Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Overloaded with lemons!

I responded to a freecycle ad placed by a woman who lives near me and has a wonderful lemon tree with more lemons than she could handle. I went to her house and picked as many as I felt I could use and didn't even make a dent in the supply! I made lemon curd and lemonade. I juiced a bunch and froze it. I sliced many of them thinly and packed them in quart freezer containers and froze them for future use. I zested them before juicing and froze the zest. I made candied zest. I also made, for the first time, lemon marmalade. Why not, right?


Lovely lemons waiting to be put to good use.
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Zested and waiting to be sliced.
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I have a couple different zesters that make different sized zest. For this, I wanted a medium zest, not too thick but also not teensy, tiny strings. I think the resulting zest was perfect.
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I removed the white pith from the zested lemons, sliced them and put them in with the zest.
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The mixture then was stirred with water and put in the fridge for several hours to soak. When I took it out of the fridge, I put it on the stove to start cooking.
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As the mixture cooked and was eventually mixed with sugar and cooked some more, it turned a much darker color.
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I transfered the hot mixture to prepared jars, put on lids and rings, and they went into the water bath.
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I didn't want to fill up my large water bath canner for only three pint jars, so I used my stock pot that has a removable basket for boiling pasta. It worked great as a water bath canner. It kept the jars from touching the bottom of the pot and it was super easy to lift them in and out of the boiling water.
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All that work resulted in three jars of lemon marmalade. The recipe was decent, but I think next time I will look for something a little less labor intensive and time consuming. It was a lot of work for three jars!
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*I want to apologize for the picture quality in this and a few future posts. My husband took the kids on an extended camping trip and so had the camera with them. These pictures are taken with the camera in my phone.

2 comments:

Jen said...

Cool... I love freecycle!

Bethany said...

Heather, you amaze me! My mom sent me a link to your page, so I've been following you!

Best,
Bethany