When Life Gives you Lemons....

This is a picture of one of my two latest culinary experiences. This is a jar of preserved lemon. Reeal simple, this one. Take about eight lemons and cut them into any shape you want. A traditional approach is to quarter the lemon without cutting all the way through so that it can be opened much like a four petaled flower. Or you can chunk the lemons, or you can slice the lemons. I sliced them. Slice them in a large bowl. Take about a cup of kosher salt and generously coat the lemon slices, trying to distribute the salt evenly. Then fill a quart jar with the lemon pieces, pushing down to pack them in fairly snug. Put the lemon juice left over in the prep bowl into the jar, and top up the jar if necessary with fresh squeezed lemon juice to cover the lemon pieces. Cap tightly and let set for one month, turning daily to distribute the salt. The preserved lemon is now ready to use, and it should keep for as long as a year if when you use it you are careful not to contaminate it, so use clean utensils to get the lemons out.

When you use the lemons, take them out and rinse them to remove the excess salt, discard the pulp, and cut the rind into small pieces.

What do you use it for?  Well, let's take this one step at a time, okay? I don't know just yet, but I've read that preserved lemons impart a far better lemon taste than does lemon zest, so you might consider that. And apparently preserved lemon is a real key ingredient in Moroccan cooking.

The other foray into haute cuisine was strawberry lemonade. This wasn't just lemonade with strawberries thrown in, this involved producing lemon syrup and then producing strawberry syrup, and then straining the strawberries to remove the seeds (???) and reserving the liquid separately from the pulp. It was a 45 minute long preparation process that produced...lemonade with strawberries thrown in. Sometimes these food guys over-engineer what should be one of life's simpler pleasures.

I took on these two projects because I've got a lemon tree, and it loves to produce lemons -- more than we've ever been able to consume, so I was looking for creative ways to use the lemons. My daughter has already successfully produced several batches of lemon granita, a fabulous lemon ice treat. So between her granitas, the preserved lemons and the lemonade, we've managed to use more of the crop this year than ever before.

And there's still plenty of lemons on the tree. If you need a lemon or two or twelve, c'mon by and I'll hook you up.