Rhubarb is the new breakfast.

It kept selling out in the first hours of the market. Pounds of red stalks, sitting in tubs behind the farmers, reserved for customers who had had more forethought than I. For three weeks I kept missing the rhubarb. So when I finally arrived at my local farmer's market while one of my favorite farmerstands still had red piles of the bitter plant on their tables, I bought two pounds of it. And then I had two pounds of rhubarb. And no plans.

Pie is, of course, the traditional thing to make with the brilliant stalks. It's usually paired with strawberries, to add sweetness and flavor to the mild, bitter, and somewhat stringy rhubarb. And I like it a lot. Maybe I'll go there. But it's been rather hot of late, and I've been trying to avoid using the oven.

Plus i was in New York a few weeks ago, to watch my little sister perform a crazy, awesome, intense play with lots of dildos, and while I was there, I stopped to get some shaved ice with a friend of mine. The awesome shaved ice dude was using a rhubarb syrup, and I was surprised at the delicate taste that resulted. And thought, "hey, I could do that. I could do that and then use it for drinks!"

I made two different syrups, one just rhubarb and the other with an additional mix of ginger and orange zest. After checking with the usual food blogs and doing a few google searches I used this recipe as a base, which is also where the idea for the ginger came from.

This is a very subtle syrup - sweet, not very strong, and we kept adding more to our cheap, sparkling wine so that we could taste the rhubarb. Turns out, the reason it's so rarely seen on its own is that rhubarb is a fairly bland, mild flavor. Although very pretty.

Adding the ginger, and about a tablespoon of orange zest helped considerably. Although my love of all things ginger has already been documented here, so take that recommendation with a grain of salt.

For me, the big success was the remaining solids - mixed together (and therefore rather gingery) they make a pretty lovely jam!

So we had rhubarb jam-stuff and biscuits and rhubarb-mimosas with our coffee and chorizo con huevos the next morning.

Rhubarb: It's what's for breakfast.

Rhubarb Syrups

Boil, then simmer for 20 minutes:

4 cups (1 and 1/3 lbs) chopped rhubarb

1 cup sugar

1 cup water

Strain (ideally through cheesecloth) and refrigerate. 

Retain solids and use them as you would jam. 

For rhubarb-ginger syrup, boil, then simmer for 20 minutes:

2 cups (2/3 lb) chopped rhubarb

6 or 7 slices of peeled, fresh ginger, about 1/3 inch thick (maybe about two inches of ginger root?)

1 tb orange zest

Strain and refrigerate. 

Retain solids and use them as you would jam. 

For drinking, combine:

1 part chilled rhubarb syrup

3 parts chilled, cheap sparkling wine

The sweet deliciousness of mass murder

Jews are notorious for kvetching about the trials and tribulations of being Jewish. Everyone is always ostracizing them, banishing them, trying to obliterate them from the face of the earth - it's a rough legacy. Most of the well-known Jewish holidays celebrate situations where one of these scenarios was narrowly avoided - rather solemn occasions that extol the extraordinary survival abilities of the Chosen People.

So it makes sense that a holiday where no Jewish people were harmed in any way is a little less formal. That a holiday where the Jews not only saved themselves from their oppressor, but got to exact revenge as well is a cause for joyous, raucous celebration. That a holiday where the Jews got to turn mass murder around and slaughter someone else for a change demands lots of noise, hundreds of cookies, and copious alcohol consumption. And the Torah itself demands generations of joy and celebration, so much that even most rabbis - even Orthodox rabbis - will allow congregants to dress in drag for one day out of the year.

That day is Purim, and I may have gone a bit overboard on the cookies this year.

When I called my friend Julia to discuss hamantaschen dough, we both managed to recommend the same recipe to each other - one that we'd both made and discussed the year before. We like it because of the butter (many hamantaschen recipes, on account of being kosher, are made with oil which is probably why so many Jews don't like hamantaschen) and also because of the funny little drawing of Haman with the hamantaschen hat. It's unclear how many cookies the dough recipe makes, since they can be different sizes, but I multiplied it by six (the photo below) and then made another double batch, and it made approximately a million cookies.

We made two different sizes of cookies, and forgot to count, so I don't have a very clear estimate. But I had about 17 or 18 people who all ate quite a few cookies, and managed to get through maybe half of them. Maybe. Next time, for the same number of people, I'd quadruple the dough recipe and count on some leftovers.

The cookies are filled - traditionally with fruit or poppy seeds - and there's a lot of lovely recipes floating around. Variety is always good, so we made quite a few.

This prune recipe is filled with additions, making it less like something your grandma might eat to stay regular and more like something delicious.

I used this apricot recipe as a base, and added some raisins and candied ginger (about half a cup of each) for a little kick. Next time I'd skip the raisins and add more ginger, although as someone inclined to eat large chunks of candied ginger on a regular basis, that could be a personal preference.

A lot of people really like chocolate, and if you're someone who finds that a little dull and also has something of a ginger fixation, it's quite easy to add some pieces of candied ginger to this basic chocolate recipe. Or just dip some ginger in the chocolate and eat it without the cookie. That's okay too.

I also cut some apples into slices, covered them in sugar and cinnamon, and then cooked them in a pan. Cut into small pieces (not puréed) they made a nice turn-over sort of cookie

You can also use any sort of premade jam - the apple-beet hamantaschen were surprisingly sweet and delicious. And the lemon curd was my favorite store-bought flavor. 

But perhaps my biggest stroke of genius was picking up a container of dates and a few blood oranges at the store. I didn't have any specific plans for them, but cooked together with a little orange juice and some sugar, they made by far my favorite flavor of the day.

I didn't pay much attention to amounts, but I think it would be hard to go wrong with this combination. The orange balances the sweet of the dates, the juice adds enough liquid to soften everything before it goes in the food processor, and the sugar - well, it may not have even been necessary. Depends on your blood orange. Mine was a little sour, so I added a little sugar.

Cooked together for ten minutes or so, and then puréed, this one almost didn't get turned into cookies. It's one of those flavors that makes you lose track of the world for a second as it hits your tongue - just enough kick to shock your taste buds into action, not enough tart to ever stop eating it.

It's also real pretty.

And then all that's left is to fold the cookies into little triangles (really mash down those tips too - they like to come undone in the oven), bake them until their edges are golden, and eat all your mistakes (and most of the blood orange-date filled ones) to hide the evidence.

Make sure to coerce some friends into helping you fold - particularly if you've vastly overestimated how many cookies you need. Remember to feed them before the party starts. And after forcing 24 cups of flour into the standing mixer, you may need to change your shirt.

Then have a drink and retell the glorious story of Esther, how the Torah asks us to remember with joy and celebration the time the Jewish people triumphed over evil by using the tools of mass murder and sexual coercion, and how an evil man's hat inspired fruit-filled deliciousness for generations and generations of drunken, costumed Jews and their slightly confused goy friends.

There may have been some goyim this year who went home with the idea that Mordecai ordered Esther to organize a ménage â trois with Haman and the king in order to save her people, which isn't quite canon, but these things happen when the Torah tells you to drink yourself to confusion.

Happy Purim!