Friday, January 15, 2010

When Life Hands You Lemons...




I'm ok with this saying but I am offering some better alternatives than "make lemonade".  That's right.  Deal.

So last year we seemed to have a bumper crop of our Key Limes and I salt preserved them (because I thought they were lemons) and they are still sitting happy in the back of the fridge...maybe it was 2 years ago.  They are delicious and you need only a very small amount to lend the acidity to a dish.  Anyway, desert peoples have been preserving citrus for eons.  Now, since I am one, so do I.




This year a co-worker brought in soooooooooooo many extra lemons from the lemon tree of the house she is renting.  I need to see this thing because I can only imagine it is old and huge and regal.  The lemons (aside from the root stock wild lemons) are large, firm, juicy and not too seedy.  They are the prettiest color of light yellow once you cut them open and man did I use them all up!  The picture above is the first round.  Over the course of a 3 day period, I used the above amount x6.  And other people were taking them from work also.  Like I said this tree must be huge!  I SHARED thank you!


Since I had AN.EXTRA.10LB.BAG.OF.SUGAR from my winter baking; see here:
I decided to make something sweet out of these boys.  The above pix are the steps involved in making CANDIED LEMON PEEL.


This is a pic of my 1st batch of 3 total.  You cannot imagine how amazing these things are.  AMAZING.  Like a taste of happy sunshine goodness in your mouth here in the middle of winter!  I love it!  I dare you not to smile when you are eating one.  I had enough to take to a party and share with 3 people at work.  They go well in champagne too, or dipped in chocolate (no pix of those). I'll post pix of how I'm going to use the others.  I am thinking cranberry and candied lemon peel breakfast rolls.  I also made simple syrup as a reduction of the last step  of boiling...anyone need 5 pints of essential-oil-of-lemon-simple-sugar?  I'm happy to share.  No pix of the syrup either; not too photogenic.  The syrup is also AMAZE in chammers.  So I was stoked but I didn't stop there...can you guess what I did next?  That's right baby I juiced those things and got 72 cubes of fresh lemon goodness.  They are already in a freezer bag for when I need them.  I feel like I never have "fresh lemon juice on hand" when some recipe calls for it.  DILEMMA NO MORE!!!  Oh, and the LAST thing I'll be making with them is LEMONADE.


Lastly, I have to add that all of this came about at the same time we were celebrating a friend's new job.  Here's my new favorite saying:




1 comment:

  1. belated commentary on this awesome post and pics!! i can attest to the deliciousness of the candied peel and syrup...thank you, again! i love the ice cube idea. *genius*!!

    ReplyDelete