six lemons six ways

I have a friend with a talent for devising imaginative hypothetical questions (If you had to have an IM acronym engraved on your headstone, which would you pick? Would you rather have an orgasm upon experiencing extreme embarrassment or  magic powers with the side effect of horrendous flatulence? If you had a weekend to spend with a celebrity of your choice, would you rather spend it in a haunted house or with your immediate family?, etc). Some of them are tough – I still think about “would you rather be able to grow small fruit out of the palms of your hands or poop cheese” more often than I really should – but here’s one that I answered immediately: if you had the power to eliminate lemons and have them replaced with another fruit, a random, God-chosen fruit that had never been seen on the earth before, would you do it? Hell no. Because it’s hard to imagine an alien fruit that could have more uses than the humble lemon.

It cleans! It curdles! It keeps you from getting scurvy! Even the number of non-gastronomic uses for lemons are pretty staggering. Here are just six recipes you can make with six lemons – the same six lemons.*

Homemade Limoncello
Adapted from Karen Solomon’s Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It

4 large organic lemons
1 1/2 cups vodka
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
about 4 tablespoons lemon juice (juice of one large or two small lemons)

Peel the zest from the lemons with a vegetable peeler (this is just the thin layer of yellow on the outside – avoid as much of the white pith as you can). Put the zest in a clean wide-mouth glass jar, add the vodka and shake so that the vodka covers the zest. Cover with a lid and keep in a dark, cool place for two weeks, shaking the jar every other day or so. By the end it should be a lovely bright yellow and the alcohol scent of the vodka should be much mellower.

Make a simple syrup by combining the sugar and water in a saucepan and heating until the sugar is just dissolved. Let the syrup cool completely. Add the lemon juice to the simple syrup, then combine the syrup and limoncello. Let it hang out in a cupboard for six weeks, if you have the patience. Serve ice-cold. Makes almost a quart.

Leland Palmer
From Damon Boelte via Bon Appetit

You can use your homemade limoncello in this! Or make an alcohol-free version, which is also delicious.

1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup hot water
3 cups freshly brewed jasmine iced tea
3/4 cup gin or vodka
3/4 cup limoncello
3/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup fresh grapefruit juice
1 cup chilled club soda

Stir honey and 1/2 cup hot water in small bowl until honey dissolves. Cool completely. Combine honey water, jasmine tea, gin, limoncello, lemon juice, and grapefruit juice in large pitcher. Add club soda and stir to blend. Fill six 1-pint mason jars or 6 tall glasses with ice cubes. Sip on porch. Serves six.

Fresh Paneer
From Mediterranean Food Recipes

If you’re curious about making cheese, this is a good one to start with. It’s easy and it will boost your confidence in your cheesemaking abilities! Apparently lemon juice is often used in India to separate curds from whey, which makes paneer a totally vegetarian cheese (most cheese is made with rennet, an animal substance). A few notes: after separating the curds from the whey, I let them “settle” for an hour as the recipe instructed, but couldn’t discern much of a difference in the curds before and curds after. If you’re in a hurry, 15 minutes should be enough time. Even after my curds had been hanging for over three hours, I still had to squeeze the bag to get some whey out, so I don’t know how effective the “hanging bag” step really is. Squeezing the bag gently seems to be a faster and more effective way to drain the cheese. It’s bland, so experiment with seasonings. Unless you press it into a shape immediately after draining, the paneer will be pretty crumbly; it’s a good addition to omelettes, chickpea salad or any other pita filling.

1 quart whole milk
2-3 tablespoons lemon juice

Heat the milk in a large pan over medium heat until it reaches a boil. Stir frequently with a wooden spoon to prevent sticking. When the milk boils, remove it from he heat. Immediately but slowly add the lemon juice to the milk while stirring the milk in one direction with the wooden spoon. It should separate into curds and whey almost immediately. Set the pan aside for at least 15 minutes and up to two hours.

Line a colander with a cheese cloth or muslin. Set it in the sink, or in a large bowl if you’re going to collect the whey. Slowly pour the curdled milk into the colander. When all the liquid is drained off, gather the corners of the cheesecloth together to form a bag. Tie this sack containing the cheese curds with a kitchen twine or any other piece of string. Hang the bag over the sink or a bowl to let any remaining liquid whey to drip off for about three hours. Keeps in the fridge for three or four days.

 

Lemon-Glazed Sweet Potatoes
Taken from Matt and Ted Lee’s Simple Fresh Southern

I had a bunch of sweet potatoes left over from my fall CSA and no idea what to do with them. Every preparation of sweet potatoes I’ve ever had was just too… sweet. Of course it would be the Lee Brothers who saved sweet potatoes for me – they are perfect with tart lemon and just a hint of brown sugar sweetness, hoo dang. These were good, especially reheated the next morning and stuffed into a pita with turmeric-fried onions and a few chunks of paneer.

2 pounds sweet potatoes (about 3 medium potatoes)
1 tablespoon unsalted cutter
2 tablespoons dark brown sugar
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon kosher salt

Heat the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Peel the sweet potatoes and cut them into 1-inch-thick slices. Grease a 9 x 13 baking dish with the butter. Arrange the sweet potato disks in a single layer in the pan.

Mix the brown sugar, lemon juice, cinnamon and salt in a small bowl and pour the glaze evenly over the potatoes. Cover the baking dish with aluminum foil and bake until the potatoes are fork-tender, about 45 minutes. Remove the foil and cook for about 5 more minutes, until the glaze has thickened and become syrupy. Serve immediately, or keep in the fridge and reheat in a warm oven before serving.

 

Lemon Pectin
Combination of methods from eHow and Putting Up With the Turnbulls

Pectin, in case you didn’t know, is a thickening and jelling substance. It’s naturally found in many fruits, especially apples and citrus. You can use it to thicken sauces, or in any jam or jellyrecipe calling for liquid pectin. Liquid pectin is sold in pouches, like yeast, so recipes often call for the amount in number of pouches. One pouch is three ounces of liquid pectin; this recipe makes approximately six ounces.

Three cups of white pith, seeds and membranes (seeds and membranes optional), roughly chopped (I got this from the entrails of six lemons; see footnote)

Put the chopped-up lemon carcasses in a pot and cover with six cups of water, or just enough water to cover the lemon bits. Cover and cook over medium heat until the liquid becomes thick and slimy. It won’t be super-thick because it’s hot, but you’ll be able to tell. I let mine boil for about two hours. Remove the pot from the heat and let cool for five minutes. Line a colander with cheesecloth and set the colander over a bowl or saucepan. Strain the lemon mixture through the cloth . Use immediately, or store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to one week.

If you want to test your pectin before risking it on a big batch of jam, pour a little bit (like an ounce) of rubbing alcohol into a glass or bowl and drop a spoonful of the pectin into it. After a few seconds, it should jell into a mass solid and cohesive enough to pick up with the tines of a fork. If the pectin droops off the tines, the jam will jell loosely.

Blood Orange Marmalade
From Putting Up With the Turnbulls

I made two substitutions here based on what I had in the cupboard: wildflower honey for orange blossom honey, which was, of course, fine, and cayenne pepper for red chili pepper flakes. According to the Turnbulls, their recipe has a “little bit of heat that comes up from behind.” I can assure you that two heaping teaspoons of cayenne pepper does not sneak up on you from behind – it smacks you right in the face. But I don’t mind; in this weather, I’ll take all the heat I can get.

4 1/2 pounds organic blood oranges (approximately 12 small or 8 medium oranges)
2 whole organic lemons
2 cups water
3 cups sugar
1/2 cup orange blossom honey
2 teaspoons red chili pepper flakes

Put a small plate in the freezer for gel tests. If you’re canning the marmalade, prepare for water bath canning.

Wash and dry the oranges and lemons well. Juice enough oranges to make one cup of juice (it took me three) while humming the “Dexter” theme song. Peel off the zest of the rest of the oranges and the lemons in strips, with a vegetable peeler. Cut the strips of zest into very very thin smaller strips. This takes a looong time. It helps to stack a few pieces of peel and then cut through the stack.

Place the strips of zest in a large stainless steel saucepan along with the water and blood orange juice. Bring to a boil over high heat; cover, reduce heat and boil gently for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, supreme the blood oranges and lemons you zested and collect the pieces of pulp in a bowl. Add the pulp to the saucepan; bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce heat and boil gently for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add sugar, honey and red chili pepper flakes to the saucepan. Return to a boil over high heat and boil rapidly, uncovered, until set, approximately 15 to 20 minutes. I let mine boil for about half an hour and it turned out to make about half as much marmalade as the recipe had anticipated, so be careful. Watch your marmalade closely during the last 10 minutes and perform set tests as necessary using your frozen plate – drip a bit of the liquid from the pot onto the frozen plate and wait a bit, then tip the plate. If the liquid runs easily, it’s not yet set.

When it’s set, remove from heat. If you’re canning, ladle into hot sterilized pint or half-pint jars. Wipe rims, place lids on jars and screw bands to finger tip tight.  Process for 10 minutes in a hot water bath and let rest for five minutes before taking out of the bath. Check seals. If you’re not canning, store in an airtight container and consume within a couple of weeks. Supposed to make three pints, but made just over one and a half for me.

*If you want to make all six of these recipes from six lemons, you will be using every part of every lemon, so don’t throw anything away, even the seeds! Here’s how you divide them up: peel the zest of four of them for the limoncello, juice them and freeze the juice in ice cube trays to use later for the lemon simple syrup, sweet potatoes, paneer and Leland Palmer. Save the leftover pith, membranes and seeds for making pectin. Peel the zest of the last two and remove the pulp for the blood orange marmalade; save the pith, membranes and seeds for pectin.

Advertisement