Adventures with Rhubarb

It's Rhubarb season!

To me, this means that spring is well underway and it's almost time to rejoice in the produce that is summer. Before we get there though, I want to take some time to enjoy this under-appreciated and tasty treat. For those of you unfamiliar with this food, rhubarb can be considered either a vegetable or a fruit. You can cook the stalks of this perennial plant as part of many desserts or sometimes as a tart addition to savory dishes. Thus, it is anatomically like most vegetables - part of the vegetative growth not the tissues associated with the reproductive organs, like most fruits. However, in terms of culinary application, rhubarb is generally treated like a fruit. (Note: if you are preparing rhubarb for yourself, remember to remove all of the leaves since they are high in toxic oxalic acid!)

In the past, I have used rhubarb in pies (especially with strawberries - the famous partner of rhubarb) or as a tart addition to muffins. This year, I splurged on some extra rhubarb and I decided to get creative with how I used it. So far I've made a really tasty, non-pie dessert and wonderful chutney.

The dessert is a recipe given to me from my sister's mother-in-law. It consists of a shortbread crust covered in a rhubarb and egg yolk custard and topped with a meringue. I was a little nervous about the meringue since I haven't made one in years, but it was surprisingly easy and came out really tasty. It also made me wonder if you could replace the rhubarb with some stone fruit - I think peaches would be especially tasty although you would need to cut back majorly on the sugar.

My second rhubarb adventure was a riff on a dish I had in a restaurant earlier this year. That dish was a grilled pork chop with baby turnips and beets, fried onions, and a plum rhubarb ginger compote. For anyone who has put applesauce on their pork, it was a similar taste although even more tart. For my version, I glazed a pork loin with lemon juice, honey, olive oil, sage, and garlic. Once it was cooked, I caramelized some onions in the pan juices. The rhubarb was mixed with some dried apricots, triple sec, a little sugar, a little applesauce, and fresh ginger. I cooked that down until the rhubarb started to fall apart. It came out FANTASTIC! The leftovers were even better in my opinion - I put slices of pork, some onions, and chutney between two slices of whole wheat toast. It was reminiscent of 'day after Thanksgiving' sandwiches - savory meat mixing with tart fruitiness all contained in a sandwich. I will definitely need to make some more of this chutney. I'm thinking it could be great as part of stuffed french toast as well as a great component in other pork or lamb dishes.

In the next week or so we should start to get strawberries at which point it will be pie season. But I'll try to remember that deviations from what I always do can turn out quite tasty, not to mention fun to make.