Latinos In America

Courtesy Rizzoli

Recently the sunburst mirror has gone mainstream, with chains offering modest-priced replicas of vintage designs.

With bleak winter days upon us, a mirror will refract each precious ray of sunlight—and the sunburst mirror seems to stand in for the sun itself.

No wonder, then, the newly married couple painted by Jan van Eyck in 1434 invested in a bulls-eye convex mirror, living as they did in the sun-deprived city of Bruges. Fast-forward to the 17th century when Louis XIV established the first glass and mirror factory in Northern Europe at St. Gobain, France. In doing so, he broke the Venetian Republic’s monopoly on the making of these precious commodities, and, in the process, raised the aesthetic and technological bar by making mirrors bigger and clearer than ever before.

Despite Louis XIV’s affinity for mirrors and for the sunburst motif—the personal emblem of the self-styled “Sun King” was a head of Apollo surrounded by rays of light—the sunburst mirror didn’t make an appearance during his reign.

According to Louis Bofferding, a Manhattan antiques dealer, we probably have the French Revolution to thank for the sunburst mirror’s debut. “The revolutionaries stormed, shuttered, even destroyed monasteries, convents and churches. Among the loot of the rabble were the gilded aureoles of celestial rays that had haloed representations of the Holy Family and saints on altars,” Mr. Bofferding said. “It didn’t take long for enterprising antiques dealers and collectors to buy those vacant sunbursts for a song, slip mirrors into the cavities and launch what would become a vogue in the 20th century.”

By 1940, the great French metalworker Gilbert Poillerat forged and gilded sunburst mirrors that smacked more of café society than the celestial realm. Soon, Parisian artisan Line Vautrin made sunburst mirror frames out of plastic—a technological innovation of her own day—never imagining that they would become an auction-world juggernaut at the turn of the 21st century.

And when bidders at Sotheby’s and Christie’s go wild for something, you know Crate & Barrel, Target and Pier 1 Imports can’t be far behind. Victoria Hagan, New York decorator to uptown clients, said she finds “sunburst mirrors add a happy touch, a sparkle, to any space, from the tiniest of powder rooms to the grandest of living rooms. I use them in unexpected ways, hanging them over another mirror, or above a piece of art in a small space, like a vestibule.” Meanwhile, downtown decorator Miles Redd, who caters to the haute bohème set, said, “They can dress up a boring space. They bring a sense of architecture and reflective surface to a room. I love them hanging above a headboard on a canopy bed.”

Said interior designer Thom Filicia, “I’ve hung them over fireplaces, where they pick up and play with the flames.”

The sunburst mirror has always fallen somewhere between decoration and art: from midcentury decorator Tony Duquette’s readymade-like versions created with automobile hubcaps to a recent Jonathan Adler design that used vintage Barbie dolls to create the sunburst motif. And so, it would seem, whether old or new, expensive or cheap, high- or low-brow, the sunburst mirror, in one form or another, will always be with us.

—Steve GarbarinoPrinted in The Wall Street Journal, page D5

By ERIC FELTEN

Christchurch, New Zealand, where an earthquake last year killed 185 people, is still struggling with how to treat another of its casualties, the city’s Anglican cathedral. Built of stone in the 19th century, the church has been damaged repeatedly by earthquakes over the years, and repeatedly repaired. But with its spire and sections of ceiling and walls collapsed, Christchurch’s Anglican bishop has declared the old pile too expensive to rebuild. Instead it will be “deconstructed” (which isn’t a postmodern linguistic gesture; it’s just that the bishop doesn’t like the awful word “demolished”).

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Christchurch Cathedral in November 1995

Many locals and preservationists are hoping to stop the wrecking crew, trying to buy time to raise the money and do the structural engineering that might save the Gothic beauty. They rightly ask, what’s the rush?

Especially since, meanwhile, the diocese has decided to toss up a temporary church designed by Japanese “emergency architect” Shigeru Ban. The architect has made a specialty out of temporary structures, using large, coated-cardboard tubes and stackable shipping containers. The roof for the Christchurch sanctuary is to be made of Mr. Ban’s signature tubes, which instantly earned the proposed building a nickname: The Cardboard Cathedral.

Some of the eye-rolling comes from the very idea of putting up a temporary church—shouldn’t sacred buildings strive to express a commitment for the ages, a confidence in the durability of faith? Yes, but even stone crumbles. A temporary church makes a virtue out of expressing the impermanence of this world.

Still, the plans for the temporary cathedral are a shame because they are one of the architect’s least interesting designs. After the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, Mr. Ban drew up a paper church that, with it’s elliptical footprint, was a lovely modern interpretation of the oval churches built by Bernini in the 17th century. By contrast, his Christchurch design is the sort of plain A-frame used promiscuously in the 1960s and ’70s, a tall shed that could work just as well as a church building or a Polynesian restaurant. Christchurch will soon have a sort of ecclesiastical Trader Vic’s.

But if the temporary chapel isn’t Mr. Ban’s best work, it does have this going for it—it isn’t permanent.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Devastated in March 2011 after the recent earthquake

Most architecture is built to last, which is one reason it occasions such bitter fights. Take the controversy over new additions to the small church of Notre Dame du Haut in rural Ronchamp, France, built in the 1950s by the modernist Le Corbusier. When Renzo Piano was hired to add a visitors center and convent to the grounds, prominent international architects mounted an unsuccessful petition against the additions, denouncing the changes an artistic apostasy that “opens avenues to all forms of barbarity.”

How much less fuss there would have been if the new buildings had been temporary. One reason the planning of new structures is so fraught is that we have to live with the potential mistakes for decades to come.

There’s a great history of temporary architecture, the showcases for which have often been world’s fairs, where grand pavilions are built to convey the passions and fashions of the moment. The “White City” at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago allowed American architects to present their vision for ideal public spaces. Not that everyone was happy with the experiment: Chicago architect Louis Sullivan rejected the Neoclassicism that dominated, and contributed a building rich with color and ornamentation. He is said to have griped that the rest of the White City set back American architecture by decades.

Forty years later architects were at it again in Chicago. This time, at 1933′s Century of Progress International Exposition, the buildings were a futuristic fantasy of the modern and moderne, with the prefab disposability of the buildings part of the architectural statement. They would be as influential, in their way, as the White City had been a generation before.

If Gustave Eiffel’s iron tower had been proposed as a permanent structure, it probably would never have been built. But as a temporary novelty for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, why not? When it came time to take it down, Paris officials somewhat grudgingly allowed that it had become a part of the city: If the Eiffel Tower “did not exist, one would probably not contemplate building it there, or even perhaps anywhere else,” concluded a city commission in 1906. “But it does exist.” And so it continued to stand.

Perhaps we should encourage more temporary architecture, works that can be experimental because they don’t have to endure (or be endured). Wild new styles could be tried with the confidence that unless they succeed, the buildings will be disassembled, proving as ephemeral as the bad ideas behind them. And if any of these life-size architectural models do capture the public imagination, they can always be set, as it were, in stone.

By HEIDI WALESON

Houston

Many new operas wear out their welcome quickly, but “The Bricklayer” by Gregory Spears and Farnoosh Moshiri, given its world premiere by the Houston Grand Opera in the Cullen Theater Thursday, could have used more time. Granted, it runs only about 39 minutes, a condition of its creation as part of HGO’s East+West project, a group of chamber-opera commissions that focus on the city’s Asian immigrant communities. Azerbaijani- and Chinese-themed works have already had their premieres; several more, including operas reflecting the immigrant experiences of people from Cambodia, Korea and Japan, are in the works.

John Lewis

Jon Kolbet as Mr. Parvin and Bray Wilkins as the titular character.

Ms. Moshiri, the librettist of “The Bricklayer,” is an Iranian novelist who has lived in Houston since 1987. Her books—including a collection of stories, one of which she adapted for the opera—are fictionalized, harrowing tales of the 1979 Iranian revolution, when fundamentalist Muslims took control of the country, torturing and killing their opponents. Ms. Moshiri, a leftist, feminist playwright, saw her friends and colleagues arrested, and in 1983 she fled on foot over the border to Afghanistan with her 2-year-old son. After four years in refugee limbo, they joined her sister in Texas. The rest of her family eventually followed.

“The Bricklayer,” an early story, includes images and themes that have pervaded all of Ms. Moshiri’s works: exile; doomed political activism; ordinary people swept up in terror, imprisonment, torture; the Wall of the Almighty, against which the condemned are executed; and the ambiguous figure of the Bricklayer, who builds the wall but is also a benevolent rescuer. Ms. Moshiri’s matter-of-fact prose makes the details all the more horrifying; her shifts from graphic, concrete accounts to magical realism and dreams are deliberately disorienting.

In the story and the libretto, the Bricklayer is the imaginary visitor of Mr. Parvin, a frail, elderly Iranian who emigrates to Houston with his wife. Mr. Parvin’s son had been tortured and killed; it is not clear whether he, too, had been arrested and beaten. The Bricklayer, whom he sees along with kaleidoscopic flashes resulting from a torn retina, is his link to his horrific memories and the home that he left, and he is terrified that eye surgery will sever this connection forever.

In crafting her libretto, Ms. Moshiri distilled the tale into six brief scenes with five characters. Her arias are models of compact expression, skillfully externalizing the very internal world of the story, particularly Mr. Parvin’s distress. Mr. Spears, a young, New York-based postminimalist composer, matches the spareness of Ms. Moshiri’s text with luminous, pointillistic writing for his five-piece chamber orchestra.

Mr. Spears incorporated elements of Persian music into the opera. “Tahrir,” an ornamented singing style that resembles yodeling, gave the vocal parts an intriguingly Eastern flavor while still sounding like Western opera, and emphasized the uncertainty and anguish of the arias. The orchestra included a ney, an end-blown Persian flute, whose breathy timbre in its low register gave an unearthly poignancy to the music of Mr. Parvin and the Bricklayer. The four Western instruments, particularly the harp, had their own distinctive, delicate color moments as well.

The opera built to its emotional climax in the very effective Scene 4, when Mr. Parvin graphically recounts his torture and the killing of prisoners. But the distillation process shortchanged Scene 5, in which he awaits his eye operation: Further exploration of his attachment to the Bricklayer and his fear of losing his past would have been potent here. Instead, the scene shifts too quickly to the end, which includes a five-voice chorale in which the characters hope for the overthrow of the regime and the Parvins accept their new home. The uplift felt artificial, far more primary-colored than the story and the rest of the opera.

The accomplished cast included the impassioned soprano Christina Boosahda as Bita, the Parvins’ daughter, who greets them in Houston (her tahrir-inspired singing was very good), and mezzo Eve Gigliotti, touching as Mrs. Parvin. Jon Kolbet grew in strength as Mr. Parvin; Bray Wilkins was underpowered as the Bricklayer. Grace Muir was Shahrzad, Bita’s young daughter. David Hanlon ably led the accomplished ensemble.

Laura Fine Hawkes created an ingeniously simple scenic design: a “wall” of stacked objects that was dismantled to created different scenes—in one scene, the characters removed their dinner table from the wall. Some blocks lit up, behind Persian traceries, to suggest the magical appearances of the Bricklayer; at the end, chests opened to reveal masses of red tulips, symbols of rebirth and hope, brightened by Philip Alfano’s lighting. Myrna Vallejo designed the basic modern costumes (though the Bricklayer seemed unmagical, more like a plumber with a toolbox). Tara Faircloth provided the efficient direction.

The East+West operas are the latest phase of HGO’s “Song of Houston” program, launched in 2007 to connect HGO with the city’s ethnic communities. “The Refuge” by Christopher Theofanidis incorporated stories from seven different groups; in 2010, HGO put on “To Cross the Face of the Moon,” a mariachi opera, which was recorded, played in 2011 at the Chatelet in Paris, and returns to HGO next season. These commissioned pieces (10 so far) are also presented in community centers, often free of charge: “The Bricklayer” was done at the Arab-American Cultural Center and the outdoor Nowruz (Persian new year) festival last weekend.

Before the opera began, Ms. Moshiri read a chilling passage from her first novel, “At the Wall of the Almighty,” accompanied by Mr. Spears at the piano; after the opera ended, the young trio Tehranosaurus played haunting Persian improvisational music. “The Bricklayer” premiere attracted plenty of Houston Iranians, but, like the film “A Separation,” its most enduring effect may be to show non-Iranians some of the subtleties that lie behind the stereotypes about modern Iran and its people.

Ms. Waleson writes about opera for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared March 20, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Glimpse Behind the Wall.

By ANNA QUINDLEN

I hate to write. I have to force myself every day to sit down and begin. This is the first thing that I always tell students, who have absorbed the peculiar modern notion that if you are practiced at something you must find it effortless and pleasurable. Sometimes they ask how I continue, and I reply, glibly, “Because of contractual obligation.” But I only manage because I live a humdrum life, in which the drama takes place mainly on the page.

The day begins with a period of mindless and repetitive activity. My one-hour power walk is nominally cardio, but it’s actually composition—scenes, characters, even dialogue. (There must be people in my neighborhood park who think I’m a lunatic since occasionally I move my lips while composing on the fly.) One of the reasons I so fear the over-scheduling of today’s children is that most creative thought happens when you are staring into the middle distance, doing nothing at all.

“Inspiration comes during work, not before it,” Madeleine L’Engle once wrote, and for that to happen you must sit down in a chair. I don’t believe in writer’s block. It’s not that sometimes you can’t write, it’s that you can’t write well. Experience has told me that writing poorly sometimes leads to something better. Not writing at all leads only to reruns of “Law and Order.” Which I love, but still.

When I am writing a novel, I have a totem that helps me to fall back into its world, like the old Hamilton wrist watch with the sepia face that I imagined on the wrist of my protagonist in “Blessings.” Stephen Sondheim says that his writing utensils are unvarying: Blackwing pencils, yellow legal pads with precisely 32 lines, both so essential that he has laid in a lifetime supply. For my part, I need Sondheim in the background. It’s not so much the music as the familiarity of it, like wallpaper in the workroom of my imagination.

My schedule, too, is set to music. I’ve heard endless stories of young mothers rising at 5 a.m. to fit in a few hours of writing before the children were up, but I can barely make coffee at 5 a.m. My productive hours are between 9 and 3, an elementary school schedule, once the only predictable part of my working day (unless one of the children got an ear infection and then all bets were off). If I go out for lunch and interrupt my rhythm, I’m sunk. I think that all of those lunches were what diminished Truman Capote’s output.

Or maybe it’s that he talked too much about his work. If you talk it, you won’t write it; it’s as though the words turn into vapor in the air. If you write other stuff, you won’t write it either. One of my Barnard writing professors, B.J. Chute, used to tell us not to take jobs that included writing of any kind because there was no chance we would then go home at night and take up our own material. But she predated the Internet, which is more dangerous than a copywriting gig.

I’m convinced that there are only so many words per day in the human body: If you do some longish emails and a few tweets, you feel done.

Finally, how you start each day depends on how you finished the day before. I never knock off at the end of a chapter, or the end of a paragraph, or even the end of a sentence. I always stop in mid-sentence. Starting a new chapter or a new paragraph first thing in the morning might be too much to bear. But I can always manage to finish a sentence. And one sentence has a way of following another if everything else around me is routine enough.

—Ms. Quindlen, a novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of a new memoir, “Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake.”

A version of this article appeared April 21, 2012, on page C12 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Agony of Writing.

By LARRY BLUMENFELD

New York

At Columbia University’s Miller Theater on Feb. 25, Don Byron gripped his clarinet in between songs. “We need to talk about Thomas Dorsey,” he said, referring to the pianist and composer acknowledged as the father of African-American gospel music. “Dorsey is literally the guy who took the nastiest blues you could play and put it together with religious music,” he told the audience. “The dominance of gospel blues in African-American tradition was not a given back then. One person had that idea.”

Leading his New Gospel Quintet, Mr. Byron celebrates the enduring power and surprising range of Dorsey’s idea. As on his new CD, “Love, Peace, and Soul” (Savoy Jazz), in concert his group also occasionally imbued that idea with the elements and feel of modern jazz. Drummer Pheeroan akLaff’s rhythmic innovations were decidedly subtle and spare, the tambourine affixed to his drum kit’s hi-hat occasionally invoking a tent revival. Pianist Xavier Davis delved deeply into stride piano during “It’s My Desire,” elsewhere moving in complex lockstep with bassist Brad Jones. Guitarist Brandon Ross, a special guest on both the concert program and the recording, turned Eddie Harris’s “Sham Time”—which isn’t gospel but fit the mood—into something explosive and abstract. Carla Cook’s vocals moved from churchlike reverence to fevered blues (on the CD, DK Dyson veers more toward rock inflection). Dean Bowman, another guest, sang the personalized pleas of Dorsey’s “Consideration” with plain-spoken directness.

Dorsey’s songs are meant for singers, yet Mr. Byron carried the music’s message with the greatest force. Sometimes it came via his tenor saxophone, as through his knowing counterpoint on “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” But it arrived mostly and best via his clarinet, as in wonderfully biting dissonance on the refrain of “Hide Me in Thy Bosom” and with disarming tenderness and stunning technique on “When I’ve Done My Best.” Mr. Byron made his point as composer too, with one stately original, “Himmm.”

Mr. Byron’s music often comes with a lesson, typically focused on subversive elements, forgotten heroes and subtexts of social commentary. His brilliant 1996 album, “Bug Music,” enlivened the notion of repertory jazz while exalting the music of Raymond Scott and John Kirby, two bandleaders who straddled the worlds of jazz and classical music in the 1930s. In the liner notes to his 1993 CD dedicated to the klezmer music of Mickey Katz, Mr. Byron argued for Katz as “one of the most important artists America has produced.” His record debut, 1992′s “Tuskegee Experiments,” featured compositions by both Duke Ellington and Robert Schumann, along with original pieces that defied genre classification. If there is one through-line to his career thus far, it is confounded expectations.

“People are always trying to figure out what I really am,” Mr. Byron said in an interview. “What I am is someone who can do anything he puts his mind to. I believe in that. I prepared for that.”

Mr. Byron is a clarinetist of uncommon range and skill, a self-confessed “music nerd” whose rigor is often concealed by his easeful swing. While growing up in the Bronx, N.Y., he was exposed to a variety of music by his father, a postal worker who played bass in calypso bands, and his mother, a phone-company employee who played classical piano. He studied classical music in high school and attended the New England Conservatory, where he apprenticed with Third-Stream originator George Russell and played a prominent role in Hankus Netsky’s Klezmer Conservatory Band.

On a 2004 CD, “Ivey-Divey,” Mr. Byron found inspiration in saxophonist Lester Young’s 1946 recording with a bass-free trio of pianist Nat Cole and drummer Buddy Rich. It’s not Young’s most celebrated work, but for Mr. Byron it showcased Young’s ability to create coherent structure from improvisation that sounded offhand. With “Love, Peace, and Soul,” Mr. Byron considers the deeper dichotomy embodied in the life and work of Dorsey, who is best known for “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” but also composed the raunchy blues number “It’s Tight Like That.” Before devoting his energies to religious music and prior to his work with Mahalia Jackson, Dorsey was known as “Georgia Tom,” performing with Ma Rainey and her Wild Cats.

“Not only was he a great songwriter,” Mr. Byron said, “but his incorporation of blues into 20th-century worship music was revolutionary. A lot of things in American culture flow from that move.” Mr. Byron found a rewarding trove from which to work. “The sheet music is impressive in the way that old Gershwin sheet music is impressive,” he said. “You could actually learn the style from reading it. All the harmonic moves that we know as gospel are in there, everything James Cleveland and Aretha Franklin played on piano.”

For Mr. Byron, who is 53, this gospel project isn’t just his latest musical investigation. More than a decade ago, when his mother was dying and he was facing middle age, he found himself hanging on the words of ministers, hearing the music in their delivery. “I needed something,” he said. He began listening to gospel music, and especially to Kirk Franklin. “I could look at the elements, figure out all the fancy chords that Franklin used that made me respect him as a musician, but there was something beyond that. That I could feel the greatness of God through a piece of music—that’s really personal. It just hit me like a ton of bricks.”

So is this new project a direct offering of faith? Mr. Byron closed his eyes, thought for a moment. “Yeah, sure. There’s some Jesus up in there.”

Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared March 6, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Celebrating the Union of Raunch and Religion.

James Ransom for The Wall Street Journal, Food Styling by Brett Kurzweil, Prop Styling by DSM

THE HEAT IS OFF | Raw beets have a sharp taste and carroty crunch.

THESE HEIRLOOM-CRAZY DAYS, a perfectly fresh baby beet can elicit as much excitement as a gorgeous lobe of foie gras. Beets are available throughout the year but their flesh is particularly flavorful when the weather warms. The best beets have enough sugar and water content to be served raw, thinly sliced and tenderized with just a sprinkling of citrus and salt. Add plump strawberries, crisp sorrel leaves and rhubarb purée to the mix, and you have a completely simple yet surprising spring salad.

The Chef: Sean Brock

Neighborhood Dining Group

Chef Sean Brock

His Restaurants: Husk and McCrady’s, both in Charleston, S.C.

What He’s Known For: Being the culinary world’s Southern it-boy; bringing low-country food to new heights with fastidious sourcing and modern skills.

This sort of stripped-down handling of ingredients appeals to the recipe’s creator, Charleston, S.C., chef Sean Brock. Though he’s known for upgrading traditional Southern cuisine with cutting-edge techniques (he uses liquid nitrogen in cold-milling corn for grits), Mr. Brock believes cooking simply is just as challenging as cooking with modern gadgets.

It’s hard, he says, to find great ingredients—and when you do, you should take a low-impact approach to let their natural beauty shine through.

Shaved into paper-thin rounds, spring beets provide an earthy, sharp flavor that’s different from the musky sweetness we have come to expect of the vegetable. With nothing but a drizzle of grapefruit-accented vinaigrette seasoning the beets, the strawberries provide this salad its sugary streak. The interplay between the crunchy beets and the candy-like berries makes this dish a standout.

When shopping for beets, look for firm, weighty bulbs with shiny stems and leaves. Your strawberries should be sweet and aromatic. To check for quality, slice a berry open. It should be deep red throughout, with no hint of white. Since it’s early in the season, underripe berries can be used, too. In fact, Mr. Brock likes adding a few green ones for tartness and texture. “It reminds me of cooking with green tomatoes,” he said.

To prepare the beets, peel them and shave them on a mandoline, or slice them into very thin rounds using a knife with a fine, sharp blade. When making this salad, Mr. Brock tosses his beets with some grapefruit bitters to tenderize the rounds. For the home cook with a basic pantry, grapefruit juice and zest impart a similar aromatic note.

Sorrel leaves, the lemony springtime green, provide bulk and extra crunch. The dish is rounded out with a raw rhubarb purée that’s hidden under the salad to provide a tart surprise. Quickly blitzed in the food processor, the purée proves that pucker-inducing rhubarb needn’t be stewed with loads of sugar to be palatable.

Drawing on slightly unusual techniques, this recipe reintroduces home chefs to the vibrant spring produce you thought you already knew. You’ll be happy to discover things really can be better the second time around.

—Kitty Greenwald

Raw Beet, Sorrel and Strawberry Salad

Total time: 25 minutes Serves: 4

Ingredients

5 baby beets, stems removed, peeled and shaved thin

½ large pink grapefruit

½ tablespoon raspberry or red-wine vinegar

Salt, to taste

2½ tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra for drizzling

8 ripe strawberries

½ lemon

Black pepper, to taste

2 underripe strawberries (optional)

1 stalk rhubarb, washed, peeled and chopped into ¼-inch pieces

4 cups sorrel leaves or watercress, washed and dried

What To Do

1. In a medium bowl, toss beet slices with the juice and zest of the grapefruit half, vinegar, a pinch salt and 1½ tablespoons olive oil. Let marinate until beets soften and lose their astringency, at least 15 minutes.

2. Cut ripe strawberries in halves or quarters, depending on size. Toss with 1 tablespoon olive oil, a squirt lemon juice, and salt and pepper, to taste. Slice underripe strawberries ¼-inch thin, if using.

3. Prepare the rhubarb sauce: In a food processor, pulse rhubarb with 2 tablespoons water until a purée with the consistency of applesauce forms. Pass mixture through a fine mesh strainer if rhubarb appears stringy.

4. Just before serving, strain marinated beets. They will still be slick with marinade. Toss beets with strawberries and greens in a medium bowl, making sure everything is lightly coated in dressing from the strawberries and the beets. Adjust seasoning with extra olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper, to taste.

5. To serve, put a dollop of rhubarb purée at the center of each plate. Mound the salad over it and serve immediately.