Round the Sphere Again: Summer Food and Drink

Iced Tea
We’ve been having wonderful weather, so I’ve been making our favorite summer drink. I make iced tea like this, except I use only 1/2 cup sugar. Lately I’ve been using Earl Grey tea, but any kind of tea will work—black, green or herbal. And I slice a lemon into each pitcher before I chill. My son sometimes mixed his half and half with whatever juice we have on hand.

Pasta Salads
We love them. Today I made Darlene’s Tuna Salad, and a few days ago, I threw together a grilled chicken pasta salad with honey mustard dressing. Sorry, no recipe for that because I made it up as I went along with whatever we had on hand. I used tri-colored spirals, grilled chicken cubes, diced celery, shredded carrots, onions and frozen peas, all tossed together with a bottle of honey mustard dressing.

What is your favorite pasta salad? Do you have a recipe? A link?

Eight Ways (and More) to Eat Your Rhubarb

See updates below!

1. Pull the stalks out of the garden and eat them raw. Karen comments

   Our grandmother had a huge rhubarb patch in back of her garage and I remember we used to pick it and dip it in brown sugar and eat. Some of our friends used to dip it in salt instead of brown sugar. I remember it was so very delicious. Remember washing it using the backyard garden hose.

   It’s mostly children, I think, who dare to eat it raw. Did you? Sugar or salt?


2. Make sauce by taking 4 cups sliced fresh or frozen rhubarb and cooking it in a saucepan with 1/2 cup water and 1/2 cup sugar. Cook and stir on low heat until the rhubarb is tender. You may want to adjust the sugar to your own tastes. I like mine tart.
   
   Eat rhubarb sauce plain in a bowl, over vanilla yogurt (how I like mine), or over ice cream or cake. Suggested additions: dried blueberries (Kim of Hiraeth) and strawberries (WhiteStone). WhiteStone has a suggestion for serving it, too.

   When we were growing up on the farm, we had lotsa rhubarb. We also had a small strawberry patch and strawberries never went far enough at our dinner table. So we made a lot or rhubarb sauce with strawberries cooked in. Made ‘em go farther. Put that sauce on a square of homemade yellow cake, add whipped cream, and you have heaven here on earth. Almost.

   Update: Kim has written a little poem about … well, go see.


3. Make jam. I like to mix mine with strawberries to make strawberry-rhubarb jam. (Did you know that putting rhubarb in with cooked strawberries improves the taste of the strawberries? I know it seems impossible, but it’s true.) Dorothy suggests blueberry-rhubarb jam, and tells us that the combo is “practically perfect.” There’s rhubarb-ginger jam, too, and bumbleberry jam usually has a little rhubarb in it.


4. Just drink it. I like a rhubarb cooler on a hot day, but I mix the juice with with club soda rather than lemon-lime. Update, May 17: Better yet, with a little more work, you can make rhubarb slushes.


5. Make Rhubarb Walnut Muffins (Dorothy’s recipe). Rhubarb and a crumb topping—two of my favorite things—turned into a muffin.


6. Bake rhubarb crisp, a favorite of Kim of The Upward Call and WhiteStone. My mother used to make Rhubarb Crunch (pictured above), which is a crisp-like dessert.


7. Put together a yummy pie. (Rhubarb isn’t called pie plant for nothing.) Here’s a recipe for rhubarb pie from Judy at Mennonite Girls Can Cook. This one calls for 2 eggs in the filling, which is the way I usually make plain rhubarb pie. If I’m baking rhubarb into a pie, however, it is usually a strawberry-rhubarb one. [Update, May 13: You could also top your rhubarb pie with meringue]


8. Make Dorothy’s Honey Rhubarb Betty. “If you love rhubarb, I can’t imagine that you won’t love it.”

There you have it. Thanks to those who gave me recipes or made suggestions for favorite ways to eat rhubarb. And it’s not too late to add to my list should you have more suggestions.

Update on Monday, May 3, 2010 at 12:38PM by rebecca

9. Make a Rhubarb Custard Tart (Mennonite Girls Can Cook)

Using My Heads

Now’s your chance to prove to me that blogging is more useful than Twitter.

So here’s the deal. I have cabbage in the garden—lots of cabbage, many big heads of cabbage—that will have to be picked sometime soon. How would you use them up/preserve them if you were me?

Things to keep in mind:

• Cold storage won’t work.
• I won’t be making sauerkraut.

I’ve already asked this question on Twitter and received several good recipes and suggestions. Can blog commenters do better?