I spent a fair amount of time with friends and sometimes acquaintances turn out to be friends. As usual, we talk about food.
One of the evenings, three of us were to eat Thai food at Spice Club and walk over to see, “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” in Niantic Cinema. Because one of us hurt his back, we ordered pizza and I made a salad.
I like to make the salad dressing because I don’t like too much vinegar, but I wasn’t sure what might be available to make the dressing. There was a lemon in the refrigerator and the only vinegar was balsamic. I am tired of that, so I used the lemon. I asked if there was fresh garlic. There was, but it was in a plastic bag in the crisper of the fridge. It was sad and tired, but I found two cloves that were good enough. I also mentioned, not that anyone asked, that garlic doesn’t want to be in a plastic bag nor in a refrigerator crisper (and neither do lemons, by the way).
So we talked about grocery shopping. Neither Gil nor Max love grocery shopping as much as I do. Then again, maybe no one likes to go grocery shopping as much as I do. I always go with a list, but sometimes I actually make the list while I am parked in the lot of the supermarket, i.e., I just want to go grocery shopping and pretending I had a list means that I must go grocery shopping.
On one of my five-times-a-week supermarket jaunts, to get two tomatoes and a quart of Lactaid, I saw rhubarb and bought six ruby-red stalks and some anemic strawberries. I had frozen strawberry juice from last summer. I also have lots of Deborah Jensen’s crumble mix in the freezer. So I made three strawberry-rhubarb crumbles. Friends ate one, and I froze two, unbaked.
Here’s the recipe.
To make rhubarb: 2 pounds rhubarb, washed, trimmed at both ends and cut into 1-inch pieces. Place rhubarb into a bowl and add one-half to one cup of sugar, 2 tablespoons cornstarch and, if you like, one-half teaspoon of pure almond extract; stir together.
To prepare strawberries: Buy one pound of strawberries, remove leaves and part of the core. Wash them in a colander, halve the berries and put them in another bowl. Add a little sugar, toss them and let them sit on the counter for a few hours (or overnight in the fridge).
To make a crisp, use the following recipe.
Deb Jensen’s Perfect Crisp Topping
Yield: makes around 5 cups (put the rest in two small plastic bags, freeze them and save for another two crisps)
1 cup flour
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup oatmeal (rolled oats)
1 cup walnuts or pecans
1 cup almonds or pine nuts
1 and one-half stick (8 tablespoons) butter, melted
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Add all ingredients into a bowl and mix together with nice, clean hands. Place the rhubarb and strawberries in a buttered ovenproof glass or ceramic gratin (8″ by 8″ or a 9″ x 12″) and top with enough crisp topping to cover. Bake until rhubarb bubbles, about 30 minutes.
About the author: Lee White (left) is a resident of Old Lyme in a section of town where she and her house are the oldest members. She has been writing about restaurants and cooking since 1976 and has been extensively published in the Worcester (Mass.) Magazine, The Day, Norwich Bulletin, and Hartford Courant. She currently writes Nibbles and a cooking column called A La Carte for the Shore Publishing newspapers, and Elan, a quarterly magazine, all of which are now owned by The Day.