Rhubarb, a Winter Warrior

The leaves and stems of our rhubarb plants dropped to the ground some time ago, marking the end of another year. But look what's happening. The rhubarb are pushing up new leaves and stems in the middle of December. Rhubarb truly is a cold-loving plant. The District of Columbia, with its horribly hot and humid summers, is about the southern limit for rhubarb. Many varieties will not thrive here. We are growing the green-stemmed Victoria variety from some spare root stock give to us by the Washington Youth Garden.

We are eagerly awaiting the spring, which will mark the third season since we planted our rhubarb. You should wait about three years after planting before harvesting rhubarb very heavily. This gives the plants plenty of time to establish healthy roots. So this year are efforts will finally pay off--rhubarbs sauce, rhubarb pie, rhubarb jam. Just the thought of it will keep us warm through the winter.

Kids Make Rhubarb Muffins

Have you ever tried dicing rhubarb with a plastic knife?

"It won't cut the skin!" the kids in my "food appreciation" classes cried.

Well, nobody said learning how to cook was going to be easy.

I'm surprised how many people don't know what rhubarb is and don't even recognize it in the store. We always had rhubarb in the spring when I was growing up. Tons and tons of rhubarb. Along with asparagus, it's one of the earliest edibles in the garden. Since we try to cook with the seasons in our classes, I wanted to expose my kids to the glories of rhubarb.

Fortunately, there are any number of kid-friendly rhubarb recipes. Not long ago I conducted a search for rhubarb texts at my favorite on-line book seller and purchased no less than three different cook books devoted to this vegetable masquerading as a dessert fruit. One of them, "The Joy of Rhubarb," is nearly 250 pages long and has an entire chapter on rhubarb muffins and breads.

I thought rhubarb wheat bran muffins was a good place to start. Muffins have a number of virtues: kids love them, and they don't take long to bake in the oven. That makes them a perfect choice for cooking classes. The bran is a reminder that we like to cook healthy whenever we can. Bran is full of fiber, something woefully lacking in modern processed foods.

This lesson reinforces a couple of basic baking techniques: Mix dry ingredients in one bowl, wet ingredients in a second bowl. When the time comes, pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. This procedure rarely varies. Also, this is a good example of a chemical rise. One of the dry ingredients is baking soda. One of the wet ingredients is buttermilk. When the acid in the buttermilk mixes with the base content of the baking soda, a chemical reaction occurs that makes gas that causes the muffin dough to expand or rise. This is much faster and more convenient than baking with yeast and is common in muffins and quick breads.

For 12 muffins:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup wheat bran
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups fresh rhubarb, diced small
1 cup buttermilk
1 egg
1/2 cup corn oil
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Preheat oven to 400 degrees

In a bowl, mix flour, bran, brown sugar, baking soda and salt. In a second bowl, beat buttermilk and egg together, then mix in oil. Separately, mix together sugar and cinnamon and set aside.

Grease a muffin tin (paper cups are optional, but should be greased if used, as with a cooking spray). Pour wet ingredients into dry ingredients and mix until just incorporated. Spoon mix into muffin tin, distributing mix as evenly as possible. Sprinkle sugar-cinnamon mix over tops of muffins. Place muffins on middle rack of oven.

Bake 25 to 28 minutes, or until muffins are browned and a toothpick inserted into a muffin comes out clean.

If you have buttermilk left over, pour yourself a glass. It's just the thing to wash down one of these muffins.

Rhubarb Tea Cake

I've had my near-death experience with rhubarb.

When I was a boy, my father cleared a place for a garden behind our home outside Chicago. One day I came up behind him while he was spreading cow manure for the rhubarb bed and caught a tine from his pitchfork right between the eyes. There was a great rush to get hold of the doctor, some urgent concern about tetanus. I survived okay--I still have both eyes--but never forgot that rhubarb loves a meal of rich organic matter.

Many years later, I am watching the rhubarb I planted from bare roots last year develop into big, lush plants. You should wait at least until the second season before harvesting any of the stalks. Better to let all that photosynthesis feed the developing roots. By the third season, you can harvest all you like.

When I was growing up, we had so much rhubarb that it was boiled into a seemingly endless quantity of something we called "rhubarb sauce." It seemed that spring consisted entirely of this sweet mush, breakfast, lunch and dinner. While I am waiting for my own rhubarb plants to mature, I content myself with a few stalks from the local Whole Foods. And since I recently wrote on the subject for Martha Stewart, I decided to try one of her recipes for a recent meeting of gardening cohorts.

I don't consider myself a "tea" kind of guy. But these rhubarb tea cakes from the March issue of Martha Stewart Living looked awfully appealing. Martha's advice is to divide the batter between eight individual loaf pans, each lined with buttered parchment paper. That sounds so awfully Martha, but also a lot of work--especially when we didn't have all eight of the mini-loaf pans. So I made this in one standard-sized loaf pan, 5 inches by 9 inches.

For the cake:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon coarse salt
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 cup sour cream
8 ounces rhubarb cut into 1/4-inch dice (2 cups)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Whisk together flour, salt, baking powder and baking soda. In a mixer set at medium-high speed, beat butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Continue beating and add vanilla. Reduce speed to low and mix in some flour, then some sour cream, then more flower and more sour cream alternately until both are completely incorporated. Stir in rhubarb.

Pour the batter into a greased loaf pan dusted with flour (or sprayed with Baker's Joy). Place in oven on a baking sheet and bake until a toothpick comes out clean, about 40 minutes. Place loaf pan on a wire rack to cool.

For the rhubarb syrup:

1 vanilla bean, halved lengthwise
1 cup water
1 cup granulated sugar
4 ounces rhubarb, cut into 1/4-inch dice (1 cup)

Use the tip of a paring knife to scrape the seeds from the vanilla bean into a small sauce pan. (Put the leftover pod in the canister of vanilla sugar you keep in your pantry.) Add water and sugar and bring to a simmer , stirring to dissolve sugar. Remove pan from heat and stir in rhubarb. Let cool, then remove rhubarb with a slotted spoon and reserve. Return pan to heat and simmer until the liquid is reduced by half, about 10 minutes. Let cool slightly, then return the rhubarb to the liquid. The sauce can be made ahead and refrigerated.

To serve, cut the cake into thick slices (I then halved the slices to make them look more like tea cakes.) Spoon a generous helping of whipped cream onto each piece, then ladle on some syrup with the small pieces of rhubarb. Don't be shy with the syrup: Let it soak into the cake.

Serve with your favorite tea or coffee. A nice dessert wine such as Essensia, the orange-flavored Muscat, would also be a good choice.

Writing About Rhubarb for Martha

I notice that new leaves are beginning to unfurl on the rhubarb plants in our garden. Truly, this is an amazing plant that starts pushing up new life in the middle of winter.

Coincidentally, the March issue of Martha Stewart Living is out with an article about rhubarb written by yours truly. Martha has kept me busy the last few months. March is the garden issue and a good time to be thinking about rhubarb. Again, I just wrote the text. I had nothing to do with the recipes. But this time I was writing not just about food, but about the history of rhubarb and how to grow it.

My first experience with rhubarb was watching my dad plant it in the back yard. He dug lots of manure into the soil. I happened to walk up behind him while he was spreading cow manure and got stuck with the tine of his pitchfork right between the eyes. I suppose I was lucky to come away with both eyes intact. I remember quite a bit of excitement about getting me to a doctor for a tetanus shot.

We don't think too much about rhubarb today, but for centuries it was among the most valued of all plants. The roots of rhubarb have a purgative effect that fit perfectly into the ancient medicinal scheme of balancing the bodies "humours." It used to be that a cathartic was good for just about anything that ailed you. For centuries, the dried root of rhubarb plants were exported from China. The Russians valued this trade so much that they monopolized it under the royal crown.

Naturally, certain Europeans had an intense interest in getting their hands on some living rhubarb and growing it themselves. China would have none of that, so although seeds sometimes made their way west, the identity of the rhubarb so valued in medicine remained a mystery. Thankfully for us, that did not stop rhubarb from being planted, leading to the discovery that the stalks--with lots of sugar--could be turned into a fine dessert. As refined sugar became more readily available, rhubarb as something to be eaten caught fire.

While the stalks are merely sour, rhubarb leaves contain enough oxalic acid to make them toxic. The same effect in a more pleasant form can be found in a rhubarb cousin, the sorrel or "dock." If you do decide to grow rhubarb, keep it out of the reach of children and grazing animals. Compost the leaves.

In our family, spring meant tons of something we called "rhubarb sauce." This was actually a stew made from the stalks with lots of sugar. There would be a large pot bubbling on the stove, then what seemed an interminable amount of "sauce" that we ate for breakfast, for lunch, on ice cream. Pitchers of it filled the refrigerator.

The spread in Martha Stewart Living has some lovely recipes for rhubarb tarts, poached rhubarb, a rhubarb tea cake. If I had any quibbles with the article, it might be the lack of a savory rhubarb treatment. Apparently the Iranians and the Afghanis use rhubarb in stews, and chefs in this country are pairing it with wild game.

This year we'll be making rhubarb pies from our own rhubarb. Now that's something I can get excited about.