Published Feb 26, 2012
We have this lemon tree in the backyard. Every year, it gave a bounty of lemons; we hardly had to buy a one at the market. Except for last year; last year, somehow it didn’t give us but one or two. It’s an old, dry tree, and we wondered if it was just getting ready to pass on. Well, it answered us this year: this year, it produced all last year’s lemons, all at once.
Confronted with all of these lemons, we’ve been cooking delicious marinated meats and lemony dressings, but it’s about to get out of hand. So I decided to go old school on it: I bought a bunch of canning jars and went to pickling.
First I harvested a big batch of orange-sized lemons. I cut off the stem end, cut them in quarters almost all the way through, and packed them with salt on the inside, in the Moroccan fashion.
Then I planned to stuff them in the jars; except these jars were sized for a lemon-sized lemon, not something that dwarfed our measuring spoons. So I quartered the lemons all the way through, packed in more salt, and added coriander seeds, cinnamon, and chills — all from Zanzibar!
Now it’s a few weeks before we know how things turn out, but I’m excited. Updates as acid- and salt-related cellular changes follow.