a recipe and a warning

To me, nothing says summer like strawberry-rhubarb pie.  I have been craving something strawberry-rhubarb every since the weather reached 70 degrees and I found a little rhubarb plant growing in the back yard.  So, I finally made something this week!  I ended up making a strawberry-rhubarb crisp, because I didn't want to deal with the pie crust and thought crisp might be more acceptable as breakfast food than pie is...not that I wouldn't eat pie for breakfast too...I mean seriously now. 

Okay to make this strawberry-rhubarb crisp, you must preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Then, you make the crumble topping with:

1 cup packed brown sugar

1 1/2 cups flour

3/4 cup cold unsalted butter, cut into pieces

3 tablespoons anise seed, coarsley chopped (this is what the recipe calls for....I put in about 1/8 tsp of cinnamon and 1/8 tsp of nutmeg)

The recipe calls for you to mix this using a food processor with a metal lade until large pea-sized chunks form.  I don't have a food processor, so I used a fork and my hands.

For the next step you'll need:

1 lb of rhubarb (about 3 cups)

1/2 quart of strawberries (about 2 cups)

juice of 1/2 lemon

zest of 1 lemon

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup sugar

Trim the ends off of the rhubarb then cut it into 1-inch pieces.  Remove the stems from the strawberries and quarter them.  Gently mix the rhubarb and strawberry pieces with lemon juice, zest, vanilla and sugar.

Put the strawberry-rhubarb mixture into a 9-inch pie pan, then top with the crumble mixture.  Bake for 45 minutes or until fruit juices are bubbling.  

Of course, just as I'm feeling pretty impressed by myself, the whole thing bubbles over and covers the stove in burning sugar.  Now here's your warning: put this thing on a baking sheet before you put it in the oven so this doesn't happen to you!  Here's your next warning:  don't forget to clean out the stove and then try to roast beets at 450 degrees only to find smoke coming out of your burners 5 minutes later.  Sigh.  

Anywayyyyy....that's what it looks like out of the oven. Note the baking pan that I had to put underneath it on the counter, so it wouldn't create any more of a mess. If only I'd done that sooner.  

This is what I would recommend topping it with.  Yes, that's homemade whipped cream made with cream from a local farm stand.  It is oh so scrumptious. 

The final product.  Yum.  Even Dan likes it and he claims to not like rhubarb!  I will mark that as a victory in my book.  

Also, I actually used frozen strawberries.  Now, before you get mad at me for this, they are the ones that my mom picked for Dan and me in Cape Elizabeth.  We just had so many of them that there was no way we could eat them all at once without turning into strawberries ourselves.  So we froze about half of them.  Now, when the strawberries thawed, a lot of juice came out of them. 

And it seemed like such a shame to let all of this juice go to waste.  I was trying to think of what to do with it.  I thought about just drinking it like juice, but it was kind of bitter.  I remembered that I had some left over mint simple syrup I'd made when Dan's parents were here.  So I made two things:

First, I made myself a drink! I combined the strawberry juice with some mint simple syrup, vodka and seltzer water.  I put it in one of my favorite glasses and drank it from a straw just to make it feel extra special.  But guess what...it wasn't very good :(  I drank most of it anyway, because I really, really wanted to like it.

Then, I made my own attempt at Italian ice by combining the remaining strawberry juice with the remaining mint syrup and putting it in the freezer.  So fancy, I know.  I have yet to taste it...so we'll see how that goes.  Hopefully it's better than the drink!