Why Rhubarb?

My husband has always loved rhubarb. When he was growing up in Illinois, a huge patch of it grew (uninvited) in his family's yard. His mother did not love rhubarb and would send him out to try to eradicate it, but the next spring it would come back more luxuriantly than ever.

He also loved to watch his mother cook, so he decided he would learn how to make rhubarb pies. This was when he was about twelve years old--and he has continued making rhubarb pies to this day.

The thing is, though, rhubarb doesn't always appear reliably in the grocery stores. Who would want to eat the sour stem of an otherwise poisonous plant in an era when fresh pineapple, mangoes, strawberries and a whole host of other delicious perishables can be shipped around the globe at any season? In earlier times people welcomed rhubarb as one of the first edible fresh things to appear in the spring and used plenty of sugar to make it tasty.

We tried--twice--to grow our own rhubarb. I ordered the rhubarb crowns from an online nursery and planted them carefully in a spot that I thought they would like. A few small leaves appeared and then withered and that was the end of that. Both times.

Apparently if rhubarb is growing where it wants to be, it can't be eradicated, but if it isn't where it wants to be it absolutely will not grow.

All this is a long preamble to explain why the "nibble" in the Knit & Nibble I'm writing now is going to be based on rhubarb. I found some at my favorite Giant Farm Market and experimented with a rhubarb cheese cake over the weekend. It's delicious and is slowly being transferred from the serving plate to my hips and my husband's waistline. But it came out of the springform pan too messily to look nice in a photo on my website, so I am going to try again.

Meanwhile, I baked a more traditional rhubarb pie long ago when I posted a music-themed pie every month for a year on my website after my blues mystery, SWEET MAN IS GONE, came out. Here's the link: http://peggyehrhart.com/april-rhubarb...