Front Porch: Indestructible rhubarb finally meets its match in online recipe

The rhubarb season has begun.

Over the decades I’ve made crisps and pies, breads and muffins, sauces, and, most favored among family members, jams – with just rhubarb alone or mixed with other fruits.

My garden giveth. I taketh. I baketh.

I’ve thinned the herd, so to speak, and no longer have rhubarb plants in two areas of my yard. But always on the lookout for something new to do with my rhubarb, I turned to the internet.

Google something once, and suddenly all sorts of things begin appearing online on that subject, forever and ever, it seems. One recipe caught my eye, and I tried it … on the morning friends were coming over later in the day.

Failure!

For the first time , at least with using rhubarb, a mess emerged from my oven. I had other things to do that day, so it was too late to start anew. Fortunately, I had a frozen chocolate cream pie that could thaw in time, so that became dessert.

How could I fail with my old friend rhubarb? In our neck of the woods, it’s the easiest plant in the world to grow. It pretty much doesn’t matter the soil, the only way to kill it is to pour a bag of lye on it or beat it to death with a shovel.

That plant has a will to live. Even in the area where I dug out numerous plants, remnants kept popping up for years. I stopped watering there and let garden debris accumulate in the area, and this year, when I cleared it off, there were a couple of little stems in one spot still trying their best to live.

I couldn’t help myself. I started watering it, and it now looks like I’m going to have one sole plant across the yard from where my main rhubarb grows.

Rhubarb is also hard to ruin when cooking with it. Normally. The only thing that can go wrong, for the most part, is how much sugar to add. Some rhubarb is more tart than others, and it does get tougher later in the season. But I’ve worked with these same plants since forever, so sugar isn’t an issue.

The new (to me) recipe was for a rhubarb custard bar. I assembled it per the directions (no deviations the first time I make a thing; time to experiment later) and popped it into the oven.

I confess that it didn’t appear quite the way I thought it should. It seemed awfully eggy looking. So I double checked the recipe.

I had done everything it called for. I had things to tend to, so off to the oven it went.

As it was cooking, I decided to take a minute to check the comments people provide to recipes that arrive via Facebook. Yes, yes, I know – that should have happened preassembling and precommitment to the oven.

The first comment said, “This is an incomplete recipe,” and the writer went on to comment that this kind of thing occurs commonly with online recipes. Yikes, I was cooked now.

But, more important, how was the rhubarb cooking?

The writer provided the correct recipe, which I then checked with other reliable sources. I was off on the amount of rhubarb and eggs, and way off with the milk.

Out of the oven it came. I let it cool. Then Bruce and I tasted it. The flavor was not rhubarby enough, and the texture was gummy. Bruce, ever the person to put a positive spin on things, ventured that he thought it was “edible,” especially if it had a big dollop of vanilla ice cream on it.

I did explain to him that I wasn’t going to serve something deemed “edible” to friends … and hence, the rescue chocolate pie.

I told the story to our friends that evening, and, after they stopped laughing, they wanted to taste the “edible” desert. So I served them each a bite or two.

They kind of liked it. We’ve known them more than 50 years, so I believe them.

And they ate both bites on their plate.

And, bless Bruce’s heart, he finished off the edible dessert (we have to be careful with that term) during the week … with ice cream.

Between the time I write these words and you’re reading them, I will have served the corrected recipe to some other friends.

I’m hoping this time it will be truly edible.Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net