Rhubarb Fruit Leather

I apologize in advance for what looks like a never ending string of posts about rhubarb. Especially because several of you have noted that you cannot find rhubarb in your regions. Tomorrow marks the official start of my husband's new position (among other changes). These rhubarb posts may just be my way of distracting myself from the never ending onslaught of thoughts swirling around in my head about changes, changes, changes, and more changes. Between mixed feelings of excitement, thrill, wonder, fear, helplessness, and terror I'm kind of an inward mess of emotion. I'm using rhubarb to distract myself. Classic, right?

First off, the rhubarb fruit leather was a huge hit. I have a husband who... hmm... picky doesn't even come close to describing his eating habits but I'll just leave it at that. He saw the fruit leather shortly after it'd cooled and inquired as to what this freakish sheet of... "what the heck is that?" like he normally does about anything new with that same look on his face. It's sort of the look you might make if you saw a dead frog squished in your driveway. It's not pretty but I'm used to it from him.

None the less he was super intrigued and possibly very hungry because he actually tried the freakish looking sheet of brown tinged with red. He never lets on when he's actually impressed with something I make and he followed suit in this instance. BUT now hardly two days later I went to the bag of fruit leather to take a photo for you fine folks and this is all I had left. It's hard to tell scale from the photo but this is a very small bit of rhubarb fruit leather. I'd used 3 to 4 cups of rhubarb pulp to cover an entire baking sheet.

Little Abe did not like it because it was much too tough. I severely overcooked it. But the flavor was fabulous. So that if you like jerky in the least and if you like the taste of sweetened rhubarb then you'd love this. My husband likes jerky and apparently is a pretty big fan of the taste of sweetened rhubarb. This was a HUGE win for me and I will definitely be making it again.

As for the severely overcooked part, funny story. I spread the pulp from the rhubarb cordial onto parchment paper on a cookie sheet. I placed it into a 170 degree oven to be left for 6 hours. I knew, I honestly knew that I would forget about it. But because my timing was poor, I planned to set a timer and wake up in the middle of the night to remove it from the oven. I did not. 

Instead I woke up in the morning, sat down at the blog to moderate comments and virtually right away SAM asked how the fruit leather turned out. Of course I jumped up from the computer and pulled it out of the oven about six hours later then I'd planned to. You'd think it'd have been horrid but it was quite edible just very much like jerky. I imagine that six hours would not have been long enough and it needed closer to 8 or 10 so, it was about 2 hours over cooked. Haha! Figures that when I totally decimate something it's the time my husband chooses to really really like it. Whatever, win win!