Rhubarb Crumble Pie
This is what the recipe is for.
Ingredients:
Grocery stores – about 1 dozen
Farmer’s market – 1
Rhubarb – 2 cups
A pie crust I guess
Some flour?
Crumble topping fixins (butter must be cold)
Instructions:
1. Realize you have never tasted rhubarb.
2. Search grocery store for rhubarb. Find none. (You are not sure what rhubarb looks like.) Try a farmer’s market next.
3. Have a nice lady at the farmer’s market explain to you that rhubarb doesn’t grow in Texas because it has to ice over in the winter. Feel shamed and buy fudge for your mom so it’s not a wasted trip. Also make it a first date. Maybe drop a taco on the ground and say you’d still eat it if you were alone. (You will not remember this, but he will.)
4. Make sure the guy you guess you’re dating now knows nothing about you except that you can’t find rhubarb anywhere. Check stores outside your usual range because he’s offering to check for you and you don’t think you’re There Yet.
5. Visit your family in another state for a week. (Bring the fudge for your mom.) Search three grocery stores in their area for rhubarb. Find none.
6. At this point, remember that you can call grocery stores. Spend three days working yourself up to call grocery stores.
7. Suddenly find courage and call five produce sections while sitting in your car ready to go. Be told they either don’t carry rhubarb or have run out but there should be some on the truck coming in on Thursday.
8. Call again on Thursday. Be told there was no rhubarb on the truck.
9. Return home. Go to the grocery store for normal reasons and find two sad fistfuls of stalks next to the strawberries, sitting on a shelf like someone dropped them there and forgot. Think about how logical that is since nearly every recipe you looked up combined rhubarb with strawberries.
Out of shot: strawberries
10. Take pictures and send them to half your contacts list. Hear a kid nearby ask his mom if that’s red celery. Excitedly tell the kid that that’s rhubarb. Receive mirrored excitement from the kid.
11. As you chop the rhubarb, read a lot online about which parts of the plant are poisonous. Tentatively conclude that the green part of the stalk is safe but you also might die.
Chop that poisonous plant.
12. Make a rhubarb crumble pie. Cut butter for a crumble topping for the first time in your life. Make a huge mess and realize the recipe specified that the butter has to be cold.
13. Take pictures of the pie. Bring pie to the guy you’re dating. Go to a renaissance faire with your friend and bring her pie to eat in the car. Tell everyone how and where rhubarb is grown, its relation to celery, and how one accounts for the water rhubarb holds without making pie soggy.
14. Go on a rhubarb spree. Make mini pies. Make tartlets and be quietly resentful when your friends don’t eat them all. Make muffins that are the best thing you’ve had in your life, but make tiny, condensed muffin patties when you try to recreate them for the guy you’re dating.
What monster could say no to tartlets.
That cinnamon topping, my God.
Yeah, that’s the stuff.
15. Occasionally see rhubarb at the store and stroke it covetously until it vanishes from stores again. Wait with patience and dignity for rhubarb season to come back.
