Roasted Rhubarb
from http://wednesdaychef.typepad.com/, excerpted from Italian Two Easy by Rose Gray's and Ruth Rogers

FG: This recipe interested me because the blogger, Luisa Weiss, usually cooked her rhubarb like Grandma Radloff did by cooking it down into a sauce. This sauce can be eaten as is, used as a topping for ice cream, added to yogurt, etc. By roasting the rhubarb, though, the rhubarb stays intact, yet has the same sort of flavors and uses that the sauce does. Definitely worth a try.

From Luisa Weiss' blog: "Last week I bought my first rhubarb of the summer, planning to stew it with sugar on the stove top as I always do, turning it into a soft, sweet, puckery mess of greenish strands to be stirred into yogurt and eaten with a spoon. But then I remembered Amanda Hesser's recent article on rhubarb and a recipe she'd excerpted from Ruth Rogers's and Rose Gray's book, Italian Two Easy. Now, some people find their cookbooks too simplistic, too easy. To me, those two ladies have just understood that good, humble food is about sourcing great ingredients and using the lightest touch necessary.

In their recipe, lengths of rhubarb roast briefly in a vanilla-bean-infused broth of orange juice and Demerara sugar. I had to improvise, with neither vanilla beans nor oranges in the house. I cut up my rhubarb, spread the lengths out in a glass baking dish, zested half a lemon over the rhubarb, squeezed in the juice, sprinkled a bit more sugar than called for to counterbalance the sour lemon and dribbled in some vanilla extract. I tossed the whole lot around, then slid the pan into the preheated oven.

After 25 minutes, I pulled out the pan. The rhubarb was meltingly tender and bathed in a delicious vanilla-scented sauce . . .what really made me giddy was the fact that I'd finally stumbled on a way of cooking rhubarb that didn't reduce it to the usual muddy puddle of cellulose. Instead, the lengths kept their rosy integrity intact and were as pretty to the eye as they were to my palate. This trick is going into my kitchen arsenal. I don't know that I'll ever cook rhubarb any other way again."

Roasted Rhubarb

14 ounces rhubarb
1 blood or navel orange (or 1 lemon)
2 vanilla beans or 1 teaspoon of pure vanilla extract (or more to taste)
3 tablespoons Demerara sugar (more if you're using the lemon)
2/3 cup creme fraiche, for serving (optional)

1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Cut the rhubarb into 2-to-2 1/2-inch pieces and place in a medium bowl. Finely grate the zest of half the orange over the rhubarb and then squeeze the juice of the whole orange into the bowl. Split the vanilla beans and scrape out the seeds and place both in the bowl. Add the sugar and stir to combine.

2. Pour the rhubarb into a baking dish and arrange the pieces so that they lie flat. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes. Remove the vanilla pods. Serve with creme fraiche.

Serves 4