Well, not entirely.
He said: "I like it. It's something different."
He ate a whole bowl of it, and then another. (It was filled with beef, after all, and he is a Prince.) The rest of us couldn't be brought to finishing ours, nor indeed proceeding beyond bite one. The dish in question was ground beef and onion and rhubarb, over rice. Persian. Iranian. 1001 Nights. Exotic. New to me. It had also needed a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice, which sent it jolting over the sourness richter scale. During its preparation, I began to panic. I thought, if I add some chilis and then something sweet, I can make it hot and sour and spicy, and save this trainwreck.
But it just tasted like beef in a lemonade flavor base with rhubarb in it, over rice. And kinda spicy.
The sort of thing a crazy and heartbroken and clueless person bakes for their child to take to the Appreciate Other Cultures potluck, and the poor kid is forced to secretly scrape the pyrex dish out near the staff parking lot in the dark before the buffet even starts and never, ever tell and keep the secret with them forever, beginning with when she asks how they liked it, afterwards.
(Post Persian Beef and Rhubarb experiment. Demoralized and hungry, I would need about two weeks to recover. Still searching for a dish of savory rhubarb. Less avidly, though.)
So I returned to the familiar territory of my youth: the familiar muffin territory, where everybody knows your name. Muffins are cupcakes with chunks added, by the way. Muffins are to stew what cupca
kes are to soup. Muffins? Meh. Seen it all, muffin-wise. The big, the mega, the jumbo, the mini (so dry, barely edible) and everything in-between. There are particular organic-Hippie-based, small-mountain-town cafes in Colorado (where all the pierced waitresses have been to Burning Man at least once) that specialize only in muffins, believe me. Raspberry muffins whose floppy innards look like a crime scene. Lemon muffins always but always teamed with poppyseeds. Chocolate chocolate muffins: Hey!! Bleh. What's so special about the muffin?These rhubarb muffins are different, because here, the tangy zestiness of the rhubarb finds its perfect mate in the sweet and rich lemon vanilla batter. Opposites come together and their dance simply works. It's as if the plainest Jane and Joe at the Arthur Murray Beginner's Course Graduation Night turned out to be able to rock Argentinian Tango like nobody's business. Who knew?
325 degree oven, or 180 in Europe. Use regular size (not jumbo) muffin liners in a muffin pan.
1/2 pound butter (2 US sticks, or 1 Euro block minus 2 Tablespoons)
2 cups granulated sugar
4 large eggs, at room temp.
2 T lemon zest (just cut very fine sheets of lemon zest away from the rind, taking care to leave all white pith behind, then very finely mince. Please don't buy a special tool for this.)
2 T fresh lemon juice
3 cups chopped fresh rhubarb
3 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 t salt
1 cup whole milk
Mix the flour, soda and salt together and set aside. Cream together butter and sugar, then add lemon bits. Mix eggs in one at a time, beating well after each addition. Mix in half the milk, then mix in the dry flour mixture. End by mixing in the rest of the milk, and then stir in the rhubarb.
Fill muffin liners scantily to the top. (If you like your baked goods really sweet, sprinkle more sugar over the top of the muffins, otherwise they have a pleasantly middle-European subtle sweetness. ) Bake 20ish minutes or so. The muffins should be quite done on the top, very golden brown, and/or check for doneness with a toothpick or skewer.
Also: Stuart took these to his Class Breakfast, and they all disappeared without a trace. I know that they were greedily eaten, because...they are rhubarb muffins and not messed-up Persian Beef with Rhubarb in a lemonade chili sauce.
