The Weekly Pannier, December 24, 2009

This week we received two panniers, on account of the holidays. We contacted our farmer, who was taking a week off from delivering baskets, and asked for two, to tide us over until after the first of the year. We were rewarded with a supply of vegetables and fruits that more than satisfied our desire for variety. In this week's pannier: eggs, broccoli, leeks, lettuce, parsley, céleri rave, sweet potatoes, turnips, endives, a butternut squash, fennel, curly cabbage, rhubarb, avacados, oranges, clementines, kiwis, grapefruits, and a box of organically grown chestnut meat.

Not knowing much about rhubarb -- Garrison Keillor and Meryl Streep singing "Be-bop a re-bop, rhubarb pie" is what first comes to mind -- I decided to do some research and found that the plant has quite a story to tell. It's the stalks that you eat, not the leaves, which contain small amounts of the poison oxalate. Apparently, you have to eat huge quantities of the leaves in order to get the toxic effect, but why take the chance. Besides, the leaves are not spoken of as being all that good to eat anyway. Rhubarb figures in traditional Chinese herbal medicine, but mostly for the root, which when dried makes a good laxative. The leaves and stems may have some anti-oxidant value.

Another thing about rhubarb is that it is highly acidic, so it would not be a good food for people who are watching their acid intake. The acidity perhaps explains why the chopped stalks have to be cooked with lots of sugar in order to be worth eating, such as when making the famous Rhubarb Pie.