when the off licence gives you rhubarb …

We have a wonderful off licence in our village - we go in there and order wine, they deliver it, we give them a cheque. Works beautifully. I popped in there last week, and they asked where P was - “planting a rhubarb crown”, I said. Which he was. At which point, they invited us to pop over and collect some of their rhubarb crop the following day. P did so, and came home with many sticks.

We made half into a crumble - standard sort of thing, with grated fresh ginger and honey (rather than sugar) in the filling, and a topping substituting 2 oz of hazelnuts for 2 oz flour. Lovely.

With the rest, I made a steamed sponge pudding - very nearly, but not quite, one of my rare slow cooker miscalculations.

I cooked the rhubarb with a couple of tablespoons of caster sugar and a teaspoon or so of ground ginger a gentle heat for 2-3 mins until it was just starting to soften. Put that in the bottom of a greased 2 pint pudding bowl.

In the food mixer, creamed 125g each of butter andcaster sugar. Added 2 eggs, a teaspoon of vanilla essence, 175g plain flour and 1 teaspoon baking powder (I never bother with self raising flour).

Put this mixture on top of the rhubarb, then covered it with a double thickness of greased tin foil (mind those alien rays!) and secured it with a red rubber band, courtesy of the Royal Mail.

Put it in the slow cooker, topped up with boiling water from the kettle and left it for about 3 hours. Which wasn’t quite enough.  It was lovely, but could have done with a bit longer - probably another 45 minutes or so.  If you were cooking it on the hob I think it would want about 90 minutes.

Turned it out carefully, onto a place on a baking tray, for fear of hot rhubarb spillage.  Which there was.

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rhubarb crumble

As always, bits of this are fairly random.  Serves 4 if they’re not overly greedy.

Take 3 good sticks of rhubarb, clean, trim, and chop into chunks.  I do mine in different sizes so you get a different texture when it’s cooked.  Some might say this was accidental, but it’s not.  No really.

Put into an ovenproof dish, and add a couple of dessertspoonsfull of elderflower cordial.  Or a bit more - I just went sloosh.  Sprinkle with some golden granulated sugar - probably the same sort of quantity, but we don’t like stuff too sweet.

In a food processor,  put:

150g plain flour
100g porridge oats
100g butter
100g soft brown sugar

Blitz until it resembles fine breadcrumbs.  Keep an eye on it, but don’t worry if it goes a bit lumpy; you can always recrumble it with your fingers.

Spread this over the rhubarb, put in a pre-heated oven at gas 4 / 180C for about 45 minutes.  Best eaten warm, ideally (in our view) with good vanilla ice cream.

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Sunday supper

As previously noted, we picked up the first local asparagus of the year on Saturday; with it, we cooked one of our favourites - asparagus stir-fried with ginger and red chilli. It sounds a terrible thing to do to fresh asparagus, I know, but trust me … it really is glorious.

We followed this with a rhubarb and ginger sponge pudding - bit piggy, really, but it is Sunday. I discovered the wondrous combination of rhubarb and fresh ginger a couple of years ago; I was following a recipe that called for stem ginger in syrup, and I thought it would be too sweet, so lobbed some finely minced fresh in instead. We’ve never looked back!

If you don’t have any ginger in the house (and you *should*, of course) remember that elderflower works wonderfully well with rhubarb too, so a splash of elderflower cordial would make a very good substitute, although I’d cut the sugar down a little in that case.

Rhubarb is a Very Fine Thing indeed.

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