Today I was planning to do a post about rhubarb, but the camera’s battery is flat. Here instead are some pictures I took a couple of days ago of the horses that have been brought into the field below our house.
They’re always shuffling the animals around so there’s enough for them to eat.
These horses come every year for their summer holidays.
They work in a riding school, which is tremendous drudgery
— being kicked in the sides all day long by ten-year-old girls who can’t ride properly — so they deserve the rest. They’re getting about six weeks, this year.
Afterwards, Alma took me down to the lake to see an enormous horse (she’d checked them all out already).
It’s about 175 cm high, which is smaller than a cold-blooded cart horse, but still very large compared to Alma — who’s 5′-8″ — and the horse behind.
A Bad Guide 
We had dinner out on Wednesday. My pudding was called “Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb”.
Wikipedia says: “The gritty “mouth feel” one experiences when drinking milk with a rhubarb dessert is caused by precipitation of calcium oxalate.”
I associate an odd “mouth feel” with some other foods containing oxalic acid (eaten with or without dairy products), but not with rhubarb.
My wife recently invented a strawberry-rhubard-oatmeal desert, but she hasn’t settled on a name for it. I believe that the oatmeal part is inspired by the memory of something called cranachan that we once tasted in Scotland.
I wonder if there’s anything to be done about it. It’s not a huge problem, but if I could slip something in that stops it precipitating…
Now I’ll look up cranachen.
I mean, spinach or chard can make my teeth feel funny, creating the illusion that the teeth are being roughened up by being dissolved by some powerful reagent, but I think I have now learned that that rough feeling is fine particles of a calcium compound … I’ll be on the lookout for that for that rest of the current rhubarb season.
The recipe for cranachan on Wikipedia does not accord very closely with my memory of the stuff; on the other hand, neither of the above has much in common with the new rhubarb concoction, either, beyond oatmeal and a bit of booze.
The dessert would be called “rhubarb crisp”, similar to apple crisp. Strawberries are often added to rhubarb pie here, along with a tablespoon or two of grenadine syrup. The crisp is much healthier than pie, as it has the heart healthy oatmeal instead of pie crust with shortening. If you put fat-free kool-whip on it, you now have a dessert approved by every heart association there is, but don’t tell anyone. I prefer ice cream, but I could stand to lose a few pounds too.
The oxalic acid in rhubarb is in the leaves, not the stalks.
I see now that the WP article on oxalic acid agrees with you about leaves — the same article with the quote about rhubarb and funny feel. Humph.
We’ve made things in past years that could have been called “rhubarb crisp” but didn’t have oatmeal. This year’s version is (intentionally) soggy, so we can’t call it “crisp”. I was surprised to find that cranachan is crunchy on top, because I didn’t remember it that way.
… just noticed that I typed “desert” before. Deserts are rarely soggy; I meant “dessert”.
It used to be possible to buy something called “non-oxalic acid” here. At least when I was a kid. I haven’t looked for it recently.
It was just a solution of calcium chloride. One’d add a bit of it to rhubard recipes to pre-precipitate the oxalic acid.