Rhubarb Crumble

Our neighbor has successfully fended the deer off her garden and accordingly bestowed an armful of rhubarb stalks on us the other day (yeah, twist my arm). So when I spotted a rhubarb recipe on Food Blogga, Triple Berry Rhubarb Crisp, I immediately sent it Lisl's way since she is the crumble queen in this household. Part of the confusion over name comes from nationality issues -- what Americans call a crisp, the Aussies and Brits call a crumble (the topping usually has oatmeal, brown sugar and butter, and sometimes nuts).

I was assigned the task of putting together the crisp topping. That is about as close as Lisl will let me get to baking, since I am normally unable to follow cooking directions without veering off into new directions (or over the cliff). We were missing shredded coconut, almonds, and ground ginger, but replaced the almonds with walnuts and the result still came out great.

Lisl also had to do an ingredient swap, as we discovered we did not have corn starch in the kitchen, so she used a very small amount of flour. The fruit filling ended up a little more runny than Lisl wanted, but that was purely an aesthetic issue -- the taste was fabulous, and went perfectly with some vanilla ice cream.

I won't elaborate on my own food experiment tonight. Let's just say that surely even Richard Blais had disasters on his way to discovering great new flavor combinations! That's what I'm going to tell myself anyway.