It’s citrus season! I love all the delicious citrus fruit that shows up this time of year, and one of my favorites is Meyer lemons.
Back in November, I got my yearly email from the Lemon Ladies, announcing the start of their harvest. Lemon Ladies are a group of women who tend and manage a Meyer Lemon orchard in Emerald Hills, CA, a small community near San Mateo in the greater SF Bay Area (map). Their groves are 100% dedicated to Meyer lemons, and I have been extremely happy with the quality of the fruit I’ve received from them. This year’s lemons were fantastic—gorgeous sunny yellow oblong orbs that smell amazing. And they taste wonderful!
I’ve done a variety of things with Meyer lemons over the years—they are perfect for preserved lemons, make amazing lemon curd, and I’ve even dried them (dried Meyer lemons are really good added to a glass of water). But what I really wanted to do with them this year was to make marmalade. I almost made it a couple of years ago, but got scared off, thinking the process was too difficult. I couldn’t have been more wrong—at least with the recipe I used this year, it was a breeze! It just took a little planning. Continue reading “Making Meyer Lemon Marmalade”
Well, turns out I totally spaced on Harmonious Belly’s second birthday! It was February 8. A lot has happened in this past year – a layoff sprurring on lots of writing, preserving, and food experimentation. My garden was awesome this past year (no blight, hooray!). And a little guy entered my life (I love you, Linus) and captured my heart, while my beloved girl passed on (RIP Marina).
So happy birthday, little blog! Here’s to many more collaborations, learning more, nurturing old friendships and creating new ones, and lots of delicious food! Paid work would be nice, too, universe. 🙂
Recently, I’ve seen a bunch of posts on the interwebs about citrus and citrus peel – since it’s citrus season, that makes sense. I’ve been preserving lemon peel in kosher salt for a few months now – yes, that’s just the peel, not the entire lemon (I’ve preserved entire lemons, too). It’s a way to reduce waste as well as turning it into something delicious.
Usually when I use preserved lemons, it’s all about the peel; more often than not I discard the pulp, though I’m sure someone could show me what to do with it (I’m interested!). So, I got the idea of just preserving the peel in salt – each time I juiced an organic lemon, I’d get rid of the leftover lemon innards and reserve the peel. I slice the peel into strips and store them in salt.
I use the peel in things like chicken dishes or with couscous. It gives a kind of North African flavor to things. I love it! And it’s super thrifty. Organic lemons aren’t cheap.
After the peels stay in the salt for a while, they start to change color – it goes from a bright yellow to a kind of yellow orange. I think it’s beautiful.
This season I’ve been preserving often, and that makes me very happy. The processes are fun, and I love the idea of having food on the shelves/in the fridge that I can enjoy when the food in its natural state would be past its prime. I plan to continue preserving food throughout the summer – my next big project will be canning tomatoes in August or September.
Earlier this year, I was taken by this DIY handbook published by the NY Times. I ended up making Vin d’Orange and Maple Vinegar. I’ve been enjoying the Vin d’Orange all summer, and it really just screams “warm weather” to me. I drink it mixed with sparkling water and it’s very refreshing.
Vin d'Orange brewing
I also made the maple vinegar, which is pretty good. It’s made of raw cider vinegar, maple syrup, and rum. It still has a bit of an alcohol kick to it, which is a bit odd. Still, it’s fantastic as part of a vinaigrette on salad. That’s my favorite way to use it.
As far as this DIY handbook, I still have plans to make the tomato chili jam and the kimchi. I’ve used up most of my preserved lemons, so I’ll need to make some of those again soon.
Apart from that, I’ve made apricot jam from the apricots off the backyard tree. I used a very basic jam recipe, and added some organic orange zest to it. I love that addition. I think in a lot of jams and preserves, the addition of orange is a wonderful flavor contribution.
Apricot jam
As I wrote before, strawberry lemon preserves were made at my home, as part of an event put together by my CSA. I was fortunate to be the recipient of a jar of these preserves by AJ.
The spicy cherry preserves I made are simply amazing. I love the combination of sweet-tart-spicy, and these cherries really deliver on this. I liked the half pint I made so much that I bought more sour cherries at the greenmarket and made another pints’s worth of sour cherry preserves! The cherries with some syrup mixed with sparkling water make for a nice, barely sweet soda.
I also used some of the sour cherries for a liqueur, which is coming along quite well.
I’ve started experimenting with simple syrups and made a very tasty mint simple syrup with the mint on my back deck.
With the last of the first yellow plums of the season, I made plum shrub syrup, which turned out beautifully. I like it in sparkling water, though it could be added to a wheat beer with pleasant results, especially if you like sour beers (I do).
If it’s not evident in this post, I’ll just say it – I love vinegar. So, I’ve made some vinegar pickles out of snap peas. They are very good, but I think next time I’ll make them spicier.
Snap pea pickles
I even did some short term preservation with the peaches and nectarines that were really ripe – sorbet! I sweetened it with sucanat and used a bit of the maturing sour cherry liqueur, and it turned out just so well. Sucanat – an unrefined sweetener – turns things a bit dark, but I’ll sacrifice a little bit of aesthetic beauty for something sweet that doesn’t mess so intensely with my blood sugar.
This week in our CSA share, we received sour cherries. I was really excited about that – they only come once a year and the window to access them is very short. They are gorgeous – I think they are prettier than sweet cherries.
Sour cherries
They are smaller than sweet cherries and quite sour. I was amazed at the CSA pickup site when my friend’s son just started eating them like they were sweet cherries, apparently unaffected by the puckeryness of the cherries (I tasted one on its own – way sour). But this kid has an amazing palate at 2 years old, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at what he gladly eats!
Anyway, for most of us, these are not snacking cherries. They are meant to be preserved or made into pie. I wanted to preserve them, so I chose two ways to do that – hot cherry preserves, and cherry liqueur.
The sour cherry liqueur was very simple – I took a cup of pitted cherries and mixed it with 3/4 cup of organic sugar. I put that in a quart sized mason jar (it took up about half the jar) and added a combination of vodka and dark rum to that – the original recipe specified white rum, but I didn’t have any, so I used what was in my cupboard. We’ll see how it is in a couple of months. I can’t imagine it will be horrible or anything.
I’ll stir the mixture once a week or so. It’s in the back of a cupboard that doesn’t get opened regularly, so the store-it-in-the-dark thing is taken care of. The liqueur should be ready mid-September.
The Hot Cherry Preserves took a little more work, but not much. I mixed 12 oz of pitted sour cherries with 2/3 cup of organic sugar, a vanilla bean, and two guajillo chiles and let that macerate in the fridge overnight. The next day I heated it up to boiling and let that cook for 10 minutes. I added a tsp of organic lemon juice to it, and after it all cooled down a bit I put it in a half pint jar, and then in the fridge, where it will stay until I eat all the cherries. That really might not take very long, too.
I didn’t think a half pint jar would be big enough at first, but after the cherries cooked down, it made a scant half pint. They’ll sit in my fridge and I’ll use them in cocktails. Sour and spicy is one of my favorite flavor combinations. I may have to pick up more sour cherries this week (assuming they are still around) tomorrow and make more preserves!
During last week’s canning workshop, I learned that all along I had been using my jar lifter wrong! Basically, I’d been using it backwards – using the black roller handles to grip the jars… which was always a bit precarious in hindsight. Here’s the way I was using it:
Wrong way to use the jar lifter (it's upside down)
And here’s the proper way to use it:
The right way to use the jar lifter
It makes sense to use it this way, because the red parts grip better, so there’s less chance to drop the jar. And they are curved to better fit the jars. I’m going to use my jar lifters properly this year, which I expect will make the process quite a bit easier.
And as far as the confusion as to which side is the handle and which is the gripper, I’ve learned that I am not alone in this respect… many thanks to AJ for setting me straight.
As you can see from the picture above, my yellow pear tomatoes have started to ripen! They are a little funny looking, kind of like bowling pins, and they are very tasty. My plant keeps producing them, even as most of my other tomato plants are on their way out.
My paste tomatoes suffered from a lot of blossom end rot, but not nearly as bad as the Prudens Purple. The mystery volunteer tomato did fine, as did the Silver Fir. Both of those plants produced small to medium sized fruit. Larger tomatoes just had problems this year.
I had a bumper crop of lemon cucumbers, too. I will definitely grow those again next year.
Soon, it will be time to pull up the tomato plants and consider what to grow for the fall. I like the idea of carrots especially, and some more tatsoi.
Apart from the garden, I’ve done a lot of canning. I made 6 half pints of fig-orange-honey preserves, which turned out great, and keeps getting better as it ages. The figs came from the backyard trees – can’t get more local than that!
I’ve also canned tomatoes and made salsa – 9 pints of crushed tomatoes, and 4 pints of salsa, 3 of which are lacto-fermented salsa. The tomatoes came from my CSA in the form of a 20 pound tomato share, and were fabulous – really healthy, firm, and meaty. Not to mention tasty.
I have a lot of nectarines and peaches, so I may make preserves out of that as well.
My social life ramped up for a little while, and that meant dinners out, and less cooking at home. I’ve also been sick, so little appetite. This will all change soon.
This weekend I pick up my salmon share! Very exciting!!
