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.