A Year In Redwood

I promised at the start of the year that I was going to start trying out new recipes, or at least, go back to some old ones that I haven’t done in an age.

I have been doing so, but have hardly posted any of them!  My apologies!  Only thing I can say is that there is a back-log of nice recipes and I will get around to posting them eventually! 🙂

I like the idea of having stories behind plants, etc. in the garden. It is nice to point at something and say, oh that came from such a garden or whatever.

So the story of rhubarb in this house….

I mentioned to a former boss that we wanted to get some rhubarb!  He duly obliged by arriving to work a few days later with a LARGE bag full of rhubarb plants!  His comment “you wanted rhubarb – you got rhubarb”.  So we had rhubarb – 13 plants….. and I subsequently read that 1 plant is sufficient for the average family!

Eh! You can imagine just how much rhubarb we have each year!  So rhubarb tarts are in the freezer, rhubarb and ginger jam in the press.  I’ve made rhubarb chutney – but wasn’t too enamored with that!

So it was good to find a recipe for rhubarb icecream.  This is Domini Kemp’s recipe from the Irish Times a couple of weeks back.  It is truly delicious!

Ingredients:

• 300 g chopped rhubarb stems
• 50 ml water
• 2 tsp stem ginger in syrup, finely chopped
• 4 egg yolks, beaten
• 170 g caster sugar
• 100 g butter, cut into cubes
• 290 ml Greek-style yoghurt

Method:

Put the chopped rhubarb in a saucepan with the water, gently poach until it breaks down.  Pass through a sieve to extract the juice.  Mush it with the back of a wooden spoon to squeeze all the juice out.

In a clean saucepan, heat the rhubarb juice along with the chopped ginger, eggs, caster sugar and butter.  Mix really well and eventually it will thicken enough to coat the back of the spoon.  (This is the tiresome part, you do need to stand over the saucepan and stir all the time.)

Season with more ginger syrup or sugar, if necessary (I didn’t).

Allow this to cool, then stir in the yoghurt.  Mix well and freeze in a container for a few hours.

I did make the rhubarb compote and ginger meringues to go with this too!  Will share those recipes later.