To get your healthy 2-3 serving of nutritious vegetables in each day, eat Rhubarb Crisp. Technically, rhubarb is considered a vegetable, and sans the mass amounts of brown sugar, sugar, and butter I added to the crisp, it probably would be healthy. But then it just wouldn’t taste good! It was originally used for medical proposes, but then it gained popularity as a food around the 20th century. Although it is a vegetable, it is mostly used in sweet desserts such as pies, crisps, jams, jellies, and tarts. I wish all of my green veggies tasted this good! DON’T eat the rhubarb leaves though! They are poisonous. Lucky for all of you who ate my Rhubarb Crisp, I read this useful bit of information before the baking began.
The rhubarb Grams and I used came straight from the old Ahlden Homestead. Luckily, Aunt Diane was able to gather up enough stalks for me and Grams to bake one rhubarb recipe, even though the season is almost over. The other two rhubarb recipes will be delayed until next summer. Aunt Diane told me that she set out a pile outside her house, and I could pick it up anytime. I pulled up to the farmhouse with absolutely no clue what I was looking for. I knew rhubarb was a plant, so it was most likely green, but that was all I could guess. What I found were these things that looked like reddish celery with huge leaves. I smelled them, and they didn’t really have a scent. I licked them, but they really didn’t taste like anything. At this point, I was having my doubts that anything sweetly edible could come out of these stems.
I decided that it would be best if I did the dicing. I’m sure Grams would have done fine, but I didn’t want my blog to turn into a saga about a finger on ice. So while I diced the rhubarb, Grams told me about her memories of making rhubarb jam out on the farm. I had heard stories about canning vegetables and making peach jam, but I didn’t know that rhubarb was something that she used to make jelly from out on the farm. Grams was saying that each summer a bunch of ladies with farming husbands would all get together to can and make jams. She remembers doing lots of carrots and tomatoes. Grams recalled that the she canned a lot of pickles on the Ahlden farm. I am not a fan of pickles, and I have never understood how people could enjoy just eating a plain, dill pickle. After I told her this, Grams said that if I had tried a fresh farm pickle, I would probably like that. “There is nothing like garden vegetables,” she reminded me.
As I said, Rhubarb Crisp was an experience from start to finish. It really is a pretty vegetable with shapes of green, pink, and red. When I added the sugar to the diced rhubarb the sugar stuck right to the moisture and gave it a real crystal look. Not only was this my first rhubarb recipe, but this was also my first crisp attempt. I wasn’t really sure when I should take the pan out. I didn’t want the topping to get over done, but it needed a good crunch for the top. Me and Grams decided to follow Aunt Diane’s recipe because we knew she wouldn’t steer us into inedible. The Rhubarb Crisp turned out much richer than I would have imagined. At my house, we decided to serve it over vanilla ice cream to even out the sweetness- go figure.
Grams and I decided that it was absolutely necessary to share our rhubarb dessert with the ultimate lover of rhubarb, Uncle Ronnie. Since he and Aunt Diane supplied the “vegetable” part, we thought it was only fair to pass on the ending nutritious result of our baking. He gave it the Ahlden stamp of approval. Besides learning to bake a dessert from a vegetable today, I learned some family history. I always knew that there was rhubarb growing at the Ahlden homestead, but I just assumed it was always there. While talking to Uncle Ronnie, I learned that the rhubarb growing at his house was actually brought over from Great-Grandma Ahlden’s house after she passed. Apparently she had stalks growing, and someone in the family decided to dig a few up and replant them at the Crescent City farm house. There is family history in that tasty rhubarb.
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