Rhubarb

I have been so busy, but I feel that I am ALMOST caught up. I have been spending most of my time with my Spring planting. In general, this includes planting the vegetable garden, new shrubs and trees, annual flowers, new perennials, and whatever catches my eye. It is a lot of work and it all needs to be done during a short window of time.

In my case, the short growing season of 106 days means that I need to start planting by mid may, and I must have everything in before the first week of June ends. That would be about right now, and yet I am not quite finished. For example, I do not have my potatoes in yet.

This year was extra challenging because we have had continued drought, a hard frost at the end of May, then a windstorm, then scorching heat, then back to the windstorms. Still, things are managing to start growing.

Some things are ready already. Like my rhubarb, which has turned out to be very bushy with thick stalks.

Since I needed to pull some rhubarb stalks, I decided that I would make a cake. If I pull some stalks now, more will grow by midsummer and hopefully I will have some strawberries by then. That way I can make rhubarb and strawberry jam.

The trick to harvesting rhubarb is to tear the stalks off the plant. This encourages additional growth and is much healthier for the plant than cutting the stalks with a knife. They can take some yanking, depending on their size, but I am a bit of a weakling and can manage it.

The giant leaves are poisonous to humans, so they need to be cut off. I usually put the leaves into my compost bin.

Rhubarb has a similar structure to celery--meaning that it has long fibers. The best way to deal with this is to slice them thinly. After washing and slicing, I stewed them with some sugar . When cooked, rhubarb softens into a pulp that can be used in many types of recipes.

Since rhubarb is very sour, it is usually necessary to add sugar. You can eat rhubarb without sugar, but I only advise that you do so if you already enjoy things like sucking on lemons. When I think back to my childhood, I remember getting stalks of rhubarb to gnaw on as a treat. My mother would dip one end into sugar first, but they were still pretty sour. I remember sucking all the juice out until there was nothing left but the dry strings. Clearly my taste buds had low standards back then!

There is more to rhubarb than the sour taste, however. The unique fragrance and taste is not like any other fruit or vegetable that I know of, and it is a source of vitamins C and K1. That means that this cold weather plant can be an important food in cold climates with long winters. While other crops may fail, rhubarb is sure to survive the worst of weather conditions.

I used my stewed rhubarb pulp---which contains a good deal of sugar---to make a cake.

It is delicious and tastes like summer.

This is a 100% POWER UP! post.