The Yellow House

I had my recipe picked out. I was all ready to make it and tell you about my new love affair with the BBC Food website, which, unlike other big recipe aggregation sites was actually useful, well-organized, and really original because of its British flair.

Several of their recipes hadn’t failed me yet, so when I got home from the market toting my first-of-the-season rhubarb, I pulled up BBC Food and found (under the ‘Afternoon Tea’ section for spring, no less) a recipe for warm ginger cake with poached rhubarb. I was sold. I blindly gathered all the ingredients, glossed over the instructions, and got to work, visions of a soft, gingery cake with sweet-tart rhubarb syrup drizzled over the top dancing in my head.

Something occurred to me as I mixed, though. There were a lot of eggs in this batter. And not much flour. And (reading the directions, now) what the heck is a “pudding basin”?
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I was supposed to post about something else rhubarb-related today. But one something rhubarb-related turned into something else rhubarb-related, and before I knew it, I was tired and sticky on an unseasonably warm day, wishing I had something cold to drink, and deciding to push photographing all the rhubarb-somethings until tomorrow.

This little number was born out of a tickle-me-pink rhubarb syrup that was the byproduct of this rhubarb baking spree I’m on. I couldn’t believe how it looked when I strained it out of the rhubarb that been poaching in it.

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Radishes–the pink or red ones, at least– rank high on my list of prettiest things sitting in a farmer’s market stall. Even if I didn’t like radishes, I feel as if I’d buy them and attempt to find a way I could palate them, just for the rosy pop of pink greeting me when I opened the fridge.

But I do like radishes. Which is fortunate, because you know how people always warn, “Never grocery shop on an empty stomach”? For me, I think the advice should be, “Don’t shop on a cold, drizzly day in April when you’re starved for color.” Because I took home three big bunches of the season’s first pink radishes, damp from the rain, dirt clinging to their leaves. And I’m pretty sure it was more for how they lit up the grey day than because I wanted to eat radishes every day for a week.

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The site that hosts my photos is having some issues, so we’re currently picture-less here. As much as I am panicking concerned about the fate of my data, I’m more distraught thinking about any people who might have wandered over here after receiving Julie’s veggie e-newsletter that featured my bok choy stirfry. What a bad first impression! I’m trying to get to the bottom of this, so please bookmark and come back soon. –S

Update: We’re back! Picture issues were related to the Amazon outages today. Thanks for your patience! –S

Ben and I just got back from a weeklong trip across the US. By train. Maybe this sort of thing isn’t for everyone, but for us, it was perfect. Time to decompress and see some corners of our own country’s landscape that we might never see otherwise.

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