"Tart Is Good!": Ode on Rhubarb and A Wild Spin on Rhubarb Chutney

Kim Ode (pron. OH-dee) was in our neighborhood last weekend to present a demo and talk about cooking with rhubarb, which has become her tart, seasonal calling card since she published Rhubarb Renaissance, the first title in the  Northern Plate series from the Minnesota Historical Society Press, in 2012.  Kim charmed a full house with stories about her rhubarb journey, from being gulled by a devious cousin into taking a big bite of a raw, naked stalk in her South Dakota childhood, to discovering the affinities and aversions of culinary rhubarb (ginger and shrimp, yes; beef, not so much).  As someone who has presented a few cooking demos and classes, I was amazed by Kim’s ability to measure and mix ingredients for savory rhubarb and cheese biscuits—a fairly precise formulation—all the while keeping up a calm, conversational patter in front of nearly 30 people.  When I expressed my admiration for her on-stage calm and efficiency, she replied: “Well, there have been incidents…”.

Bide-A-While rhubarb patch

Several people in the audience mentioned that their rhubarb patches had been propagated from divisions gathered from a parent’s patch, or grandma’s garden, the family farmstead, which led me to think that that’s the true sense of an heirloom vegetable, one literally passed down from generation to generation, by hand.  And that may be why so many people have a sentimental attachment to rhubarb, and why they’re so grateful to Kim Ode for showing them how to take rhubarb beyond the typical strawberry-rhubarb concoctions (Kim included one, count it, exactly one rhubarb-strawberry recipe in her book).

 
In addition to the biscuits, which baked up brown and crusty, with the cheese and rhubarb dancing dos-si-dos in an appealingly chewy crumb, Kim mixed up a kale salad with pickled rhubarb.  I prepared a couple of Kim’s recipes to round out a rhubarbish buffet.  I made Gingery Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake, and in the course of preparing it, it occurred to me that I had never, ever, in my whole entire life, actually baked a cake from scratch.  How could this be?  And yet I swear it is so.  I sort of freaked out when that realization started to sink in—it was about the time I realized that the butter I was trying to cream with sugar should have been much softer, as it just glommed on to the beater and the sides of the bowl, and went dismally round and round, not becoming creamed and fluffy, at all.  But I forged ahead, and in the end it came out well, delicious, in fact—wh ich is a testament to a well-written recipe, if even a total neophyte bad at following instructions (moi) can have success.

  

And I made a rhubarb chutney that Kim suggests be served on crostini spread with a goat cheese-cream cheese blend and garnished with prosciutto.  I simplified by serving it on crackers and 86ing the ham.  It was fabulous, addictive, I dare say, sweet, tart, and spicy, flavored with ginger, garlic, and jalapeno, and bulked up with dried apricots.
 

It got me to thinking that I could easily substitute wild and local ingredients for some of the chutney components, to make it more Trout Caviar friendly.  So I made a batch back home in which I subbed maple syrup for the brown sugar, chopped ramps in place of garlic; dried apples from our trees took the place of the apricots, and some kick-ass fermented chile paste my friend Melinda gave me brought a throbbing heat.  My palate leans toward the savory more than the sweet, so I upped the tartness with extra rhubarb.  I firmly endorse Kim’s book-signing tagline:  “Tart is good!”

One other wild element:  little bits of peeled wood nettle stem gave some crunch to the chutney’s texture and made a nice color contrast, the pale green nettle nuggets playing against the pink background, reminiscent of the pink and green madras plaid sports jackets and shorts my preppie friends used to favor, back in the day.  Whatever happened to all the preppies (ou sont les preppies d’antan…?)?  Wood nettles are one of my favorite wild greens (I say this every year about this time).  You can use the leaves like any young greens, though they are delicate when young, so be careful not to overcook.  Then there are the stems which, when peeled—and they peel very easily—are crunchy crisp and mildly sweet, haricots verts du bois, if you will, or as I’m also wont to say, my favorite trailside crudité (goodness, I’m quite French-y and rhyme-y this morning!).

Not to overlook the obvious: wood nettles sting at least as vigorously as stinging nettles, and like stinging nettles, they lose their sting when exposed to heat, as in blanching in boiling water for a minute.

The result of my wild alterations to the chutney: quite, quite edible.  And beautiful.  We served it with some farmstead cheese from Cosmic Wheel Creamery, the new venture from Rama Hoffpauir and Josh Bryceson, growers at Turnip Rock Farm.  

Kim noted that in working the rhubarb circuit she has found that very few people are on the fence about rhubarb, that it’s generally love or hate.  But me, I’m still kind of in the middle.  I am by no means a rhubarb lover.  I find I don’t care much for the typical rhubarb desserts (I did enjoy my upside-down cake, but maybe that’s just baker’s vanity!).  My fondest rhubarb memories still center around the patch we had at my childhood home in Eden Prairie, and eating stalks nibble by nibble, each tiny bite equal parts sugar and rhubarb.  But I’m intrigued by its uses in savory applications, like this chutney, and I’ll probably experiment a bit more each spring.  Call me rhubarb-curious.
 

Forager's lunch on black cherry slab

This chutney is great in Kim’s original recipe, a dollop on a crostini or cracker first spread with a 1:1 mix of goat cheese and cream cheese.  It also nicely complements a well-flavored aged cheese, and, for what it’s worth, thinly sliced smoked venison.

Wild and Local Rhubarb Chutney (after Kim Ode & Rhubarb Renaissance)

1/3 cup maple syrup

2 cups rhubarb in 1" pieces

4 ramp bulbs minced

2 tablespoons fresh ginger root minced

1/3 cup dried apples chopped small

1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar

Pinch salt

Chile or sambal to taste, or chopped fresh jalapeno

1/4 cup wood nettle stems, peeled, chopped in 1/4" pieces

Combine all but nettle stems. Bring to a boil and stir until the rhubarb starts to break down and exude its juices (rhubarb is about 90%  water). Then simmer for 8-10 minutes, until it is thick and jammy. Add the nettle stems and cook 1 minute more. Cool thoroughly before serving. Best if made a few hours to a day ahead. Will keep for a couple weeks in the fridge.  Makes about 2 cups.


Text and photos copyright 2015 by Brett Laidlaw

White Out

It was indeed white out this weekend, and very cold, windy, but thrilling, as well, and beautiful. We got out to Bide-A-Wee Friday afternoon, did some housekeeping, took a walk, brought in firewood, fried a couple of steaks, listened to some music, as well as to the increasingly emphatic predictions for the weekend snowstorm. Late in the evening it started, so that by bedtime, when I opened the cabin door it swept away snow as it opened, with a good six inches clearance from the deck.

Then Saturday morning looked like this:



And the afternoon, and evening, as well. We hunkered down. Mary shoveled a path to the woodpile, no farther. The car was parked at the top of our steep drive, just far enough from the road so the plough wake wouldn't bury it. Saturday brunch, scrambled eggs with smoked fish. Saturday supper, leftover sauerkraut, added smoked sausage (Whole Farm Co-op), and fresh Polish (Seward Co-op).


Sunday morning, bright, clear, cold, and white. The dogs were indignant at the bitter chill, lifted one frosty foot after another, looked at us as if to say, "Fix this, would ya?" They wouldn't stay out long, though long-legged Lily got some running in.



We had corn-apple pancakes for breakfast, listened to the radio, stoked the woodstove. All Sunday the wind worked the snow, shaping drifts, sculpting intricate designs on the surface. Occasionally it blew the windows open.

Sunday afternoon the plow came by--a road grader fitted with a massive wedge plow in the front, a wing plow on the side. I dug through the deep wake it left, and determined that we could get out if we needed too. The plow had made a pass on Saturday, too, but that only served to create a void into which prodigious amounts of snow could drift. Just east of our driveway entrance, the drifts were chest-high.


Sunday afternoon I worked on a relish to have with warm goat cheese. I meant to coat little pucks of fresh chevre with bread crumbs and black pepper on one side, crushed wild hazelnuts on the other, then fry them. I wanted something a bit tart-sweet to serve with them, and I've been noticing the fresh cranberries from Wisconsin Rapids at the co-op. The chutney would be the blast of color in a white weekend and an evening of white food. It was a total success. It needs a day to rest. I discovered that if you've forgotten or run out of dried apples, you can slice an apple, line a sieve with the slices, set the sieve in a cast iron skillet atop a Four Dog woodstove, and have dried apples in a couple of hours. They gave a nice, slightly chewy texture to the chutney.


I cooked the cheese a little too long, so it was difficult to turn and the crust kind of fell off. I shouldn't have turned my back on the frying pan; I should have stuck the coated chevre pucks in the freezer for a while before cooking them. It was tastier than it was beautiful:


Cranberry Maple Chutney
makes about one-half cup

½ cup fresh Wisconsin cranberries, quartered
1 small shallot, minced
¼ cup dried apples, chopped
2 tsp butter
Pinch salt
½ a small dried red chili, crumbled*
2 Tbsp maple syrup
½ cup water

Melt the butter in a small saucepan and add the shallots. Gently sweat them without browning for 4 or 5 minutes, until a bit soft and translucent. Add the rest of the ingredients, bring to a boil, and simmer, partly covered, until the mixture is thick and most of the water has evaporated, 10 to 15 minutes.

This is best if you make it a day or two ahead and give it some time for all the flavors to come together. Delicious with a round of hot goat cheese, and it would be great with pork, bison, venison, turkey, or game birds.

*Note: This was quite spicy; reduce the amount of chili if you’re concerned about it being too hot.

We followed that up with a creamy potato soup. Comfort food, indeed.



I'm not sure how much snow we got. My best guess: A lot. Over 18 inches was reported in the Menomonie area. With all the blowing and drifting, precise measurement is pretty hard, but I can say that there was knee-deep snow everywhere, and like, ridiculous snow everywhere else. A different world out there now. And I do believe that hunting season may be over (aside from plunking the odd rabbit in the front yard...).




Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

The Cheese Course: Cheddar & Chutney

It's not that I don't have a sweet tooth; I most assuredly do. There were kids I knew in grade school who were able to nurse their Halloween stash through till Christmas (unnatural, I know). Mine was gone in a week (yes, I'm lying: it was gone in two days). I am not even that discriminating when it comes to sweets--I can enjoy an opera cake from a fancy Paris patisserie, or a sack of Jelly Bellies; fine Swiss chocolate, or Oreos dunked in a glass of milk . I was close to becoming addicted to the peanut brittle we got from Regina's Candies at Christmas. By no means am I anti-sugar.

But when one reaches a certain age one finds (so I'm told) that one can't consume just any old thing and not pay for it, sooner rather than later. You're called upon to make wise choices about these things, and I find that in choosing how I'd like to end a really nice dinner, I choose cheese.

One recent night, we chose cheddar cheese and chutney. The ten-year-old Wisconsin cheddar came from Bolen Vale Cheese . The chutney I put together out of root cellar holdings, more or less following a recipe from a really interesting book, Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning , from "the gardeners and farmers of Terre Vivante," an ecological research center in southwestern France.

A recipe for "Potimarron and Apple Chutney" had caught my eye. I didn't have a potimarron on hand--it's a smallish orange squash that's supposed to taste like chestnuts--but I had something that looked quite similar. I think that's actually a red kuri. It had a dense, dry flesh that held up well in the chutney. Those shriveled apples, those are golden russets that we picked up at Maiden Rock Apples last fall. And that is why they are shriveled. But once peeled and chopped they worked very well in the chutney, their mildly spicy, Asian-pear-like flavor intensified by being...shriveled (but we don't throw grapes or plums away when they start to get dried and wrinkly, do we?; no, we give them a new name and a whole new career in a different spot in the grocery store; nothing wrong with slightly shriveled apples, especially russets).

To make the chutney I chopped one medium onion, peeled and chopped the flesh of those two apples, and used about a third of the squash, seeded, peeled and chopped (that yielded about 10 ounces of flesh).

Those went into a saucepan with one large clove of garlic, chopped, a couple good pinches of salt, half a teaspoon of mustard seeds, three whole cloves, a good coarse grind of black pepper, one small hot dried red chili, just about an inch-long piece of cinnamon stick, and a little bit of chopped fresh ginger. I poured in a half-cup of water, brought it to the boil and down to a low simmer, cooked gently till the apples and squash were quite soft and most of the water was gone, about 20 minutes.

At this point I added cider vinegar, about 1/3 cup (a combination of some of our own home-brew, and because that wasn't quite tart enough, a fortifying splash of Leatherwood Vinegary product), and 3 tablespoons of brown sugar. I found it needed a pinch more salt, as well. Now simmer another 15 to 20 minutes, until everything is getting nicely melded.

Eventually I decided I wanted a little more heat, so I added a quarter-teaspoon or so of piment d'espelette (a couple of pinches of cayenne would zip it up as well).

Chutneys improve with a few days' to a few weeks' age. We first had this one the same day I made it. There was plenty left over--it made about a pint--and I'm looking forward to chutney and cheese sandwiches. I think this particular version would be very good with roast lamb, pork, or goat.

Making chutneys or relishes from root cellar ingredients is a great way to add interest to the winter table, "locavore" style. The only non-local ingredients that went into that cheese course were the brown sugar and spices.


text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw