My husband has been travelling a lot for work over the past few weeks, so I have been adjusting to life as a single diner. For most of the past year I’ve been cooking for four so it’s a case of scaling down - not one of my natural talents. However, after learning that lesson the hard way by ploughing through four nights of lentil bolognese on the trot, I’m getting into the swing of things.
The first night I was alone in the house (slightly concerned that would be the night the house ghost would choose to emerge and haunt me forever) it had been a long day and there was a reduced baguette crying out to me from the supermarket that found the perfect partner in a reduced hunk of brie. God bless the yellow label section. I lit a couple of candles, had a glass of wine, and had myself a m-evening1.
Then there was the bolognese saga, closely followed by a mish-mash of random foods that needed to be used up before I went away including puttanesca gnocchi, two portions of cod with sliced tomatoes and some shwarama chicken with roast potatoes. I made brownies and had most of a tray to get though by myself2 and ate a lot of eggs and noodles.
The final hurdle was a couple of sticks of rhubarb that were looking increasingly forlorn at the back of the fridge. I’ve had a lot of rhubarb in my veg box recently and these were the last men standing. I’m not a massive fan of rhubarb, but I’ll eat anything in crumble form and therein lies the justification for trying to make an individual rhubarb crumble for my lunch today.
Microwave mug cakes and the like aren’t really my thing generally, I’ve not got a massive sweet tooth and if I’m going to make a dessert I want to give it the full clappers. But, I had everything I needed for this abomination including the perfect circumstances having taken the day off from work, earning a luxurious lunch by spending the morning digging up the garden. There are no doubt hundreds of recipe for a lonesome, single crumble on the internet but I wasn’t in a recipe-following kind of mood, and surely I can just chuck a crumble together at this point.
Turns out: yes! I chopped up two sticks of rhubarb and put them in a small buttered dish3 with a couple of teaspoons of sugar and some orange peel I had leftover from my disastrous enriched buns. The crumble was about 20g of butter rubbed into about 40g of flour, with about 10g of oats, 2 teaspoons of sugar, a pinch of cinnamon and a pinch of flaked almonds I crushed in my fingers. I put my little dish in the air-fryer (which I am now starting to reluctantly appreciate) for 20 minutes.
In an unusual flash of good judgement, I had a quick peek after about a minute of cooking to check it was all okay in there. Bloody good job I did, because the ‘air’ part of the air-fryer had blown the crumble all over the place and my rhubarb was naked. As I’d caught it early, I gathered all the crumble from the bottom of the tray and put it back where it belonged in the dish, and then covered the crumble in tin foil. Very important for all crumble-based air-fryer endeavours, it turns out. It was perfect after about 25 minutes, with a couple of foil-less minutes at the end to crisp up the top.
With a cup of tea and a bit of single cream (two weeks old leftovers but miraculously fine), it was actually pretty good. It gave me a lovely boost, of both sugar and morale, to then head back into the garden and continue trying to locate a path under twenty years worth of weeds. A small victory in a week of DIY battles, with not much else to report.
Yours in small desserts for the lonesome4,
Deb
I am not sorry for quoting And just like that… It’s my trash TV and I will not be shamed.
Oh, woe is me.
We all the know the small white dishes that I mean, usually from a pie. Charlie Bigham must be a gazillionaire.
This is a joke; I am fine.
😍 love it