Raccoon and Lobster

If you are not a roundeye who is familiar with roundeye cooking, a dessert made from a vegetable that looks like celery and sounds like rutabaga does not exactly trigger the salivary glands*. But my friend Stacy could not stop talking about it.

2:50 PM Stacy: couldn’t find rhubarb, though, had to go back to the grocery store for it

2:52 PM Stacy: hafta decide, rhubarb CRISP, or CAKE

3:01 PM Stacy: ronnie do you… not like… rhubarb?

9:28 PM Stacy: so i just served [my  husband] his rhubarb crisp…

9:17 PM Stacy: oh, did i send enough rhubarb recipes?

So I finally caved and bought some of this infernal plant to see what the fuss was about. So I bravely chopped up my red celery and placed it in a baking dish only to realize that Stacy’s recipe calls for 4 cups of rhubarb, while scaredycat that I am, I had only purchased what amounted to 2.5 cups. My sad little pile of chopped rhubarb was going to cook down to nothing in the 8×8 dish so I decided to make 2 personal pan rhubarb crispettes ™.

[40 some odd minutes later] The rhubarb crisps smelled fantastic when I pulled them out of the oven. A quick picture for the blog and it was time for the first tentative bites.

After bite #3, it became very obvious that this is extremely tart rhubarb. Extremely. Perhaps even Xtremely. I used 2 heaping tablespoons of sugar for 2.5 cups of rhubarb. Keep in mind that the recipe called for 1-3 tb for 4 cups. I added more sugar to my fork. Then even more. When I had sprinkled another 2 tb of sugar onto one of the cups and was still puckering my mouth, it was time for drastic action. Fortunately I had something saved for just such an occasion:

Miracle fruit, for those who don’t know, contains a molecule named miraculin, which binds to your taste buds, causing sour food to taste sweet. With its help, I finished off my personal pan rhubarb crisp and then drank some unsweetened lemon juice. I can’t wait for my boyfriend to wake up from his nap so that I can offer him a tasty dessert.

For the record, this is what Arthur thought of it:

He did not want seconds.

* Oh dammit. Wikipedia informs me that rhubarb originated in Asia and was only introduced to the Americas in the 1820s. There goes my whole opening premise. Then again, this is the same wikipedia that informed us that our mint mojitos last night were incomplete without a sufficient stock of beef or walrus. Also, I believe the Chinese only used rhubarb root medicinally and it was the barbarian hordes of Mongolia [NOT BARBARIAN HORDE-IST] that actually ate them, so my aversion to them as a food source is still justified.

Breaking news update:

(19:40) Stacy: hmm
(19:40) Stacy: don’t hate me
(19:40) Stacy: in retrospect, i think i underestimated the amount of extra sugar
(19:41) Stacy: i think i meant 3-6 tablespoons
(19:41) Stacy: >_<
(19:41) Stacy: i made it too sweet once
(19:41) Stacy: so i was trying to be judicious