Some people think I’m depriving myself by eating seasonally.

Yes, my consumption of leeks and butternut squash went up this winter as I chose those local veggies (from a storage share at my CSA) over crops like tomatoes and spinach that were grown somewhere else and shipped a long way. Did I miss out? No. I simply changed the way I planned menus — and discovered a lot of yummy soup recipes along the way.

When you eat seasonally, you experience cooking in an entirely different way. When something is in — as strawberries are now — they’re in in abundance, and you feel the freedom to experiment with new recipes. In my house, this meant trying something I’ve always enjoyed but had never made: strawberry-rhubarb crisp.

Both berries and rhubarb came from Berry Patch Farms in Brighton. We picked up the rhubarb before weighing and paying for our two flats of berries at the farm stand. If you’ve never cooked with rhubarb before, remember that the leaves are toxic so only prepare the reddish celery-like stalks. And like cranberries, rhubarb is very tart so it needs a good bit of sugar. Keep this in mind when reading recipes; I frequently cut the sugar by 1/3 or 1/2 when baking quick breads and the like, but don’t give in to this temptation when it comes to rhubarb.

Click here for the recipe for Rhubarb-Strawberry Crisp, written by Deborah Madison and published in Cooking Light.