Well the time finally came to pick these lemons. Last year the freeze severely damaged one of our lemon trees. Our trees are still young but this is the second year for a harvest.
This is the time to harvest citrus in the southern USA and we love salted preserved lemons. I have a post on how to preserve them in salt and I will post the link at the bottom of this post. You can make them with store bought lemons too.
It was also time to harvest our Turmeric and Ginger so Charles dug them up the other day.
We grew ginger in pots and the ground this year, this is some of the ginger we dug up.
Our bucket of turmeric. We have been harvesting it over the past month.
This is one clump of turmeric. We have been sharing it with friends.
I have been washing the ginger and then peeling it an slicing it and putting it in the freezer to enjoy over the winter into next spring and summer.
It has been very nice to have it fresh right now since it has turned cold.
I just simmer it in some water for 15 minutes and strain it. I like to drink it with honey and lemon.
So I got busy and sterilized some pint jars for the preserved lemons.
They are meyer lemons and are very large so just one lemon takes up a lot of space in the jar. Normally I would put two lemons in one jar with 1/3 cup of kosher salt but this year I could only get about one and a half lemons in the jar.
You have to keep back some for juicing to pour the juice over the salt and sliced lemons. This one was a smaller lemon.
I made five pints and saved some lemons to use for other things. During the year if it looks like we will run out of lemons we buy them from the store and make more. We like to eat them over a salad or chicken or most anything.
Salted preserved lemons are very simple because the salt and lemon juice preserve the lemons. It is the rind that we are preserving, the pulp is discarded when they have cured and that is discarded as you remove the wedges when you are using them.
We let them sit for two weeks in our cool pantry and we we turn the jars up and down daily to mix the salt. Then we give them about a month before we start eating them. When we do start eating them we remove a wedge (slice) and pull off the pulp and rinse the rind and slice the rind thinly and put it over salad most anything as a garnish.
One tip, after about a month, I change out the lids and rings because occasionally the salt will make the edges start to rust and so after the month, I remove the lids, wipe down the jar edges and replace the lid and screw on band. Normally after that I do not have any more issues.
We are still sticking to our more healthy diet, here above is chicken, southern peas, squash with onions and sweet potatoes. I know it seems like we keep eating the same food over and over but really that is what they did in the past.
We eat salad, and we made our first pizza with spelt flour, spelt is new to me so when I get better at it I will do a post. We are still drinking our fruit smoothies, we are eating very little meat, just chicken and fish occasionally.
Pinto beans soaking....
We eat all kinds of greens, turnip, kale, spinach, mustard, we eat root vegetables, sweet potatoes, turnip roots, carrots, onions etc. We are eating beans and squash and broccoli.
I have lost twenty pounds now and changed size of my clothing, Charles has lost a total of 56 pounds and two pant sizes down. He had lost part of that from when we started living like the 40s and since the elimination diet to help his psoriasis he has lost and additional 27 pounds. We had gotten overweight so this is a good thing.
We eat "Very Little" processed food and one processed breakfast foods we eat occasionally is cheerios and we eat it dry like you would granola and we eat it with a banana. We still are drinking warm filtered water throughout the day.
Breakfast is normally oatmeal with cooked apples small amount of maple syrup and cinnamon. Or oatmeal with sliced bananas and fruit since a friend told me how she likes to eat her oatmeal.
Sometimes it is a fruit smoothie with fresh pineapple, strawberries, blueberries and banana with coconut milk.
Sometime is is simply leftovers from the day before.
We had a scare with our little dog Katherine, in my pet section on my blog I explain about our pets.
Katherine has had spinal surgery twice now and the other evening she started going lame again. This time is was only slight and we immediately kenneled her and put her on pain med. It was the weekend so first thing when the week began we got her into our vet to have her checked out. He added another medication for us just in case but she has improved a lot. We are making her a small wheelchair to train her how to use one for just in case.
It is a simple little thing and we are not finished with the front part but the back part of her belly goes over the padded roll. This is still in the projects to do. When she is better we will start training her.
So that is a few of the things going on, I have also been organizing again and will post about that this week after I get some more things done. So off to work I go, it is ironing day.
Here is a post of how to preserve lemons that I did in January of 2015
http://gdonna.com/cooking-from-scratch/preserved-l...
Grandma Donna
