Blueberry Toddler - YUM!

From the “isn’t-that-cute-but-also-horrifying” archive of Things Kids Say When They’re Three comes the following:

Always with the white clothes in blueberry season...

“What would you like to eat for lunch today?”

“Toddler.”

“What’s a toddler?”

“It was yummy.”

“A toddler was yummy?”

<Nods>

“A toddler is a little kid, like you.”

<Nods> “But I’m big.” <cries>

“OK, yes, you’re big. But I don’t think you ate a toddler.”

“I did!” <cries>

“When did you eat a toddler?”

“When you cooked it.”

“Honey, Mama wouldn’t cook a toddler.”

<Tearfully> “You did, Mama! I ate it!”

After I went over the prior week’s grocery list and mentally reconsidered our plans for preschool, I figured out that he wanted COBBLER. Of course he did – this is a perfect cobbler recipe, and we should throw temperance out the window whenever any kind of fruit comes into season and eat this for breakfast and also have it for dessert every single night and get into fights about the last serving.

It scales up (and down) beautifully and there’s not a single fruit I can think of that wouldn’t be delicious in this recipe (OK, maybe bananas. Or kiwi). There are no difficult ingredients and it’s easy to make gluten- and dairy-free. It’s so rich that it’s almost impossible to overcook, even if you’re drunk around a campfire with your friends by the time it goes in the oven; your beer-soaked future self will be grateful. But do please taste your fruit, because the only way to make this slightly less than totally perfect is to over-sweeten it.

From How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.

Blueberry Toddler

4-6 cups blueberries or other fruit, washed and picked over
1 cup sugar
8 Tbsp butter, cold, cut into bits
½ cup flour
½ tsp baking powder
Pinch of salt
1 egg
½ tsp vanilla extract

 Preheat the oven to 375. Toss the fruit with half the sugar and set aside. IMPORTANT: If you are using a sweeter fruit – for example, the most perfectly ripe peaches ever – use less sugar so your filling isn’t too sweet. Put the fruit in a lightly buttered 8-inch baking pan or a round cake pan.

Combine the dry ingredients in the bowl of a food processor and pulse to combine. Add the butter and process for 10 seconds, until mixture is well blended. Add the egg and vanilla and pulse to combine.

 Drop the dough by tablespoons onto the fruit (don’t spread it out evenly). Bake until golden yellow and just starting to brown, 35-45 minutes.

 

Summer Favorite: Kill the Rhubarb

I never ate anything with rhubarb until my father-in-law brought a grocery bag full to the house in Northport, courtesy of a vigorous plant in his backyard. I had no idea what to do with it other than strawberry rhubarb pie, but David isn’t a fan (he says it’s always too sweet). And even though this was years ago and we could still eat gluten with wild abandon, I had no interest in dealing with a pie crust that day. That month’s issue of Gourmet magazine had a feature story on a restaurant in North Dakota that included something called Rhubarb Crunch, which was basically fruit with an oat streusel topping. Seemed simple enough.

And it was! The filling is just the right amount of sweet, the proportion of topping to filling is perfect, and it doesn’t have any weird or hard-to-find ingredients, which makes it a winner for cabin/cottage/anyone else’s house and/or unfamiliar grocery stores – situations that tend to happen to me fairly often during the summer.

The first time I made this, David and some friends of ours were watching Loony Tunes in the room next to the kitchen. Turns out it’s nearly impossible to resist chopping in tempo with “What’s Opera, Doc?” and “kill the wabbit” promptly became “kill the rhubarb.” We’ve never called it anything else and I have to sing this every time I make it.

Everyone we’ve ever served this to has loved it; it comes together in a few minutes, the leftovers are delicious, and ice cream is the only way it can possibly be improved. We lost the recipe for a few years and have happily rediscovered it recently; David even agreed to adding strawberries last time, which was wonderful and not at all too sweet. The prolific rhubarb plant was moved from the house in Auburn Hills to the house in Oxford some years ago; now that David’s mom is selling and moving closer to the rest of us, I’ll be sure that Papa’s rhubarb plant finds a new home in our yard.

From Gourmet magazine, July 1997, where it was unimaginatively titled “Doris Gulsvig’s Rhubarb Crunch.”

Kill the Rhubarb

1 ½ lbs rhubarb (or 1 lb rhubarb and ½ lb strawberries)
¾ cup sugar
1 Tbsp cornstarch
1 cup water
½ tsp salt
½ tsp vanilla
1 cup flour (or your favorite GF blend)
¾ cup oats
1 cup packed light brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
½ cup butter, melted 

 Preheat the oven to 350 and grease a 13x9 baking pan.

Trim the rhubarb (and strawberries, if you’re using them) and chop into ½-inch pieces. This works out to about 5 cups of fruit, and yes you can use different fruit or frozen fruit and it will be delicious. Put the fruit into the baking dish.

In a small saucepan, stir together the sugar, cornstarch, water, and half the salt. Bring it to a boil and simmer, stirring, about 3 minutes or until it’s thickened and clear. Stir in the vanilla. Pour over the fruit in the baking pan.

Stir together the remaining ¼ tsp salt, flour, oats, brown sugar, cinnamon, and melted butter. Sprinkle evenly over the fruit and bake for 1 hour.