I love spring/early summer, the sun comes out to play, flowers and trees are blooming and my favourite fruits come into season. I also love that it's the season of rhubarb. And this week I've made the most of it, cooking rhubarb in a number of ways.
First we had rhubarb fools, a quick and easy recipe stolen from Weight Watchers.
To make these you'll need 450g rhubarb, 1 bag (24g) of raspberry jelly crystals, 200ml of boiling water, 200g of greek yoghurt, 4tbsp of sugar (or sweetener) and a couple of handfuls of porridge oats. Chop the rhubarb. Pour the crystals and water in a pan, once the crystals are dissolved, add the rhubarb. Cover and leave to simmer for 10 minutes, until the rhubarb is tender. Transfer the contents of the pan to a food processor and blitz the whole thing. Leave to cool for a while then add the sugar to taste and the greek yoghurt. Blitz again. Pour in glasses and leave to set. Just before serving, put the oats in a pre-heated oven at 180ºC for about 10 minutes to toast them. Sprinkle on top of the rhubarb fools and enjoy.
After the fools came the classic combination of rhubarb and custard in the form of a cake. It was a baking experiment, one which I plan to enter in an upcoming baking competition so I won't be sharing my recipe just yet, or much about the cake for that matter. All I'll say is that it's a really good looking cake and it was truly delicious. Hubby and his colleagues got to be the judges of my first attempt.
Finally, we ended the week with a luscious crumble. I used a James Martin recipe and it turned out perfectly. I only used about half the sugar in the rhubarb mix as I like it tangy and I also used a half flour/half oats mix for the topping. I served it with a dollop of clotted cream ice cream but double cream or custard would have done the trick just fine.
Outside my rhubarb obsession, I have been experimenting with cheap crafts this week. Inspired by a post I saw on Pinterest, I came up with two activities for my toddler.
First I recycled a cardboard box, strengthened it with Duck tape then made a series of holes in it with the help of a scalpel and a knitting needle. Add a (dirt cheap) bag of pipe cleaners and hey presto, hours of fun for the little person, arranging and re-arranging the pipe cleaners in the different holes. Although I must admit, I'm still not sure who had the most fun playing with it, our daughter or her parents.
Next I chopped a cardboard tube in bits of different size and stuck them to the side of a cupboard then I gave our daughter a bowl full of (again, cheap) pompons. She loved chucking the pompons through the tubes and delighted in the watching them fall back in the container. It really doesn't take much to entertain a small person, does it?
I've also explored the latest teenage craze this week, rainbow loom bands. A bag of these bands costs less than £2 at our local store. I've used my knitting loom to make single band bracelets, which was pretty easy. Now I need to find more designs to challenge myself or I'm at risk of quickly losing interest.
That's it from me for this week. Enjoy the sunshine folks x
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