In the Kitchen with Monkey: Rhubarb Crisp

Rhubarb is one of my family's favorite springtime treats. We have a giant patch in our garden. The plant has stalks with giant leaves. The stalk is the only edible part of the plant. The leaves should not be eaten!

The picture below is complements of Purdue University.

There are plenty of ways to cook with rhubarb. My family's favorite is to eat it as Rhubarb Crisp! When we make this, it disappears within a few days!

First, we have to start by washing our hands. Thanks to my friend, Leah over at Beyer Beware sending me a great link to Target, we have cute aprons to wear while we cook too!

We started with the rhubarb.  I never really measure.  I just go pick and wash enough to cover the bottom of a 9x13 pan. 

After you cut up the rhubarb and put it in your 9x13, add a cup of sugar and mix it all together.

 

Take a separate bowl and melt a stick of butter and add a cup of brown sugar, a cup of flour and a cup of quick cooking oats.

Mix all of those ingredients together.  We use our hands to mix it up! Then crumble it all on top of the rhubarb. Bake in a preheated oven set at 350 for 45 minutes to 1 hour!  

We like it best with ice cream on top! Enjoy!

Where has the time gone?

I began anticipating my Monkey's preschool graduation about 3 months ago. Which means I've been crying about it for roughly 3 months as well. Just the thought of her walking down the aisle in her little yellow cap and gown made me want to grab her up and rock her as I did when she was a baby.

So I've been thinking alot about her growing up. My Monkey came into the world as a tiny, stubborn child. Although she looked fairly angelic and innocent! Despite having a fast labor, she was pretty content to stay put in utero and required a bit of coaxing to get out.

After she was born, she turned a great shade of yellow/brown and spent about a week in the big city's NICU. I spent the week crying as I had no idea what I had done wrong in the pregnancy and was so worried. We had left the little country hospital and were in a whole different setting in the big NICU. But she ended up being fine.  I learned alot about jaundice and heel pricks during the first 3 months of her life.  But she was really fine compared to some of the other mom's and their babies I met while in that NICU.

She was a happy baby! And I had finally had a child who looked like me! This picture of my Monkey looks so much like some of my baby pictures, even down to the the tongue sticking out of her mouth.

My Monkey has always been such a camera bug!

A trip to DisneyWorld produced a great picture of my Monkey!

Monkey is the child who loves to follow her Daddy around the farm. She really is good help!

My Monkey has always been the kid who has somehow ended up in my bed when I wasn't looking! Although her brother was here that morning as well. I find myself sometimes wishing she'd need to crawl in bed and just talk at night. I worry about the day when she won't want to talk to me, although I can't imagine that day will come.

This past Friday, Monkey graduated from preschool.

She has been blessed with the greatest preschool teacher around!

And she made some fantastic friends in preschool.

So she has now put preschool in the rear view mirror. And has moved full speed to getting ready for kindergarten.  My heart longs for those moments in the middle of the night when I can rock her back to sleep.  But I move forward knowing great memories will be made in the next few years.

A Hunting We Will Go

In all fairness, I first posted this as a guest blogger last week to my friend's Liz's blog. And seeing how I haven't had time to blog this week, I'm going to post it here as well. 

Growing up, it was a right of passage to go mushroom hunting.  Many Sunday afternoons, after we had been to church and had lunch, Dad would load my sister and I up to trapse through the woods. In the early years, my sister and I just goofed around. But once we got old enough to find mushrooms, we were good hunters! Dad still jokes he'd go stand near one and say "I think there must be some around here." But I like to think we found some on our own!

Now my husband and kids enjoy heading to one of our wooded properties that adjoin many different farm fields we plant each spring with corn or soybeans. We are on the lookout for the treasure morel mushroom. You can’t travel to any church service, coffee shop or farm commodity meeting this time of year without someone asking you how many mushrooms you have found.

My Farmer has taken the girls on a few different trips to the woods. With the amount of rain that has fallen and the few hours of sunshine we have had, The Farmer has been convinced the woods should be providing many more mushrooms than he has actually found. So imagine my surprise when he came home one night and told us all to grab a bag and follow him.

So our yard had not yet been mowed, thanks to the rain we have had. But the sunshine had produced morel mushrooms. A lot of them!

Both girls found quite a few hidden amongst the dandelions.

After spending a bit of time searching our yard, we brought our bags inside and counted 66 mushrooms in all!

Our favorite way to eat them is to wash them in salt water, rinse in cold water, dip in flour and fry in butter!

By no means is this a healthy meal, however we only indulge in this meal as we find the mushrooms. Thus far our 66 mushrooms have made a few meals. And I do run a lot to work off the calories this meal provides. Not to be left out, my Lion Cub, who is only 8 months old, has discovered a taste for mushrooms as well!

Don’t worry, I only took my hand off the sandwich to take the picture. He didn’t eat this whole thing!

If you have a better recipe for morel mushrooms, I’d love to hear it! Leave me a comment and tell me how you eat this spring delicacy!