Rhubarb Mistake

Oddly, some of my favorite recipe ideas have come from mistakes. Of course, some mistakes have just yielded inedible messes. Over one weekend I got lucky. There was a flourish of rhubarb in the garden as part of the jungle that all the rain had produced. I sawed off—a bread knife works well—a few handfuls of stalks, discarding the poisonous leaves. I washed them, cut out the nasty bits, and trimmed off the root ends. I cut the stalks into ½-inch lengths and put them in a pot with sugar, mix