Category Archives: Food

Mmm… strawberries!

While I was at the H Street FreshFarm Market on Saturday, I bought two pints of  gorgeous – and delicious – strawberries, as well as some rhubarb. I’ve never baked any sort of strawberry-rhubarb anything, but I’d had a really good piece of pie earlier in the week, which had given me a hankering for more of that flavor.

Being as I was feeling a little bit lazy, however, I didn’t want to go to the trouble of making a pie crust and decided to make a crisp instead. I headed over to Pinterest, where it seems I find all my recipes these days, to see what I could find. I did a search for “strawberry rhubarb” and was immediately served up dozens of yummy-looking photos.

I began clicking through all of the non-pie images, looking for one that linked to a recipe that included only ingredients I actually had on hand. I settled on this one, thinking I had a lot of almonds and not very much oatmeal. As it turned out, I had at some point used nearly all my almonds and had, in fact, laid in a spare box of oatmeal, so my supplies were almost exactly opposite of what I thought.

So, I decided to improvise. The original recipe called for a cup of toasted almonds and a half cup of oatmeal; I instead used the scant half-cup of almonds I had and bumped the oats up by a quarter-cup. I also added a teaspoon of minced lemon peel, since a lot of the other recipes I had looked at had a bit of citrus (varied pretty equally between lemon and orange) in the topping.

Going back to my “feeling a little bit lazy” problem, I decided to cut down the number of dishes I used by baking the crisp in the same Pyrex bowl I had put the fruit in after slicing it up. It was by no means the 9-inch square pan called for in the recipe, and as a result, my crisp topping was way too thick – very much out of proportion to the fruit.

(I know, right? Too much topping? I had no idea this could even happen, given that I looooove the crisp part!)

In hindsight, I also think I could probably have used the whole second pint of strawberries, since they weren’t the most generously-filled to begin with. Overall, though, it was totally delicious and I would make it again, but in a proper baking pan.

The final product. Yum!