Foodlore Library

On Mother's Day, this story is to honor my mother who is a holy terror in the kitchen. I inherited her furious flare for throwing food around and leaving the kitchen resembling a war zone, yet winding up with something truly delicious! 

This photo is my mother with my little sis on our back porch in Idaho. This was taken during the days of her domestic goddess  (or as I mentioned prior, holy-terror-in-the-kitchen) phase when she almost single-handedly raised 7 children and baked breakfast and dinner including amazing desserts like the rhubarb crunch listed below!  How did she do it and remain sane? Good question. It was also during this time that she made her Hollywood debut as the star of Name That Tune (really, she could "name that tune in one note!"), returning back to Last Chance, Idaho from Hollywood, with lots of prizes including a trip to Europe with my father.

Rhubarb reminds me of a traditional Sunday dessert my mother often made in June and July.  Today, I made her Rhubarb Crunch. It's a gooey cobbler with a crunchy topping that helps me remember her! It was a recipe she learned from her own mother.

Rhubarb Crunch
My mom's well-loved recipe

1 cup flour
1 cup oats (not quick oats)
1 cup brown sugar
1 cube butter

(Mix together, add cinnamon if you'd like! You can also replace the white flour with wheat flour.)

Several (7 or 8) stalks of rhubarb

1 cup water
1 cup sugar (or half honey)
1 tsp vanilla

Put it together according to following steps and then cook at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes. Test rhubarb with fork to make sure it's soft.

Steps:

Take about 8 stalks of rhubarb
Cut off the edges and wash well



Cut up into cubes



Take the flour, butter and brown sugar and mix together.



Add 1 cup of sugar into water and heat over the stove until it's melted and hot but not boiling (I used 1/4 cup wildflower honey and 3/4 cup raw sugar.)

Put half of the crumbly mixture onto the bottom of a pan, layer with chopped up rhubarb, then pour on the sugar/water mixture.



Then top with the remainder of the crumbly mixture.



And bake for 1/2 hour at 350 degrees.

As a kid, Sunday dinners at my home were always memorable; the smell of pot roast cooked with onions & rosemary greeted us when we arrived home from our Mormon church meeting famished from sitting for 3 hours and eating only a meager morsel of bread (the sacrament.) But for mother, (who had 7 children) Sunday was a three- ringed circus trying to get us all rallied around the dinner table and fed while the food was still hot. Of course it helped that my Dad used his commanding bass voice to call for us. We'd all coming running like little mice from our rooms to perch at the table and pick at the food until my Dad caught us and told us to knock it off. We'd wait again for the dinner prayer. We always prayed over dinner.

I remember closing my eyes and though I was supposed to be imagining the God who provided the food and meditating on how grateful I was, I admit, I pictured the dinner table and the exact location of the mashed potatoes: deliciously soft with a square of yellow butter melting. I pictured this so I could be the first to grab it when the last Amen was said.

My mother was the kind of woman who involved all of us in cooking dinner and in preparing the table as well.

Dinner always consisted of something green (a veggie) something fried, some kind of bread and most of the time, something on the table that we considered very "local:" elk, antelope or trout my Dad had bagged in the woods or caught in the stream. We ate wild mushrooms. We loved morels and picked them close to the river beside to our home. And Idaho potatoes of course! We also ate canned fruit or veggies my mom put up the previous summer: pears, peaches, cherries, pickles or even something that our family friends, the Fosters, had brought us fresh from their garden in the valley south of our home. Produce like snap peas, radishes and rhubarb.

To this day I love rhubarb; it's the taste of home and the taste of summer. I'm always ordering it when it spy it on restaurant menus. It reminds me of mother and of the arrival of summer, which was always a welcome thing to a kid, like myself, who grew up in a place where the snow didn't melt until June.