Feast your eyes on the deliciousness that is my Hubby's strawberry rhubarb pie. Made with his tender hands using only the best
Horse and Buggy CSA rhubarb and strawberries. Schhhhhhhlup!
Was meandering home today through the heart-in-your-mouth country hills that are my neighborhood, listening to
Glen David Gold's* new book,
Sunnyside on the ol' iPod. His words are like elixir - I swear when I saw he had written a new book it was Christmas morning. I jumped up and down in the local B&N, clapping my hands like a leetle gurrrl.
Carter Beats the Devil was one of my all time favorites. Imagine Charles Dickens meets Stephen King with a healthy dose of
Stephen Millhauser. Add a dash of Fitzgerald with a sprinkling of
Tom Robbins. This man can yarn better than an old timer holding court on the General Store's porch.
Anyway, Gold mentions strawberry-rhubarb pie at one point. Some poor sap who'd just been beat all-to-hell-black-and-blue sees this just-out-of-the-oven perfection and slams his entire paw into it like he's Little Jack Horner. Ate the wad of pie goo, licked his fingers, and thought, "What a GOOD boy am I!" (okay, not really, I added that part).
The passage was so descriptive it reminded me my own sweet thang had baked a rhubarb treat for us a few weeks back. I photographed it from every angle, cursing the whole time at my inability to capture its sweet-tart goodness - and then ate it. We finished the entire thing in a night. In my rhubarb-induced stupor I TOTALLY forgot to write about it. There the picture sat for weeks, languishing. It took ol' Glen David's mastery of the written word to remind me. I blame it on the pie. Twas so damn good I plumb forgot to describe it. It also causes me to descend into unneccessary colloquial "country tawk" (as you can see).
Forgive me for sounding too much like
Joy Turner, but that pie was SO GOOD! Sweet red berries hit you first, and then BLAM! the tart of the rhubarb. It knocked my socks off so much I insisted rhubarb become a prominent fixture in our first garden. Luckily it's easy to grow and propagates with the ease of a horny rabbit. Hubby tells a story about his brother who as a child was tilling the garden and dug up all his father's prize rhubarb, thinking they were weeds. No matter, the stuff quadrupled overnight and came back ten-fold the next year. They were eating rhubarb on everything for eons.
Hope our little plant is just as hardy. We're in the midst of a thunderstorm you see and there our rhubarb sits. Still in its tiny plastic cup, freshly purchased from
Edible Landscaping, on our back porch. Being pummeled by penny-sized hail - and me too chickenshit to dodge the things and save my little pie-making paradise. Sigh. Wish us luck. The above picture may be all we have of the 2009 rhubarb harvest...
* I positively LOVE that I'm linking to a blog he wrote about why he doesn't blog...
