Rhubarb season is at hand. Iris and I got some at Stillnovich Corner Produce at Pike Place Market last week. Stillnovich’s is my favorite rhubarb in town; they grow it on their own farm and sell it cheap, which is good, because I’m going to need a lot.

After last year’s rhubarb crumble adventure, I swore I’d never need another rhubarb recipe. Iris and I brought that rhubarb home and made a crumble right away, and it’s still my all-time favorite dessert.

But there was leftover rhubarb, and Laurie reminded me about Dana Cree’s rhubarb compote. It’s simple to make and really does take 13 minutes, 17 seconds. If you cook it longer than that, it explodes.

On Sunday, we had our usual French toast, but instead of syrup we spread the slices with rhubarb compote. Awesome! Later that day, for snack, I had an Eggo waffle with rhubarb compote. It’s also great on ice cream or, even better, stirred into Greek yogurt. I’m sure there are many other things I should be doing with it, such as bathing in it.

Luckily, I stopped at Stillnovich today and got a couple pounds of rhubarb, enough for another crumble and another batch of compote.

In fact, it was an awesome day at the market in general, even though I didn’t bring Iris along today. I’m making this fennel recipe from The Wednesday Chef tonight to go with some mini-frittatas, so I grabbed a fennel bulb and a Meyer lemon. At Bavarian Meats, I got Iris some landjäger, the very chewy German pepperoni that is a current obsession of hers.

I was thinking about morels and ramps for the frittatas, but Frank’s said that ramps aren’t in yet and I should check back soon. They had some early morels at Sosio’s, but I’ve had mixed results with early morels before and these were $20/pound, so I guess I’ll wait until the Broadway farmers market and see what Found and Foraged has on opening day, May 13. The frittatas will be cremini and shallot. As Iris has been saying lately, “That seems reasonable.”

Whenever I shop at the market, I have the same thought as when I nail a funny one-liner (in real life, not online): if my life were a TV show, this is pretty much what it would be like all the time.

The first food piece I ever wrote was a review of Good Dog/Bad Dog: Sausages For All, in downtown Portland. My friend Brian Covey and I, editors at our school paper (The Cardinal Times, Lincoln High School) were wandering through downtown one night in the 1991-92 era and came across this new place. We were easily lured in by the promise of meat. It was great. We befriended the owners, brothers Ted and Brian Gamble, and wrote a review of the place for the paper. As I recall, we tried to sneak the phrase “damn good sausages” past our hard-as-nails faculty advisor, Mr. Bailey. I can’t remember whether we succeeded.

My favorite meal at GD/BD was the “mag chair”–that’s the Chairman of the Board sandwich, a sausage patty with mozzarella and tomato sauce, made with their “magma dog” extra-spicy Italian sausage. Later they allowed you to order any sausage “facemelter style,” with sauteed jalapeños and Tabasco sauce. Not everything at GD/BD was spicy, but I don’t think I ever ordered anything that wasn’t.

Laurie just emailed to tell me that the downtown GD/BD closed in October. Ted and Brian had already sold it years ago, but I’d been after that and it was still good. There’s still a location at the airport (past security, which is too bad, because the airport is near Laurie’s parents’ house) and one at Washington Square mall in southwest. I can’t vouch for the quality of these, but they’re worth a try.

If I had a time machine, I’d go back to 1992 and find my younger self, assuming I could pick him out among all the longhaired kids listening to _Nevermind_ on their Discmen. “Younger self,” I would say, “I have news from the future: writing about sausage is going to become your career.” I wouldn’t mention the Kurt Cobain thing.

Chocolate Jesus

> Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, fumed, “It’s an all-out war on Christianity.”

Yeah, Christianity had a good 2000-year run until Chocolate Jesus ruined it.

I thought of three ways this story could get even better:

1. The hotel claims that they shuttered the exhibit because people kept eating Chocolate Jesus.

2. The Catholic League provides a complete list of unacceptable Jesus-sculpting materials.

3. Jesus returns to Earth in delicious chocolaty form, and Bill Donohue is *so* embarrassed.

Recently I asked, in a post about frozen potatoes:

> Is there a web site devoted to revealing which convenience foods are good and which are terrible?

Still haven’t found it, but I thought of a couple of other convenience foods I can highly recommend.

One is polenta in a tube, or as Iris and I call it, a chub. (“Dada, where’s that chub of polenta?”) I’ve been getting it at Trader Joe’s for $2. For breakfast yesterday, I sliced off about seven slices and cooked them in a skillet with butter. No matter how much of this I make, it’s never enough. Iris will eat polenta until she’s full even if there’s bacon on her plate. The thing I’ve noticed about chubbed polenta is that, presumably because of the high water content, it takes much longer to cook than I expect–it ends up being about ten minutes per side, which only heightens the anticipation. When I was a kid, my mom occasionally made fried cornmeal mush for breakfast, and this is basically the same thing.

Next, I guess this isn’t exactly a convenience food, but someone needs to speak up for Monterey jack cheese. For a long time, I had dismissed jack as a cheese for people who don’t really like the taste of cheese. Then I tried it while testing this enchilada recipe, and was surprised to find that jack worked much better than cheddar for this recipe. The cheddar browned too quickly and turned into sort of a parody of itself, tasting a bit like a Better Cheddar cracker. Again, it’s the water content.

Dismissing jack, I realized, is like tossing out your cream for being not enough like buttermilk. Jack stakes out a middle ground between undeniably cheesy cheese and process cheese. Or between cheese and butter–think of it as an unfermented dairy product and it will serve you well. Incidentally, I also tried a Mexican process cheese in the enchiladas and didn’t like it. Last time I went to [Tat’s Deli](http://www.tatsdeli.com/) I got the traditional Cheez Whiz on my cheesesteak. I prefer the provolone. So I can only take this man-of-the-people act so far, but count me as pro-jack.

This week’s Culinate column is about oil.

> At the risk of turning this column into one of those “everything currently in my desk drawer” pages from the early days of the Web, I would like to share which fats I keep on hand and what I use them for, and speak up for lipid diversity in the kitchen.

[Chewing the Fat, Part I](http://www.culinate.com/read/bacon/Chewing+the+fat*2C+part+I)