Choose your words wisely; they hold the power to craft your reality.
Doesn’t get easier than this guys.
I froze a bunch of this puree in big ziplocs. If you want to get adventurous, freeze 1 cup sized dollops on waxed paper and then add them to bags. This way you can easily defrost in known amounts when you’re ready to make your muffins, orice cream, or delicious daiquiris!
Got Rhubarb? Lucky you. Rhubarb is used in Chinese medicine and is thought by some to have cancer-inhibiting qualities. Plus, it’s super tasty in desserts..
Rhubarb stalks are ready to harvest from early spring through mid summer as soon as the leaves are full. The stalks will be anywhere from light green to bright red in color, and should be thick enough so they don’t bend like rubber.
To harvest, grasp the stalk by the bottom and wiggle it, just a little bit. Wiggle a lot if you want to count it for today’s workout.
Do not eat the leaves, they are toxic. So toxic, in fact, that if I touch them without gloves I get a weird skin tightening sensation, though it doesn’t bother the kids at all. They are tough as nails.
I rinse, dry then dice the stalks right away and then lay them out on a tray in the freezer. Once frozen, I dump them all into a ziploc where they will be ready to add (frozen is fine!) to any tasty recipe (like this one for my locally famous Rhubarb Crisp).
This is a yummy recipe passed along to me from my mom. I thought the peanut sauce would do a number on the kohlrabi, which has a distinct radish flavor. I also kept thinking that the kohlrabi would taste like water chestnut, but it didn’t.
All the ingredients in the salad portion are optional. You can add or subject depending on what the farm is offering up that day. Leave out the chicken or substitute with tofu to go vegetarian.
This is a favorite around here. At book club last spring it went faster than the wine!
Heat oven to 375°. Butter an 8-inch square baking dish. Arrange diced rhubarb in the prepared baking dish. Toss rhubarb with the orange juice, sprinkle with the 1/2 cup sugar and the cinnamon; dot with the 1 tablespoon of cut up butter.
Combine melted butter with brown sugar.
Stir together flour, salt, and baking soda; mix with oats. Combine the flour oat mixture with the brown sugar and melted butter mixture until well blended. With hands, spread the crumb mixture over rhubarb. Bake for 40 minutes.
Serve warm, with ice cream.
Once upon a time a catcall was a catcall. Superficial as it may be, boys, whether in the dorms or on the construction site, whistled at what they saw. And the twisted world made sense.
Now that I’m the resident champion of all things green, things have changed. Last week we had people over for dinner. Neal, my friend’s husband, swaggered into the kitchen and nodded approvingly. Ok, maybe he didn’t swagger, and to be fair there was no waggling eyebrows, but boy oh boy was he impressed:
Nice trash! How can you get away with such a small garbage can?
With pride, we showed off compost heap and recycling bins. Help me; when did my inner dork start roaming freely?
If you’ve known me awhile and are somehow holding on to a vestigial sense of my coolness, you may want to tune out for this next comment:
Our compost pile is super cool.
Not in the same way that two-for-one cosmos are cool. Not like swishing down the slopes sans kids is cool. But as far as back-yard-burb-tales go, we’re not generating a ton o’ trash. Let’s let that be exciting.
OK, you can open your eyes again.
Forget Disney, composting is fun for the whole family! Here are the girls, enthusiastically embracing their newest chore…the dumping o’ the compost.
Look at those smiles. Lucky lucky girls.
Show some respect for peats sake, I’m talking here. There may not be much junk in this old trunk, but you totally just checked out my trash!
Ahhh, reproduction. Who could forget fifth grade with its squirm-worthy talk of budding and asexual reproduction and new boobs and busy bees? Back then, nary a day passed without the girls getting herded off to the gym and the boys skulking down to the art room to hear promises of puberty, and treats and terrors to come.
But those seasons, they go round and round and now here we stand firmly on the other side. We’ve seen for ourselves from whence babies come, and those babies have themselves come home from school bearing their own dixie cups of sprouted peapods in hand.
It seems that although puberty is (thankfully) a thing of my past, I still don’t know all there is to know about baby-making. Just this spring I happened upon a new term of reproduction: propagate. As in, come on Billy-Bob, let’s get down and dirty and start propagatin’. Which brings me to rhubarb. We inherited one old plant.
Tough gal. Despite considerable overcrowding and our laissez-faire gardening approach, she bore us plenty that first year. We were cruel, ignoring her unless a hankering for rhubarb crumble reared up and demanded we pluck her plentiful stalks. However, when our neighbor poured concrete to reset his fence posts smack dab on top of her, my mothering instincts kicked in. It was time to save Rhubarb.
I searched online, followed some directions, and wham! bam! I made me some baby rhubarbarinos. You heard it here first–propagating is the wave of the future. And rhubarb? Oh, I have plenty to say about rhubarb. I’m just getting started. You’ll hear more about our old gal for sure.
Grab a cigar by the way, congratulations are due: Look what our tough mama created: Seven little rhubarb-arinos. Come on, aren’t they cute?
(Cute, yes, and mighty tasty too. Here’s a tasty recipe that has my kids chanting for more rhubarb!)
Happy Mother’s Day to me! We had been discussing it for a while, (because, whenever there is something to be done there is nothing like good old fashioned conversation to nip it in the bud,) but finally, it happened. My guy, that nutty romantic, built me a compost heap.
In case you’re thinking, what? Why on earth would anyone want a compost heap? Here’s a brief list of the finer points:
It’s our compost heap, and it’s 100% homemade. Dave followed directions he found on ecocycle, which says that as long as it’s about 3’X3′ and has some open space to allow for air circulation, we’re good to go. Ours is built from old fence posts, leftover deck lumber and some mesh netting from last year’s strawberry patch. Ecocycle has a comprehensive list of what is and is not compostable, but here’s the gist:
Ok to Compost:
Not Ok to Compost
We send the girls out with a little tupperware for the compost heap each evening as one of their allowance-worthy chores. They dump it, and then cover the kitchen waste with a handful of leaves or cut grass. They’re still too small to manage the pitchfork, so every few days farmer Dave heads out to turn the pile. We also water it to keep it slightly damp, which helps the stuff cook down into yummy soil.