Weekly Food Challenge

We had a friend over for sunday dinner yesterday because she's moving to Sweden and we're going to miss her. For pudding, we had Rhubarb grumble. The rhubarb was TECHNICALLY groan by my dad on his allotment, but I'm making an executive decision that this counts.

You will need:
- an oven and a lasagna dish or similar
- a hob and a saucepan
- some rhubarb - I don;t know how much in weight, but I used 5 stalks. They were big fat stalks though, so you might need more at supermarket size.
- some normal white granulated sugar
- 175g plain flour
- 110g muscovado sugar
- 110g butter
- some powedered cloves
- some powdered cinnamon
- custard (to serve)

Method:
- chop the rhubarb up into 1 inch lengths and put it in the saucepan with a little granulated sugar, on a low heat with the lid on.
- the rhubarb will start to break down and go mushy. Stir it up and check for sweetness. Add sugar to taste. You'll probably want it reasonably sweet, because the topping is not going to be overly sweet.
- once it is all mushy, cook it a bit longer (still on a low heat) to reduce it down a bit. You don't want it too liquid.
- put the stewed rhubarb in the bootm of the lasagna dish and leave to cool while you make the crumble topping
- put the oven on to preheat at about 180c
- mix together the flour, muscovado sugar, butter, cloves, and cinnamon with your hands till you get clumpy breadcrumb consistency
- put the topping on top of the rhubarb and shove in the oven till you get rhubarby bits bubbling up through the topping and it's lovely and brown
- eat with custard

OK, so, I had 800g of Rhubarb, a bottle of champagne we got free at Christmas, and a jar of Opies' stem ginger in syrup to kill. This is what I did:

Firstly, cut the rhubarb into 1cm chunks, and threw it in a big pan with 300g sugar, 600ml water, and all the syrup from the jar of stem ginger. Bring it to the boil and then let it simmer for 15-20 minutes, until the rhubarb lumps are tender and the liquid is pink and rhubarby. You now have some nice tender rhubarb chunks and a lot of pink, sweet, rhubarb-with-a-hint-of-gingery liquid, and can move on to the actual recipes:
( Rhubarb Fizz Jellies )
( Rhubarb and Ginger Muffins )
( Rhubarb Bucks' Fizz/Mimosas - with picture )
( Rhubarb Gin Cocktail )

So there we go, four nice easy recipes to use up some store cupboard staples. I think I might have to send some of the muffins to school with daughter, though...