WERNKE: Rhubarb, toxic weed or wonder crop?

We created some pretty good meals in my mom's kitchen when I was a kid. Some meals were known for easy prep, some for cheap eats and still others primarily for family tradition. Cabbage burgers, well-known now as Runzas, were a family favorite, but required most of a day's time and effort to prepare from scratch. Liverwurst, commonly confused with Braunschweiger, was a cheap source of protein and iron, but few in the family would go back for seconds.

Rhubarb would shoot up in two or three of those categories about this time of year, usually the easiest, cheapest and most tasty for all eight kids and a few guests. At first slim, rosy and tender as a baby's pinky finger, the stems often got away from us and ended up looking more like giant celery stalks with the leaves gone bad. It was one of the few times I was turned loose with a machete-style butcher knife in my hands, hacking away at the neighbor's stash behind their garage.

The strong, tart taste might scare away a less adventuresome or hangry child, but like most neighborhood children in the '60s and '70s, we would eat nearly anything. We made mud pies with chalky orange brick dust and dandelions for garnish, swallowed wasps (unintentionally at times) and were known to spit if the stinger didn't go down quickly enough.

Caught midway between finger and hand's width, the rhubarb stems could produce a bountiful variety of desserts and condiments for the cost of a 10-pound bag of sugar. A rhubarb sauce over vanilla ice cream was a frequent treat for my children, as well. Each night, while I frittered away my free time at the kitchen sink, their dad would supervise showers then not-so-surreptitiously sneak into the girls' rooms with dishes full of "rhubarb goop," warm from the saucepan.

They'd huddle together, a flashlight playing about under the bedcovers. The sweet girlish giggles permeated the house as surely as the smell of rhubarb sauce, bubbling on the stove. But the best treat was their surety dad was fooling mom into thinking they were asleep. I was just happy to have a few minutes alone after dinner some evenings.

In the dark ages, when I was a preteen, rhubarb was stretched into a cobbler, a crumble or a crisp, as we called it. The recipe appears only slightly complex to me as a lone, non-cook nowadays, but it was easily divided between three cooks and made not only quick work, but family tradition instead of a chore to feed the crowd. Mom diced the rhubarb, my sister made the crumble and I created the syrup from sugar, cornstarch, water and vanilla.

Sweetly, the concoction simmered softly on the enormous gas range top for hours, or so it seemed. As a gangly adolescent, my domain was limited to the front burners and my impatience might see the saccharine syrup get the best of me, before it became thick and clear. A scorched syrup was never acceptable and I'm sure neither sugarcane nor sugar beets grew in the neighbor's backyard.

In a strange juxtaposition with tomatoes, my research says rhubarb is a vegetable, not a fruit and 2,700 years ago was as prized as cinnamon, opium and saffron along the Silk Road's trade route between east and west. Today, it's recognized as an excellent source of fiber, packed with vitamins and minerals. If you were to eat 10 pounds of the leaves, you might die, but no one said anything about 10 pounds of rhubarb goop, strawberry-rhubarb pie or my favorite, rhubarb crisp.