Morning At The Stove

It seems that I spend my life either taking things out of the freezer (fall and winter) or putting things into the freezer (spring and summer). The putting-into-the-freezer season is here, and I'd better get busy, if we want to eat next winter.

I harvested a big armful of rhubarb this morning.  I love those huge leaves, as big as elephant ears, and stack them on some wild rosebush sprouts that I'm trying to suffocate to death (it's almost impossible to kill a wild rosebush without using herbicides).  I chopped up the rhubarb stems and filled three one-gallon bags, each of which--with the addition of eggs, flour, oil and pecans--will make  a batch of six rhubarb bread loaves on some snowy afternoon.  When the chopping was done I was left with the trademark black fingernails that result from some weird reaction between the rhubarb juice and my skin and will take about a week to disappear.

I also picked a basketful of kale, which I tore into pieces and threw, stems and all, into the big vat of dog food that I cook every month.  In case you're wondering, this mixture of rice, veggies, eggs, oil, garlic and powdered milk does not constitute my dogs' entire diet--only about a quarter of it, the rest being a decent kind of kibble.  Wolfie and Bisou love it, though, and I feel that I'm ensuring that they will live forever....

The lavender has just started blooming, so I picked that, hoping to encourage the plants to produce more.  It's not been a good lavender year so far--lavender wants hot, dry weather instead of this chilly damp. I lost a couple of plants over the winter, and the survivors are putting out feeble little blooms.  I hung today's harvest in a bunch from the light fixture above the dining room table.  It doesn't look like much, but I can smell it every time I walk by.

I've been meaning to make arugula soup while the arugula, which does like chilly damp weather, holds out.  Also, my spinach crop has been negligible, but I should do something with it before the weather changes and it bolts.  Meanwhile, it's started raining again.  My green Vermont is so green these days that when I look out the window I almost feel like I'm swimming underwater in some woodland pond.

Rhubarb Days

(Blogger doesn't seem to want to do paragraph breaks today, possibly because there's a storm?  I apologize.)  

Several days ago I complained here that heritage breeds of chickens are not very productive. The same, I am pleased to say, does not apply to rhubarb.  

Apparently, the rhubarb transplants that you get in nurseries have been hybridized, and produce just a few meager stalks a season. But “heritage” rhubarb, the kind you find growing around old barns, is another matter.  

Three years ago, a friend gave me some heritage rhubarb plants that were taking over her vegetable garden. It took a sharp shovel and quite a bit of muscle to extract the gnarled roots from the soil. When I got home, too tired to offer them TLC, I stuck them in the ground between the vegetable garden and the back wall of the house. I threw some dirt over them and left them to their own devices. A few days later I noticed that Wolfie, who was entering adolescence at the time, had dug up some of the roots and chewed on them. I shook my finger at him, retrieved the roots, put them back in their holes, and forgot about them.  

Next spring, I noticed some fierce-looking red bulbous growths pushing up through the melting now—it was the rhubarb. All five plants had survived my neglect and the rigors of winter, and went on to give me all the stalks that I needed, and more to give away.  

With each passing year, the harvest grew. This spring, after the third snowiest winter in recorded history, the rhubarb has achieved barbarous proportions. The plants, which I had planted four feet apart, now overlap each other. The bottom leaves are over two-feet wide, their stems as thick as Wolfie's front legs.  

Not only am I freezing and giving away rhubarb as fast as I can cut it, but I have found a new use for those huge, poisonous leaves: after separating them from the stems, I layer them in pairs and slap them down on the perennial garden, to keep the mints and other offenders from choking off the Echinacea and the Black-Eyed Susans. The rhubarb leaves work almost as well as newspaper, and look a lot more natural.  

Today I harvested and froze thirteen quarts of sliced rhubarb. Thanks to the food processor that my daughter gave me for my birthday, the task this time did not take all afternoon, though it did necessitate my wearing ear protectors. 

But the rhubarb had the last word: on the front of my purple t-shirt, against which, as I harvested, I had pressed the leaves and stems, the oxalic acid in the leaves had eaten away the dye in the cloth, and left indelible reddish stains that will forever scream je me souviens.  

(For those of you who are not from around here, je me souviens [I remember] is the motto of nearby Quebec.)

Rhubarb Reflections

Sorry about the alliteration. It's been a cool, rainy summer here, and as the peppers and tomatoes languish, the rhubarb is going full steam ahead,producing stems as thick as...well, really really thick stems. What to do with this bounty? It grows all by itself out of the ground, year after year. It requires no seeding, mulching, or fertilizing. It's free, a kind of weed, and therefore seems less valuable than the broccoli that I buy in transplants, or the chard whose seeds I measure out one by one, not to mention the tomatoes.

But rhubarb is full of virtues—vitamin C and fiber and so on. People make pies with it, and you can find all kinds of fancy recipes for it on the internet. One of the most popular is for rhubarb sauce, which is supposed to be delicious on ice cream. But who eats ice cream anymore?

It occurred to me today that I could possibly spoon the stuff over my hot cereal next winter, so a batch of rhubarb sauce is now simmering on the stove. I also cut up ten cups of stems, which I will freeze and at some later date put into six loaves rhubarb bread.

Nevertheless, I barely made a dent in the crop--and I've been harvesting since May.

There's so much food-related stuff to do these days. There are peas, broccoli, kale, chard, and zucchini to harvest and cook and eat, or blanch and freeze and store. There is life to be lived.

A part of me today said, let it go; it didn't cost you anything; just ignore it. But I can't. It's food, and the starving Chinese babies our mothers shamed us with at dinnertime decades ago have morphed into hungry American babies, living within a stone's throw of our house. So every week I harvest pounds of rhubarb for the saintly woman who collects them for the local food bank. She tells me the rhubarb always finds a “home.”

I try to think what happens to my rhubarb after it leaves here. Do the working poor have the time and energy to make pies, breads and sauces at the end of a hard, discouraging day? Wouldn't it be better if I offered my rhubarb already in the form of breakfast, or dessert?

Right now, that's out of the question. There is too much else to do. But between making rhubarb pies from scratch and letting the rhubarb go altogether, there is a middle course to which I will stick, hoping it's the right course.

December, 2008 "Rhubarb Bread"

Six Loaves, No Fishes

Every morning for breakfast I eat a slice of rhubarb or zucchini bread. I've been making the stuff for years, six loaves at a time, from a recipe I cut out of the back of a flour bag. The recipe has variations for zucchini, apple, pumpkin and carrot loaves. Because I get large amounts of rhubarb and zucchini in my garden, that is what my bread usually consists of.

I made a batch of the rhubarb kind this morning, and even though I know the recipe by heart, I pulled it out because I wanted to check how far I have come from the original.

My first modification, when I still had small children at home, was to triple the recipe, which made only two loaves. I was in industrial production mode in those years, and wouldn't turn on the oven unless there was a substantial amount of food to bake. But all I did was to multiply each ingredient by three and note that carefully on the margin. At the time, I firmly believed that if one worked hard and observed the rules, things would work out and life would make sense.

The history of my later adjustments parallels the history of dietary fads in America. In the 70s it was all about unrefined flours and fiber, so I replaced white flour with whole-wheat and added a cup of oat bran for good measure. The resulting bread was a little less dessert-like than the original, but nobody complained.

When sugar was revealed as the source of all evil, I cut the amount the recipe called for by half. In a household whose members were denied sugar except on major holidays, half the amount was better than none, so again, there were no complaints.

Remember in the 80s, when fat, any fat, was thought to be a killer? Emboldened by the success of my previous modifications, I decreased the amount of oil by a third. At this point, I began to wonder whether the loaves would cook properly. I was, after all, messing with some pretty significant ingredients. But the bread held together well, though it tasted even more Spartan than before.

Then came the emphasis on eating more fruits and vegetables, which happily coincided with my having, once again, a garden. So I increased the amount of fruit from six cups to ten. Surely, I thought, the loaves will fall apart now. They didn't. In fact, the big increase in fruit made them moister and tastier.

Then one time I was making the rhubarb recipe, which calls for grated lemon peel, and I didn't have a lemon. I threw in some lemon extract instead, again expecting disaster, but the bread tasted fine. Now I use lemon extract all the time, and ignore the voice inside me (whose voice, I wonder?) that tells me that this just isn't right.

The recipe also calls for the use of an electric beater, but since there is no way all that dough is going to fit in my mixer, I use the biggest spoon I have, and sort of stir and beat until my arm starts getting tired. The loaves rise all the same.

This leads me to two conclusions:

1. that I have stumbled on the world's most flexible and forgiving recipe, and

2. ( an important lesson for a Catholic school girl like me) that taking liberties with the rules is not always a bad thing.