OK, friends, you’ve been warned. This post is what happens when Throwdown Thursday and Foodie Friday have a singing citrus baby. #sorrynotsorry
So we might as well start here: ORANGES AND LEMONS, SING THE BELLS OF ST. CLEMENTS!
This year I’m trying to do more things that are good for my state of mind. I had, over the last few years, stopped doing things that I like in favour of things I felt like I had to do. This year, I’m trying to correct that. I read the delightful Food in Jars blog, and every year, Marisa has a series of challenges to help her readership develop their skills. Sometimes, it’s a skill (fermenting in February), and sometimes it’s a practical challenge (Use the Damn Jam), and sometimes, it’s an ingredient. This month, the ingredient was Citrus. Never one to shy away from a challenge, which is TOTALLY different from cannonballing into the deep end, I accomplished a ton!
A few of these wouldn’t have happened without the sponsorship of my pal Jeff Shepstone and his husband Dan Borges at Urban Wetland Apiaries. We’ve been using their honey for a while at the Casa MacDonald, and they donated a few jars to enable my mania. Thanks, Fellas! Check them out if you’re looking for local Kitchener honey: urbanwetlandapiaries.ca.
So, to the results, then! Here’s what I made:
- Candied Kumquats
- Honey Sweetened Meyer Lemon Jam
- Clementine Jam
- Fédérales Marmalada. OK, the recipe is actually mostly Cara-Cara-Chile Marmalada. But the goal was a General Tso’s sauce. And I’m just sayin’ the Fédérales might also make a spicy citrus chicken dish that includes Tequila more often than General Tso does.
- Whiskey Honey Marmalade – I kinda freestyled this one a bit, for as much as you can freestyle a recipe with 3 ingredients.
- Lemon-Lime curd
- Candied tangerine, lemon, lime, and orange peel (and the ah-may-zing syrup left over when you’re done the candying of the peel)
- Orange/lemon/tangerine peel surface cleaner (citrus vinegar).
- Layered Lemon/Ginger/Honey jars (Thinly slice lemons and ginger root, layer them in a jar and cover with .. Honey, Honey!)
- Lime-Coconut Jam because You put the lime in the co-co-nut you drink ’em bot’ up.
A good experience, overall. By the end of it, I was fighting off my gentleman associate for use of the oranges (because he ran out of clemmies). And I was kinda over-estimating my industriousness when I bought the bag of limes, so yay for the lime-coconut experiment!
So, uh, everyone stand by for UseTheDamnJam month, when SwearyMissMary figures out what to do with all this great stuff.
Until then you had to know this was gonna happen: Hey sista, go sista, soul sista, flow sista; Hey sista, go sista, soul sista, go sista.
Sweary Parent Chronicles 