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Ridding the world of rhubarb
The natural aging process will take the remaining few from nursing homes. One lone great-great-grandmother will survive to tell us all that rhubarb tastes great-great. She will offer her recipe for rhubarb-strawberry pie and we will each smile politely (because she is very old and that's how we were raised), but will each later admit to thinking other, less complimentary things.
Rhubarb tastes awful, Granny.
Why did you ruin that perfectly good strawberry pie with that crap?
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If you are under the age of 135 and still have a tongue, chances are that you have not experienced rhubarb. It sits at the pinnacle of the big list entitled, "Things We Ate When We Were Poor," a roll that also includes "Dirtflowers" and "That Dead Animal Under the Porch."
Back off, road kill lovers. I'm from West Virginia. I'm in your corner.
Why do I have this vendetta for rhubarb? Why am I taking valuable print space, normally reserved for updates about protection-from-abuse scofflaws and advertisements for lawyers who will help beat your DUI charge to beat the anti-rhubarb drum?
Because I care. I, being an amateur gardener and master hole digger, know the agony of rhubarb first hand. Our last house, the yuppie brick box in Carnegie, came with gardens included. In the vegetable bed were two rows of healthy, red-stemmed, recipe-sabotaging rhubarb.
It looked pretty.
We were told it tasted good.
That second part was a lie. Gummy and stringy, the inbred love baby of kale and cabbage, it ruined any dish it was included in and many it sat near on the table. Completely inedible in a cup of sugar, rhubarb also soon proved itself to be literally indestructible.
Like in-laws, once it came to stay, we could never get rid of it.
The first mistake was chopping it to bits and then turning the remains over, into the soil. I know, I know. We were young. Give us a break. That, as you can guess, merely made the demon stronger.
We followed by burning, excavating, nuclear holocaust, and lastly, bringing in a Catholic priest to perform an exorcism.
That didn't work. Turned out he grew up during the Depression and had a real fondness for rhubarb and dirtflower casserole.
Truth be told, the only thing that worked to get rid of that rhubarb was to buy a farm in the next county and move. We didn't warn the buyers. Every once in awhile I like to ride past the old house to see how big the rhubarb trees have gotten.
Soon enough, the last of the rhubarb lovers will succumb to nature. We survivors, together with the Marines, Dick Cheney and Will Smith, will then band together to rid the world of this evil menace once and for all.
And then? On to cilantro!
Rhubarb : 10/4/2009
I am 40 and I love rhubarb.....My grandmother made rhubarb only pie, no strawberries.....yummy....lol....it's true, love it !
