Rhubarb is a gift

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Hello friends, welcome back to A Newsletter. What’s new with me? Thanks for asking. Well, the thorn is I’ve officially stopped br**st f**ding (breast feeding) and retired The Pump, and so I feel both free and a little depressed. It might not be an exaggeration to say I’ve never felt this many high/low conflicting things at once, but I am, how you say “working through it.”

The rose is that this week we started to give Charlie solid foods to taste, and giving a tiny baby food and new flavors for the first time is as wonderful as I had dreamed it would be. So far his favorite is a lemon slice, with masticated blueberry a close second. Mother Boy! If you want to hear me talk about the baby experience some more, you can find this interview I did with Spread The Jelly here.

Today, there’s a recipe for a lovely little rhubarb cake that is really best described as “delightful,” and also the perfect receptacle for all your rhubarb curiosity. Next week, two not-quite-definitive but from-the-heart lists of places to go in both upstate New York and Maine. See you then.

Rhubarb, an extremely easy on the eyes, hyper-seasonal vegetable that bakes like a fruit, is a true wonder of nature. That color, that texture, that acidity, that versatility! Yesterday, when baking this cake, my friend Kate nibbled on it raw (which I love) and said it tasted like a “Strawberry Celery” if that ever existed (it doesn’t, but wow, what a description). I will always buy it if I see it with ambitions of doing something remarkable with it because I can not and will never get over how something so gorgeous just grows wild and we get to eat it. In my pastry chef days I tried repeatedly to turn it into sorbet or ice cream maintaining the vibrant pink color without relying on something like hibiscus or beets to keep it pink and failed several times, realizing it’s perhaps best baked into cakes or used to fill galettes (here’s the galette from Dining In– it’s from an Australian website, but hey, we love grams. They say marzipan, but it was originally made using almond