Preserved Lemons

As previously mentioned, we're absolutely drowning in lemons at the moment. From somewhere, and I honestly couldn't tell you where, the idea of making preserved lemons appeared. Never mind that I had not idea how they happened, much less what to do with them. Give anything a go once, right?

So, armed with the very simple recipe above, away I went. Now, I didn't actually read the recipe very well, so here's what I did...

1. Take largest jar I could lay my hands on - an Indian sauce jar, big, but not the litre size they suggest. Probably just as well.

2. Raid lemon tree for the smaller lemons, as they'll fit happily into my jar. Also for approximately five nice big lemons for the juice.

3. Wash and dry lemons.

4. Ignoring the part about cutting the bottom flat, I cut each lemon into quarters, without quite cutting all the way through.

5. I then proceeded to stuff the lemons with coarse rock salt, a messy process and one not helped by the fact my hands are covered with small cuts after the rosebush wrestling the day before. Ow.

6. Cram lemons in jar, I made three fit which is plenty for something I'm not actually sure how to use.

7. Cover with more salt, and fill jar with lemon juice.

8. Seal, label and store. Seeing as I neglected to naff about freezing and thawing the lemons before I dunked them in the jar, it seems it will take about 3 months for them to soften, which I presume is the aim.

So now, I have three months to work out what to do with them. Preliminary investigation suggests that it's the skin I'm interested in, not the rest. I have no clue.

Lemon curd

Lemon curd. When I was a kid, lemon curd in the fridge meant that it was around a week after the Church fete, since that's as long as it ever lasted.

We have two lemon trees in our backyard, and they are absolutely chock full of lemons at the moment - one of them is literally bending under the weight. The photo at right is the best one I can find of it, that's just a tiny little section, and as you can see covered in lemons rapidly ripening.

So, obviously, it's time to make the lemon curd. Now, there's some awfully complicated recipes on the internet, and I think I will in future simply work from a ratio - one block butter, half a bag of caster sugar, and 4 each of eggs and lemons. That makes around a litre of curd, and I can scale up or down as necessary.

The instructions make it sound dead simple - whack it all in a saucepan and stir it till its done. Like all things, it's not that simple. Well, it is, but you have to stir it *constantly* to avoid it burning to the bottom of the saucepan. You need to make sure it doesn't boil, since apparently that can contribute to the white egg floaties. Although I'm not sure about that, since this last batch didn't boil, and it still had white egg floaties. Perhaps they would've been worse had I let it boil. Who knows. But in reality, what you're in for is a fairly uneventful 20 minutes and cramp in your arm, while it thickens.

I had intended to make half the batch lemon and passionfruit curd after discovering a back of last summer's passionfruit in the freezer, but having dissected half a dozen of them and sat the flesh and seeds in a bowl to defrost a bit, I promptly bottled the curd and completely forgot. Oh well, next time.

Due to the concurrent glut of kumquats we're experiencing, I'm toying with the idea of having a go at a lemon and kumquat curd of some kind. Not sure though, suspect you would need to up the sugar, as the kumquats are quite tart - too much so to really eat them raw. Some other time, when I'm feeling a bit more confident, I think.

Mint jelly

We discovered this weekend a sizeable crop of mint growing in the back corner of our garden, ostensibly through the fence from the neighbours. Closer inspection, okay let's be honest, the fact that it made my fingers smell exactly like Extra spearmint gum, made us pretty sure it's spearmint. A quick trip to the Font of All Knowledge, aka Wikipedia, makes me suspect we're right - it matches the picture of spearmint.

It was actually my mother's bright idea to make mint jelly, well, her idea was to make mint sauce but I always preferred the jelly, myself. So, away to the internet, and bless the ABC in Tasmania, because here we are again - mint jelly.

I pretty closely followed the recipe in this one, hacked up the apples and boiled them in the vinegar. I used honey apple cider vinegar, since that's what I had in the cupboard. The apple didn't puree quite as nicely as I'd hoped, but it's actually ended up giving a bit of texture to the finished jelly so all's well. I upped the mint slightly, to maybe 6 tablespoons, and I added a few drops of green food colouring because the weird brown colour it turned offended my delicate sensibilities.

Kumquat Brandy

I have an enormous kumquat tree in my back yard, which is absolutely laden with kumquats. Reportedly, according to the former owner of our house, it is the best kumquat tree in the district, and will fruit all year round. A couple of months ago, when it started to look like this might actually be the truth, I raced off to google to try to work out what the bloody hell I was going to do with the inevitable 12 tonnes of fruit. At the time, the options seemed to be kumquat marmalade, or kumquat brandy. Now, let's be honest, there's only so much kumquat marmalade the family can eat. So, I decided to have a crack at kumquat brandy.

The very simple recipe I found on the ABC website called for 500g kumquats, 500g sugar and a bottle of brandy. I decided to use a flagon I had sitting around, and double the recipe. The basic premise seemed to be shove kumquats into flagon, add sugar, brandy and shake. Things, of course, are never that simple.

The kumquats all had to have their skin pricked with a darning needle, or similar. In my house, that "similar" would be a fondue fork. So there I am, spraying kumquat juice right left and centre, pricking kumquat skin. That, it turned out, would be the easy part. With the exception of the very smallest, actually getting the kumquats through the narrower-than-I-thought neck of the flagon proved to be a bit of a problem. Nothing a bit of brute force wouldn't see to, but it took me a lot longer than I expected, given that I had to cram every little fruit through the neck of the flagon individually. But success was finally mine. Onto the next step. Inserting the kilo of sugar into the flagon would've been much easier if I could've only found my funnel. But no. I first thought of a sort of impromtu funnel made out of kitchen roll, which would've worked had not the flagon been covered in kumquat juice, as what I ended up with was a sticky mess. Writing this a few months after the fact, I honestly do not remember how I managed to get the sugar in, but I suspect there was plenty of swearing involved. Follow the sugar with two bottles of cheap brandy (not that cheap brandy is all that cheap, as I found out), and voila!

The flagon required "shaking", or in actual fact wiggling around a bit, for the first month or so while the sugar dissolved, and then every now and then after that. In practice, it sits on the bar in the dining room, and I give it a swish around every time I walk past it. The brandy will be ready to drink approximately six months after the sugar and kumquats are added, which in this case will be around the middle of September. Stay tuned.

Since I last went looking for kumquat recipes, this site has appeared in my google results. While I'm not sure about some of them, there appears to be some good recipes for sauces and bikkies and thing on there.