A second chance

Spring is in the air. It’s getting warmer and that means the first rhubarb is ready. Yea or nay?

Anyone who grew up in Germany will most likely remember this “fruit” from their childhood with a combination of fear and shaking. While it should change from astringent to pleasantly tart through cooking with enough sugar, too often this ended up as a sour green-brown pulp. If you were lucky it was mixed with vanilla pudding. And daddy proudly preparing this dish, and ended up eating it for days on his own… year for year. Not such good memories. And repeated every spring again…

All of that doesn’t sound appealing, right?That’s what I thought. But then we had the rhubarb and needed to do something with it. So I started looking up recipes. Thought it’s time to give it another try. And I have to admit: wow, how times change. It seems now featuring in more sophisticated guises, including Rhubarb Martinis!

Well, Martini sounds good but let’s start first with the old favorite tart (made lots of experience in the past weeks with lemon tart, strawberry tart…). This time with rhubarb based on a British recipe: a thin pastry shell topped with a thin layer of dark chocolate (for hubby) & cream.

I loved the different preparation style of the rhubarb – rather than stewing (memories!!), it’s gently roasting the rhubarb in the oven with a little sugar, which means you end up with tender chunks of rhubarb which burst with flavour and have a positively fluorescent pink color – awesome!

Super delicious! So good that it even deserves to be written about. The rhubarb definitely deserved a second chance! (The neighbors loved it, too).

I sent my father a photo, his comments: oh, that rhubarb looks wild (including some crying and thump down emoji…). Just now I asked my mum for her old rhubarb cake recipe… Father’s Day is coming up soon…