Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble, gluten-free

Before today, I had never eaten rhubarb. I knew a little about it - it was a late spring fruit (vegetable?), glossy ruby in color and often paired with strawberries. But rhubarb has never knowingly passed my lips. Somehow, though, I became fixated on baking a strawberry rhubarb pie. I have been obsessed with seasonality lately, and have been skulking around Pittsburgh muttering "Peas! Spinach! Strawberries! Scallions! Rhubarb! Strawberries!" You know, like a crazy person.

Enter a week of trying and failing to obtain the necessary ingredients from farmers markets. I finally succeeded yesterday, biking to the Citiparks market in Bloomfield and picking up a backpack-full of tasty produce and some wonderful runny goat yogurt. At the stand for the yogurt, I tasted a dense and flavorful feta, and also a tiny cup of lovely pink yogurt, flavored with... rhubarb! I tasted it and immediately knew that my big plan for a rhubarb-including dessert was a Very Good Idea.

When using gluten-free dough, crumbles are much easier to work with than pie crusts. There is a lot I would rather do than struggle with a fragile, tear-prone, absolutely-refuses-to-roll-out-properly dough. This crumble is so easy - the most time consuming step is washing and chopping the fruit. You mix the chopped fruit with some sugar, lemon juice and cornstarch, whip up a topping from flour, baking powder, sugar, and melted butter, dump it all in a pie dish and bake.

A note on liquid/cornstarch: my strawberries were extremely ripe, and very juicy. Adding the sugar pulled out all that liquid, resulting in something that more resembled strawberry-rhubarb soup than a pie. I decided to skip half of the lemon juice for this reason. I was nervous about all this liquid and added about 3.5 tablespoons of cornstarch, not wanting to add much more for fear of a gluey filling. Even though the filling was very liquidy, it baked up almost a little bit too firm. I guess the lesson here is don't worry too much about how liquidy your filling is!

Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble, gluten-free (adapted from... where else? Smitten Kitchen)

Topping:

1/2 cup sorghum flour

1/2 cup tapioca or potato starch

1/3 cup almond meal

1 teaspoon xanthan gum

1 teaspoon baking powder

2 tablespoons white sugar

4 tablespoons demerara/turbinado/raw sugar

zest of half a lemon

8 tablespoons margarine or butter, melted

In a medium-sized bowl, mix together all ingredients except for the margarine/butter. Pour the melted butter over the dry mixture, stirring with a fork until you form "pebbles" of various size. Refrigerate until needed.

Filling:

1 quart + a few more strawberries, washed, hulled, and quartered

1 1/2 cups of rhubarb, washed and chopped into 1-inch pieces (I chopped a bit smaller and used a bit more, which was fine)

Juice of half a lemon (increase to juice of one whole lemon depending on juiciness of strawberries)

1/2 cup of sugar (adjust to taste and the sweetness of your strawberries)

3-4 tablespoons cornstarch (adjust according to juiciness of strawberries)

pinch salt

Preheat the oven to 375.

Combine the chopped fruit in a large bowl, or right in the deep 9-inch pie dish, if you're feeling daring. Add everything except the cornstarch, and decide how much cornstarch to add based on the juiciness of the mixture.

Dump the fruit mixture in the pie dish if you didn't start out there, and sprinkle the crumble evenly over the top.

Cover a baking sheet with foil, place the pie dish on top, slide into the oven, and bake for 40-50 minutes, or when the topping has started to brown and the fruit is bubbly. Let cool on a rack before serving, and store covered in the fridge.