Rhubarb Rapsody to the Rescue

My neighbor has a lot of rhubarb in her yard. The last few years I've noticed it's gone untouched all summer long. Crying shame. Something had to be done.

Bella looked out to the rows o' rhubarb. She wishes she could get over there and play in it. She can't. But I can.

So, I went over there this morning and took advantage of the rhubarb.
"Yes, please" said the neighbor. "My children don't like rhubarb, so I don't really do anything with it."
"Thanks so much," I said.
Then I took my box and my gloves and got to work.

Here's a before shot of one particularly lovely bunch. What a beautiful plant!

Here's the same plant once I had a go at it. I left some bits for later.

Here's another row that I combed through a bit. You can see the section I hadn't touched yet - where the plants have already gone to seed.

By the end of the jaunt in the garden, I had two boxes full of lovely stalks.

Then I went over to Chris's house, where we prepped the barb for baking. and canning.

We made:
• one batch of rhubarb pie filling (yummy stuff - when it's November and I want a rhubarb pie, all I have to do is open one of these jars and dump it in a pie crust and cook it). This involved cooking up a syrup sort of mix and pouring it over already packed rhubarb, then putting those cans in a water bath for 15 minutes.
• one batch of rhubarb sauce. This is pretty much just rhubarb and water and a little sugar (though we experimented with some Splenda version as well - trying to make healthier versions). This will be good over ice cream.
• 4 (!!) pies - 3 strawberry/rhubarb supreme yummyness and 1 straight rhubarb

One of the pies stayed with Chris. One of the pies went to the neighbor with the patch of rhubarb. One of the pies went to another neighbor who had a bunch of people visiting who needed a pie.

This pie went with me do a dinner and a piece of it went into my stomach. Yum.

A pretty successful day of rhubarb. And now that I did some maintenance to the patch, there will be more coming! Yeah!!