales clerk during the annual Filene's Basement Running of the Brides. Plus whenever you try to use your phone, you keep misdialing the number, again and again, until you finally get it right but then the person at the other end can't hear you.

Which is to say, the past few weeks have been much like those of any other mom trying to balance a tray full of Responsibilities over her head while navigating her way through a restaurant crowded with people snapping their fingers, unexpectedly flinging an arm or shoving a chair into a pathway, and spilling their beverages.

And all that prologue is to justify a totally random posting of pictures. (Can something be a prologue if it is also pretty much the epilogue? I don't know. Discuss amongst yourselves.)

First off is The Cake.


Behold, Cake Rex.


When my family gathered for Easter this year, we decided to celebrate a host of birthdays as well, because during our year of mourning nobody really felt much like celebrating anything.

The celebration of five birthdays requires an extraordinary cake. So I baked and constructed a four-layer tower of a cake, slathering it with homemade icing that I tried to dye purple but which came out more of a lurid pink.Such confection perfection clearly needed to be set upon a worthy throne, so I hauled out the jadeite Martha Stewart cake stand.

The cake stand had done something weird a few years ago. It was sitting in the china cabinet, supposedly content with its lot, while I sat in the living room, minding my own business, reading a book. Suddenly I heard a loud clunk.

The cats were riveted in front of the cabinet, staring in horror, so I knew just where to look for the origin of the mysterious sound. And there stood my cake stand--or rather, half a cake stand. A huge chunk of the plate had sheared off along some hidden fault line, without anybody or anything touching it. Anything that a normal person (or cat) could hear, see, smell, or touch, that is.

I wrote to the catalog company that had sold me the cake plate, but they were Not Helpful. In fact, they told me they were not responsible for the plate because the catalog was now out of business (correlation, causation, anyone?) and they couldn't tell me who'd manufactured the stand, either. So I glued the thing  together and stuck it back in the china cabinet.

It seemed sturdy enough when I set the giant cake on it. When I sliced the cake into quarters, releasing some inner tension inside it, everybody gasped as each quarter leaned sideways, threatening to fall off the stand. Clearly each Leaning Tower of Piece-a-Cake needed to be sliced rapidly for serving, so I quickly bisected one of the quarters.

That's when the cake stand sheared in two again and the entire cake sprawled across the table. Cake Rex had become a contender for Cake Wrecks.

Waste not, want not. We wanted cake. We ate it anyway.

Other holiday festivity included discovering that our yellow Lab was even yellower than usual:

This is what happens when a teenaged girl discovers that the stamens of stargazer lilies brought in for Easter produce dusty gold pollen that works as a dye when rubbed on a surface.

Django, meanwhile, discovered a roll of ribbon just within reach on the basement stairs if he stuck his whole arm underneath the basement door to snag the end of the ribbon with one claw. He did his best to drag it to the water bowl to dunk it, but though the ribbon cooperated with him for most of its length, the roller it was on would not squeeze under the door, and so he was frustrated in not being able to achieve his goal.

Home Cooking: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Cookbooks line the shelves in my kitchen, and recipes clipped from magazines form slippery, teetering piles on the dining-room table. Which is kind of funny considering that 99 percent of the time, like many a home cook in charge of feeding the family, I resort to the same tried-and-true recipes (or tired-and-true, in the case of some of them).

Add to this the fact that one family member (She Who Shall Not Be Named) is not on speaking terms with onions, peppers, celery, tomatoes (if they're not in sauce form), greens (if not food-processored into specks and blended into soup or sauce), lamb, tofu, most fish other than salmon, nuts, and...oh, anything she's not "in the mood for" on a given day, and the menu shrinks even more.

Still, one gives it the old college try now and then, with its roster of hits and misses. Hence the good, the bad, and the ugly of home cooking.


The Good:

A cake. Rarely is a cake Bad or Ugly (though, when it comes to Bad, I can remember a disastrous cheesecake baked with Sweet & Low made by my German grandmother's roommate, the mean Mrs. Schulkopf, whom my dad kept mistakenly-on-purpose referring to as Mrs. Holzkopf, or "wooden head"...and as for Ugly, look no farther than Cake Wrecks).

Good is the very essence of this simple Bundt cake, which not only tasted delicious but also obligingly slipped out of an intricate Nordic Ware pan with all its peaks and valleys intact. Anyone who has ever begged, pleaded, and wheedled a Bundt cake to come out of its pan will appreciate the simple prettiness of this baked good.

Usually half the cake comes out with a plop, leaving the rest to be pried out with a knife. I once had to blow-dry the outside of a Bundt pan to get the cake out and since it was going to attend an auction to be at the dessert table, many repairs with frosting and powdered sugar were required after it stopped sulking and crept out onto the serving plate.

After struggling with unsticking cakes stuck in nonstick pans (even resorting to thoroughly greasing the dratted things with butter and Crisco and liberal lashings of flour), I finally got in touch with Nordic Ware (which still actually employs people in the United States to answer its emails, people who are free to depart from a script and really chat with you). A lovely spokeswoman there informed me that Pam baking spray (the oil and flour one) is the only way to go. It worked a treat. Plus, she sent me a free nonstick pan to compensate for my frustration, something I certainly didn't ask for or expect. Wow! Now that's customer service.


The Bad:

The Bad was born of ultimate thrift and planning on my part.

There were a lot of heels from whole-grain loaves of bread kicking around in plastic bags in the bread drawer. In this household, these heels would remain in the bread drawer yea, verily, unto eternity if I, apparently the only one with opposable thumbs, did not pick them up and put them into the food compost bin (or resign myself to weary morning after weary morning of having toasted heels of bread for breakfast).

So I decided to be Becky Home-Eccy and dry them in the oven to make bread crumbs. I'd done it before. What could be simpler? (Though the last time I dried bread in the oven, She Who Shall Not Be Named opened the oven the next day, puzzled over the dried slabs, and then just threw them away. In this case, "throwing away" was unwanted but accomplished. Why? Why? But I digress.)

Unfortunately, I heated them the eensiest bit too long. Oh well, they're bread crumbs; who cares. I decided to use the lot when I industriously made two meat loaves a week later, using my mom's old recipe but substituting ground pork for beef, as I always do. The proportions of bread crumbs to meat weren't exactly as dictated by the recipe, but meat loaf is forgiving, right? And look! How thrifty! And I can freeze all those leftovers for future meals!

Well, meat loaf is forgiving...up to a point. The taste of over-toasted, very strong-tasting whole wheat  bread crumbs overpowered everything else, and the meat loaf was dry, to boot. Or, as my family felt, "should be booted"--into the trash. My daughter took one bite and, being of unvarnished editorial opinions, shouted, "Yuk! Ugh! Bleh!" My husband, being British, stiff-upper-lip, and understated, merely said that he preferred my "other recipe," but quietly ate his meal with lots of ketchup.

I jammed the leftovers into the freezer, distraught at the thought of wasting all that food. And--shhh, don't tell--pulled it out a week later, shoved it all into the food processor, and went through the ridiculous process of turning meat loaf back into ground pork. Then I mixed it all with two bottles of Prego traditional pasta sauce, heated it up, and served it on spaghetti. Nobody was the wiser; they thought it was Bolognese sauce and came back for seconds. Shhh.


The Ugly:
The Ugly is so Ugly I cannot share the pictures of it, and in fact I deleted the images from my computer because they were so horrific. I am happy to say, however, that the Ugly was also very Delicious.

It was a Beef Wellington made from a recipe in Jamie Oliver's book Jamie's Food Revolution, with pork substituted for beef. It was a smashing success. It even obligingly stored itself in leftover form in the freezer and tasted fine after thawing and reheating.

However, it definitely wasn't photogenic. It looked scrumptious on the plate, but the pastry had split open to reveal the filling, so when I uploaded the photos and looked at them on the computer screen, it appeared as if I'd been taking photos inside a veterinary surgeon's operating room.

I have spared you this grisly scene. Instead, feast your eyes on the cover of Jamie's book, and the adorable visage of Sir Jamie himself.