Betty's Rhubarb Crumble

Betty's Rhubarb Crumble

On Saturday we spent the morning downtown and visited our Farmers' Market. 

There we spotted some beautiful rhubarb and Brennan just had to have it.

I was all for it because I've never cooked with rhubarb and had always wanted to try.

The group we bought ours from had recipes to give away and we took one called

"Betty's Rhubarb Crumble".  Sounds great!

Oh, David.  How old is that Elvis Costello t-shirt you're wearing?  15 years?  20?

Rhubarb has got to be one of the strangest looking vegetables around.

So that begs the question.  Is it a vegetable?  Or a fruit?  I always hear of rhubarb being sweetened when cooking because it's so tart. 

Wikipedia tells me this:  Rhubarb is usually considered to be a vegetable; however, in the United States, a New York court decided in 1947 that since it was used in the United States as a fruit, it was to be counted as a fruit for the purposes of regulations and duties.

Anyway...

I tasted it raw and it was tart, but not that bad.  I had no idea how to prepare it.  Turns out you just clean it well and trim off the ends.  No need to peel.

This dish was absolutely delicious, but I'll be honest with you - Betty doesn't mind sugar.  In fact, you wouldn't know there was a vegetable/fruit in this dish.  And that's after I cut back on the sugar and butter.

Here's what we did:

We cleaned and sliced up the rhubarb into chunks.

Our one stalk was 4 cups.

Then we mixed eggs, flour, sugar, and salt and tossed it with our rhubarb, then placed it in a baking dish.

Then we made a crumble topping by creaming brown sugar, flour, and butter and sprinkling it on top of the rhubarb mixture.

Betty's recipe says to bake it at 350* for 1 hour, but ours was ready at 45 minutes.

You can certainly see the rhubarb in there.

This dish was decadently good!

As I mentioned above, I cut out a lot of the sugar and half of the butter from the original recipe.

You may have to play around with the level of sweetness you like.

Our version was plenty sweet though - and nice, sweet introduction to rhubarb!

Next I'll be looking for a rhubarb strawberry dish!

Double click to print as a 5x7 recipe card.

Enjoy!