Wild Hope Homestead

I have been watching my rhubarb eagerly. The chopped, frozen rhubarb I brought up from Christchurch didn’t last very long, and I have been a bit lost without it since then. I bought my rhubarb in January and planted it in a big planter tub while we were staying at The Parents’ place. When we moved to this house in March I planted it in the vege garden along with a chunk of organic matter. Over autumn and winter it has gone a little nuts instead of going dormant, as I expected it to. I hunted out ‘Moulin Rouge’ specifically for it’s mouth-watering, dark red all-the-way-up stems, but it seems that winter tolerance is also a special feature.

Since the rhubarb has grown so well, I decided it was time to test it. Last night, I christened the rhubarb with mini rhubarb crumbles. I am not proficient at making up my own recipes yet. My history of food experiments goes a little like this. When I was a toddler I ate dirt and other grabbable things from the garden. Good subject matter, wrong function. When I got a bit older I progressed to concoctions of dirt, ornamental berries and other ‘ingredients’ from the garden, mixed together in a container with a stick. I don’t think I ate those. Well, I hope I didn’t. Once I discovered proper food ingredients in the kitchen, I made concoctions that inevitably included golden syrup, chocolate chips, sugar and other sweet things all mixed together. They must have been hideous. I made my sisters eat them. It’s a wonder we’re still alive. Needless to say, I think I’ve progressed a lot in my food experiments now. But those childhood flashbacks keep me from trying too hard. At the moment, I like to think I’m a proficient recipe finder. So here is the recipe I based my crumble on. I didn’t want to take too many stems off the rhubarb, and what I picked amounted to just under half of what the recipe calls for, hence the mini rhubarb crumbles. Which turned out to be brilliant if I say so myself.

Here is the recipe: Rhubarb Crumble by Elise on SimplyRecipes.com.

I basically halved the recipe and divided the ingredients into three ramekins. Sure, three is a weird number but that’s what things fitted into nicely, so why not? I filled up the ramekins to a nice mound since I knew the rhubarb would sink as it softened. So knowledgeable. I’ve obviously cooked rhubarb before. By the way, this is not a healthy recipe, it is a treat.

Tips:

• You can replace the white sugar with glucose.
• You can replace the butter with coconut oil to make it dairy-free.
• I replaced half the flour in the topping with almond meal, which I have plenty of as a by-product of making almond milk. I had forgotten about using my almond meal until I started pouring out the flour…

These were just lovely. I even got an outright compliment from The Husband (the real chef in this relationship).

Next time, I will fiddle with it even more to make it a bit more healthy, now that I know how it works. By the time I’ve finished fiddling with it I may just have my own recipe! And hopefully not a weird concoction… You saw it here first! Or did you? I’ll wait until I’ve finished experimenting…

TWIGLET’S WORLD: Home of experimentation.