Strawberry Rhubarb Cornbread by Lucy Burdette #giveaway

LUCY BURDETTE: We have this ridiculously large rhubarb plant outside the garden and I haven’t made a thing with it all spring. Since I was preparing cheesy green chili beans for supper, I thought this special cornbread might go well with it! We thought the result was quite delicious. If I was going to go crazy with experimenting, I might try more fruit and stir it all in to the batter. Let me know if anyone tries this?

Meanwhile, don’t forget to leave a comment below to be entered in the drawing for TWO Key West food critic mysteries, one for you and one for a friend. Number sixteen in the series is coming your way very soon!

INGREDIENTS

3/4 cup cornmeal

3/4 cup flour

1 and 1/2 Tbsp baking powder

1 Tbsp sugar

1/2 tsp baking soda 

1/2 tsp salt

Mix these dry ingredients together in one bowl.

2 large eggs

1 and 1/2 cups milk, plus 1 Tbsp white or maple vinegar

3-4 Tbsp butter

1 stalk rhubarb, chopped

1/2 cup strawberries, chopped 

Add the vinegar to the milk and wait a bit for it to thicken. (I've given up buying buttermilk, as I wasted too much of it.) Beat the eggs into the milk, add this to the dry mixture and stir until combined. 

 Meanwhile, heat the oven to 400 degrees. Drop the butter into the 8x8 inch pan you will use to bake, and melt it by popping the pan into the oven for a few minutes with the rhubarb. Sprinkle with strawberries. Pour the cornbread batter into the prepared pan and bake 15 to 20 minutes until slightly brown. Serve hot, with more butter if desired, or possibly a drizzle of honey. 

T-bone keeps his eye on the baby bunny

 A DELICIOUS DECEPTION, coming July 14 at a bookstore near you!

This cozy mystery expertly balances personal stakes with a fast-paced plot in a consistent Burdette fashion. It’s a suspenseful, heart-filled addition to the series that proves Hayley is just as effective at solving crimes as she is at critiquing menus. Netgalley reviewer

USA Today bestselling author Lucy Burdette writes the Key West food critic mystery series including THE MANGO MURDERS, A POISONOUS PALATE and A CLUE IN THE CRUMBS. Join her mailing list right here.

Rhubarb Cinnamon Loaf Cake @LucyBurdette

LUCY BURDETTE: We have a couple of plants in our Connecticut garden that really signal spring. Our shad trees blossom briefly—this is supposed to mean the shad (fish) are running in the river. Can’t vouch for that one! The chive plant is gorgeous in its greenery, and the rhubarb plant goes crazy about this time of year. I always feel badly if I don't use it a couple of times, so this is my first foray. I tweaked a recipe for apple cinnamon cake, adding some extra sugar because rhubarb is very, very tart. Next time I'd add even a bit more, plus some butter/sugar crumbles on top...

Ingredients

2/3 cup brown sugar, divided

½ tablespoon cinnamon

1/3 cup white sugar, plus two teaspoons

1/2 cup butter softened

2 eggs, lightly beaten

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/3 cup milk or buttermilk

2 cups fresh rhubarb, chopped (about 5 short stalks)

1 tbsp melted butter

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease or spray an 8x4 loaf pan. Fold a piece of parchment paper so it fits inside the pan, and butter that too.

Combine 1/3 cup of brown sugar with cinnamon in small bowl and set aside.

Cream white sugar, remaining brown sugar, and butter until fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla.

Stir together flour and baking powder. Add to egg mixture alternating with milk, starting and ending with flour. Do not over mix. Sprinkle the extra sugar on the cut rhubarb pieces.

Pour half of batter into pan, sprinkle with half the chopped rhubarb and half the remaining cinnamon mixture.

Stir the remaining rhubarb into remaining batter and scrape this into pan. Top with remaining cinnamon mixture.

Bake approx. 5-55 minutes. Check until a toothpick comes out clean.

Let cool 10 minutes, then use the parchment to lift the cake out and set it on a rack to finish cooling. Serve with ice cream, whipped cream, or exactly as it is!

Don’t forget to pre-order LUCY BURDETTE’S KITCHEN, Recipes and Stories from the Key West Food Critic mystery series...

Lucy Burdette writes the Key West food critic mystery series including USA Today bestselling and Florida book award winning A CLUE IN THE CRUMBS. You can order that wherever books are sold. 

If you’re all caught up, try Lucy’s first women’s fiction title, THE INGREDIENTS OF HAPPINESS.

Also follow Lucy on Facebook, and sign up for her mailing list right here. 

Rhubarb Crisp from @MaddieDayAuthor #giveaway

MADDIE DAY here with a yummy rhubarb crisp for you.

I know we've had a LOT of rhubarb recipes here lately, but that's because the plant is ripe in the garden. I figured there's nothing wrong with one more way to present that strange fruit/vegetable that can take over a corner of your garden and has poisonous leaves. (The smaller leaves in the middle of tis photo are the terribly invasive goutweed that's been trying to take over my garden for years. Grrr.)

Like book plots, there aren't that many ways to fix rhubarb, but the variations on a plot - or a recipe - are infinite. 

I really liked the touch of orange in this version, and the chopped pecans in the topping. If I'd had local strawberries in the house when I baked, I would have mixed the two fruits. Next time! 

I just got in a box of Christmas Mittens Murder ARCs, which includes my novella "Murderous Mittens." It has nothing to do with rhubarb, but I'd love to send one commenter an ARC. The three-novella collection will be out in late September.

Rhubarb Crisp

 Ingredients

Sugar is already mixed with rhubarb here. Salt not in photo.

6 tablespoons room temperature butter, plus more for greasing pan

2½ pounds rhubarb, cut into 1½-inch pieces (about 5 cups)

1/2 cup white sugar

1 tablespoon orange juice (I used a clementine for the juice and zest)

1 teaspoon orange zest

¾ cup brown sugar

½ cup all-purpose or whole wheat flour

½ teaspoon cinnamon, or to taste

Pinch salt

3/4 cup rolled oats

½ cup chopped pecans

 

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Grease an 8- or 9-inch square baking or gratin dish with butter.

 

Toss rhubarb with white sugar, orange juice and zest, and spread in baking dish.

Combine the brown sugar, flour, cinnamon, salt, oats, and pecans. Add the butter and smoosh together with a spatula or your clean hands.

 

Crumble the topping over rhubarb.

Bake until bubbling at the edges and beginning to brown, 35 to 45 minutes.

Serve warm or at room temperature with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream. Yum!

Readers: What's your favorite crisp or rhubarb dessert? 

I'll send one commenter an advance copy of Christmas Mittens Murder. Be sure to mention your email address so I can reach you if you're the lucky winner.

📕🕮📚

My most recent release is A Questionable Death and Other Quaker Midwife Mysteries, out in April 2023.

The next book will be Murder at a Cape Bookstore, releasing in August, 2023.

Following that in quick succession will be "Murderous Mittens" in Christmas Mittens Murder and Murder Uncorked, both featuring my new wine bar manager Cece Barton.

Check out all my writing!

We hope you'll visit Maddie and her Agatha Award-winning alter ego Edith Maxwell on our web site, sign up for our monthly newsletter, visit us on social media, and check our all our books and short stories.

Maddie Day (aka Edith Maxwell) is a talented amateur chef and holds a PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University. An Agatha Award-winning and bestselling author, she is a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America and also writes award-winning short crime fiction. She lives with her beau and sweet cat Martin north of Boston, where she’s currently working on her next mystery when she isn’t cooking up something delectable in the kitchen.

 

Spring Greens

Some years ago I was lucky enough to discover that the mistress of the real house that I use in the Orchard Mysteries, Olive Barton Warner (a distant relation), kept a diary for many years. The annual books are all in the local historical society, but I had a chance to copy two of them, including the earliest, written in 1880.

It’s a simple record of what the family (husband Eugene and daughters Lula and Nettie) did each day on a farm (110 acres) in western Massachusetts. The entries are short and matter-of-fact, but they provide some wonderful insights into nineteenth century life (although husband Eugene usually gets only a line or two).

The earliest volume reports that on Thursday, April 29th, 1880, the girls picked the first greens of the season, and Olive made two rhubarb pies, as well as a batch of raised doughnuts and a loaf of gingerbread and four other pies (she did a lot of baking! But alas, no recipes).

I thought it would be nice to honor her at this time of year, when Massachusetts fruits and vegetables are just coming to market. But I had to look up exactly what Olive might have planted that would be ready to harvest in April and May. Luckily I found a useful listing of seasonal vegetables in Massachusetts online. Here they are: arugula, asparagus, chard, fiddlehead ferns (I did give a recipe here for those—they’re available only for a short time each year), lettuce, nettles, new potatoes, parsley, pea greens, radishes, rhubarb, scallions, spinach, and thyme.

I don’t know what the weather was like in western Massachusetts in May of 1880, but it’s too chilly around here at the moment to think about making salads, even with fresh lettuce and such. That leaves me with . . . rhubarb, which Olive mentioned. Would you believe I have never cooked with rhubarb? But I guess it’s time to try. I looked through my cookbooks and came up with few recipes (although a lot of apple recipes suggest swapping out the apples and using rhubarb instead), and most of the cookbooks were later than Olive’s era. Then I remembered I had come upon an online collection of recipes from precisely that period, compiled from a Connecticut newspaper, and there was a recipe for baked apple pudding (and no rhubarb recipes!). So here is an authentic period recipe but with a bit of tweaking.

This is for you, Olive.

Baked Rhubarb Pudding

Ingredients:

3 cups of stewed rhubarb

1/4 pound (1 stick) of butter

sugar “to taste”

six eggs, well beaten

six crackers, pounded and sifted

To stew your rhubarb: Dice the rhubarb. 

Cook in a saucepan over low heat with 3/4 cup sugar until soft (you might need to add a little water in the beginning to get things started).

When the rhubarb is well stewed but still hot, stir in half the butter (1/2 stick). Taste for sweetness and add additional sugar if needed. Let the mixture cool.

Beat the eggs, and add to the cold rhubarb mixture. Beat well.

Pound and sift six crackers. (Note: I have no idea what crackers were available in 1881. Soda crackers? Saltines? Carr’s Table Water Biscuits? I bought three modern kinds and ground them up. The water biscuits (left) came the closest, I think.)

Butter a baking dish. Put in a layer of crackers, then a layer of rhubarb. Repeat until your dish is filled, ending with a cracker layer. Dot the top with bits of the remaining butter (yes, half a stick). Bake for half an hour.

The original recipe didn’t happen to mention a baking temperature, probably because nobody had a thermostat back then. I guessed 350 degrees, or a medium setting.

It seems to have worked, because the custard set up nicely and the top was lightly browned (with a lot of butter still on the surface). And I’ve discovered that rhubarb tastes better than I expected.

What about you? Do you cook with rhubarb? Do you have any favorite recipes for it?

A Late Frost, the 11th Orchard Mystery, will be released in November.

The story takes place just a bit too early for any new fruits or vegetables to have appeared in Massachusetts, but plenty of apple varieties keep well over the winter if you keep them cool, so they're available for pies.

www.sheilaconnolly.com

Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp #recipe @LucyBurdette

Right out of our garden!

LUCY BURDETTE: It's not every year that we are lucky enough to have both ripe strawberries and rhubarb in our garden. But this was one of the years, so how could I resist trying a crisp? The recipe started from Taste of Home, and they apparently found the first version on a Quaker Oats package.

Ingredients for the fruit part: 

3 cups sliced fresh rhubarb (this was about seven-ish stalks for me)

2 cups sliced strawberries 

Slightly less than 3/4 cup sugar

3 tablespoons cornstarch

Mix the two kinds of fruit together in a large bowl and stir in the sugar and cornstarch until well combined. (I think you could also substitute blueberries for the rhubarb and end up with a delicious Fourth of July dessert.)

Ingredients for the crumble:

1/2 cup softened unsalted butter 

1/2 cup brown sugar 

1/3 cup flour 

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 cup old-fashioned rolled oats

 

In a food processor or with a pastry cutter, combine these ingredients. Pulse until well mixed, and then sprinkle the crumble over top of the fruit in an 8 x 8" greased glass pan. 

 








Bake at 3:50 for 45 minutes until the filling is bubbling and the topping has browned. Serve warm or at room temperature with ice cream if you wish.

 





Oops, we did it again. We gobbled it down so quickly, I never remembered to take a photo until we were at this point... 







 

Lucy Burdette writes the Key West Food Critic mysteries.

You can follow Lucy on Facebook,
Twitter,
Pinterest,
and Instagram!