Local Loot

I’m pretty sure there’s nothing better than pulling bright red rhubarb stalks out of your garden and turning them into a tangy, sweet, crispy, buttery pie. Well I just did just that. Actually, to be fair, it wasn’t my garden—it was grandpa’s. But the point is that they were literally growing in the ground just yesterday so they’re amazingly fresh and juicy and all kinds of wonderful. [Sidenote: did you know that eating a stalk of celery burns more calories than the celery has to begin with? Yep, that’s right. Negative calories.] Rhubarb is a vegetable.

Wait, what?

Yes, you heard that right. You may have been personally involved in one of those “is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?” debates and you may also know the answer. If not, I am happy to enlighten you. Tomatoes are fruits because they are—wait for it—the fruit of the tomato plant. Carrots are vegetables because they’re not the fruit of the plant, they’re roots. Grapes are fruits, lettuce is a vegetable (leaf). Bananas? Fruits. Oranges? Fruits. Kumquats? Also fruits. Beets? Vegetable. Kale? Vegetable. Rhubarb? Also a vegetable. Corn?

TRICK QUESTION. Corn’s actually a grain.

Okay, now that we’ve got that (mostly) cleared up.

I’m a huge fan of summer produce and think it’s loads of fun to spontaneously create delicacies out of whatever happens to be in season at the moment. Local produce is great in so many ways and it’s even better if you grow it yourself. Although it seems rather heartless to painstakingly plant, water, and tend your wee baby plants only to ruthlessly cut them down to cook and eat, that’s the (natural) cycle of nature and man do they taste good J

Anyway, back to the vegetable at hand (rhubarb, that is). I found this fantastic recipe for rhubarb pie with fillo dough [brief interrupting informational tidbit: fillo/phyllo dough is a super super super super super thin (yes, it really is that thin) flour dough that comes in handy little rolls of stacked sheets like this:

 

Ta da. Find it in the freezer section of your grocery store!

Fillo dough can be pretty daunting to work with at first but once you get used to it it’s really not that bad. All the fancy recipes warn you not to let it dry out and tell you to “cover lightly with a damp cloth after each sheet so it stays moist” and blah blah blah but I’ve found that to be entirely unnecessary. The sheets go down one by one and get brushed with olive oil or butter and you have to be reeeeeallllly gentle at first (even sprinkling instead of brushing the butter on) by the time you build a stack of about 3 or so you can go to town and brush with a fairly rapid clip, allowing you to (theoretically) finish before the remaining sheets have time to dry out or even realize what happened. Although it’s pretty time-consuming to layer and brush and layer and brush and layer and brush and well, you get the point, the end result is simply marvelous. It’s crispy and flaky and amazing. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…]

Fillo dough can be used for all sorts of things. It’s traditionally used in Greek cooking. I’m talking spankopita:

and baklava: 

 but you can also make little stuffed hot pockets and crispy apple turnovers and pot pie and CRISPY RHUBARB SOMETHING-OR-OTHER. I’m not sure what to call the end result here because it’s not really a pie (no crust on the sides) and it’s definitely not a cake (no batter) and it’s not a crisp (no oatmeal-butter-sugar crumb topping) but it’s definitely crispy and it’s definitely rhubarb so for now it’s a crispy rhubarb something-or-other.

Anyway, it was fantastic. And since a picture's worth a thousand words...

It was really quite simple. Like I said, I got the idea from a magazine but then I just threw a bunch of stuff together in a bowl and BAM (say it like Emeril) you have a house smelling like cinnamon and orange and rhubarb and a fantastic dessert on the table.

So get yourself down to your local farmer’s market (or garden) and retrieve some local loot. But wait! I don’t have a local farmer’s market! Actually you probably do. Check out this website: http://apps.ams.usda.gov/FarmersMarkets/ .

Oh, and if you happen to go to the Lake Mills (Wednesday) or Fort Atkinson (Saturday) markets, look for the Water House Foods table. Chances are I'll be working there.

Now go eat some celery.