I am rhubarb’s most adoring fan.

Throughout the season, in the spring and then in late summer, my weekly market run includes a big bunch of blushing stalks that I’ll cook promptly, once home, into a compote* I’ll eat for breakfast (with a gurgle of homemade kefir) throughout the week.

While compote is my standard use for rhubarb, I love it in a tart, too, and that’s what I decided to serve for dessert last week, when we had friends over for dinner.

My mother makes a fine one on the crisp pâte sablée I’ve shared in my book, with a thin layer of custard filling that is refered to as migaine, goumeau, or not at all, depending on the region. I walked in her footsteps for the most part, straying here and there to try a couple of new things.

In addition to the rhubarb stalks, I had a fresh bunch of lemon verbena that was looking at me with an expression like, “Um, hello?”

First of all, I recently received a copy of Catherine Kluger‘s little book on tarts, and I felt inspired to try her recipe for pâte sucrée (sweet tart dough).

The dough came together easily, and baked into quite the delicate crust, not too rich, not too sweet, and lightly crumbly in texture. I had major difficulties in rolling it out, but the recipe had nothing to do with it: it just happened to be a very warm day — we were going through a mini heatwave that would end in a thunderstorm later that night — and this is a notoriously bad state of affairs if your mission is to roll out pastry.**

Second, I wanted to add a flavoring of some sort to compliment the rhubarb: rhubarb + ginger is the pairing I had in mind originally (in the form of fresh and/or candied ginger, I hadn’t yet decided). But I also had a fresh bunch of lemon verbena on hand that was looking at me with an expression like, “Um, hello?” I didn’t approve of the attitude, but I had to agree their singing voices would harmonize perfectly.

I also applied two tricks I’d picked up while sifting through the comments below this post: 1- I macerated the rhubarb in sugar for a couple of hours so it would release some of its juices. These I reduced into a syrup and then infused with the lemon verbena.

And 2- I sprinkled the bottom of the par-baked crust with a little tapioca, to contain any excess juice from the rhubarb. Unless you’re looking really closely you can’t make them out in the finished product, but it contributes to the silkiness of the filling, and helps the crust retain its crispness. This trick can be applied to any tart in which the fruit might release too much juice during the baking (peaches, for instance) and it’s one I call upon for my savory vegetable tarts as well, though I’ll use orzo pasta (pâtes langue d’oiseau) or bulgur then.

The tart format really is a lovely foil for rhubarb; the best one, I would argue. It’s a humble, comforting dessert — there’s nothing intimidating about the rhubarb tart — that celebrates the complex tang of the fruit***, and in this version, the lemon verbena flavoring subtly accents its floral notes.

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* I enjoy the tartness of rhubarb, so I sweeten my compote very lightly, adding about 10% of the net weight of rhubarb in unrefined cane sugar. I combine the rhubarb chunks with the sugar in my cast-iron cocotte and cook over medium heat for about 15 minutes, stirring once or twice during that time. Then I remove the pot from the heat and let it sit covered for a while to finish softening while we eat lunch.

** When I mentioned this painful situation, Rachel shared the following tip: place an ice-filled tray on your work surface for ten minutes beforehand. It will lower the temperature of the surface (provided it’s not wood) and help keep the dough cool enough to work with.

*** From a botanical perspective, rhubarb is actually a vegetable. Maybe it could switch seats with the fruit-as-a-vegetable eggplant or cucumber or avocado, and then the world would be a less confusing place?

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This is part of a series on French idiomatic expressions that relate to food. Browse the list of idioms featured so far.

This week’s expression is, “Être serrés comme des sardines.”

Literally translated as, “being packed together like sardines,” it is a colloquial expression that’s used when people are squeezed into a very small space with absolutely no room to move. For some reason, I remember liking this expression a lot as a child.

Notice that serrés is in the plural form — the singular would be serré(e) — because this expression is always used to liken a group of people to a group of sardines, and never refers to a single individual, however sardine-packed he might feel.

Example: “Ils ont laissé trop de gens monter dans le bus ; on était serrés comme des sardines.” “They let too many people on the bus; we were packed together like sardines.”

Listen to the idiom and example read aloud:

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I’ve long been uneasy about spring onions. It’s the kind of produce that I feel deserves a special treatment that will make it shine — local scallions are in season but briefly before the onion part bulges and takes over the green stems — but I’m never quite sure what that treatment might be.

They taste too sharply onion-y to me to be served solo as a side vegetable, yet cooking them with other vegetables seems wasteful, because then their spring nature gets lost in the shuffle and they are reduced to playing the role of an expensive onion.

It occurs to me just now that using them in a stir-fry with noodles and a little meat or perhaps shrimp would be a fine solution (I’ve been watching Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and he does like his stir-fry), but for some reason I don’t really do stir-fries (though I’ve been watching Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and now I might do more stir-fries).

Piquant from the onion, hot from the ginger, and savory from the soy sauce, it is an outspoken topping that will amp up any number of preparations, Asian-inspired or otherwise.

This is why I was thrilled to add David Chang‘s ginger scallion sauce to my spring onion repertoire. The recipe is in his Momofuku cookbook, co-written with Peter Meehan, which I borrowed from my Hidden Kitchen friends*. It also happens to be excerpted on the Amazon page, so I suspect this might be the single most executed recipe from the book, and deservedly so: it is very simple (six ingredients and as many minutes of prep) and very good.

All you do is take a bunch of scallions, slice them finely, and toss them with fresh ginger and a salty-sour dressing. The resulting mixture David Chang calls a sauce, but you shouldn’t imagine a sauce in the conventional sense: it’s chunky, not liquid, but it is meant to be spooned over things, so it might best be described as a cross between a sauce and a condiment.

Piquant from the onion, hot from the ginger, and savory from the soy sauce, it is an outspoken topping that will amp up any number of preparations, Asian-inspired or otherwise, so it’s a great one to have up your sleeve.

In the book, it is presented as part of a dish of ramen noodles topped with (really quick) quick-pickled cucumbers, bamboo shoots, pan-roasted cauliflower, and torn pieces of nori seaweed. I’ve done a sort of take on that (with lo mein noodles and without the cauliflower or bamboo shoots), and we’ve also had it over various other things like tofu, rice, scrambled eggs, or steamed potatoes with smoked trout — the latter was particularly successful. Chang recommends it with grilled meat, too, and I can see how well that would work.

* Did you know my Hidden Kitchen friends have a blog now? Well, they do!

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I recently remarked to a sympathetic friend how difficult it is to buy fresh sage around here. There aren’t many sage recipes in French cuisine, so it’s not part of the classic range of fresh herbs sold at produce shops or at the green market. But I enjoy its flavor very much, so I decided I would try and find seeds to grow my own.

Only days later, I walked past the sidewalk display of Etablissements Lion on my way home, and noticed that they sold potted sage plants that looked exceptionally healthy. I couldn’t resist; I chose the most beautiful one and adopted it.

It now rooms with our blooming strawberry plants on the bathroom window sill, but it is so bushy I thought I’d better start thinking of ideas to put it to good use. And I did what any modern person would do: I turned to twitter and asked, “What do you like to do with sage?”

The response was multicolored and inspired, and I thought it would be a pity not to share it with you. Surely there are other owners of expansive sage plants who would benefit. So here’s a compilation of the suggestions I collected — my sincere thanks go to the twitterers who kindly contributed their ideas.

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