About a month ago I walked into the tiny Mr. Kiwi grocery shop near my house and spotted just the thing I’d been waiting for. A rectangular wicker basket filled with long, fuchsia stalks of rhubarb. The price didn’t matter, I was bringing them home.
Every year, in the few weeks before summer arrives I start to poke my head into local grocery stores waiting for this fleeting vegetable to appear. If you haven’t cooked with rhubarb before, it looks like an un-leafy chard or a more-jovial stock of celery. It’s poisonous when raw, yet, when you bake it, it transforms. What was once inedible becomes a tart, mouth-puckering partner to fresh summer berries (even writing this sentence my mouth is watering!).
Within a few days of acquiring my stalks, I dove into another pre-summer ritual, picking up the first drop of my CSA. It’s a bi-weekly delivery of fresh veggies and fruit from Windflower Farms, all the way upstate past Albany. Tucked within the lettuces and garlic scapes was a box of little red strawberries, the first of the season, and delightfully punchier than their Trader Joe’s counterparts.
With the two key ingredients now collected, it was time to set about the task: making a strawberry rhubarb crisp. It’s the kind of dish that makes me nostalgic. I remember my mom pulling her own streusel-topped crisp, hot and bubbling, out of the oven when I was little.
It’s not an inherently difficult thing to bake. It’s really just chopping, adding a little lemon juice and cornstarch, then topping with whatever combination of oats, sugar, flour, cinnamon, and butter I desire (I add nuts if I’m really feeling wild!). Here’s a recipe that’s similar to what I do, I might just go light on the sugar to let the tartness really shine. Once it’s all assembled and in the oven, I hover nearby, waiting for the moment I first start to smell the deep floral notes of strawberry and the rich scent of butter melting away.
I finally pull it out to let it cool. Then I cut a slice, savoring the eye-scrunching sour flavor in contrast with the crunchy crust. I eat it for breakfast, I eat it for dessert with vanilla ice cream, and within a few days it’s gone!
Here’s the naughty little trick that I swear makes this dish even better: I only make it once.
It must happen when rhubarb is finally in season, but before it’s so hot out I can’t bear to turn on my oven. It also tastes better if I’m making it when I’m actually supposed to be answering emails, paying bills, or any other of those very serious adulty chores that tend to consume my weekdays.
Summer to me feels like the prime season to pack with these little one-off indulgences. Today, in the middle of my heat-wave induced malaise, I’m pestered by the subtle anxious hum of all the infinite potential opportunities I’m missing. A string of sunny days taunt me as I sit at my laptop doing my usual work. The strawberry rhubarb moments of summer — to look forward to before and savor afterward — are a salve for the days when I feel like a petulant child cooped up inside.
I don’t need to be on an extravagant vacation, or “out east” for the weekend to make summer feel like it did when I was young and fleetingly free from the confines of a classroom.
A short list of things that I think can embody the same rarity and summery satisfaction of strawberry rhubarb when moving through life:
Finally breaking out that wedding guest dress I splurged on but only have 1-2 occasions that I can actually wear it.
Planning an entirely unnecessary 5pm meetup with a friend to enjoy a glass of wine in the warm weather.
Packing all of the ridiculous beach accessories I have hiding in my closet waiting for a sunny day to lug them all to the Rockaways.
The first whiff of green air when I get out of the city for the weekend.
The sun on my toes as I step out of the nail salon with a ludicrously capricious neon orange pedicure.
Taking a book to the park, turning off my phone, and actually reading for any amount of minutes over 15.
Swapping my heavy-duty winter duvet for my summery linen sheets.
With my tart little crumble behind me until next year, here’s what I think I love most: It’s a way to welcome a new season — a little moment I look forward to for the months before it. Not just because of taste, because of the decadence of a silly ritual. I appreciate keeping my tart little dish as something rare and precious instead of indulging in it over and over again. I eat my slices and my stolen mid-afternoon bites until my baking dish is empty and rhubarb season swings around again.
I hope you find your own satiating summer bites in the midst of your own malaise.