Lemon curd! The first canning project of 2011. As I open and eat the things on the shelf, I rue not having kept better track of what they all were and where the recipes came from, so the 2011 canning diary shall serve as a record of this year’s jars of yum. And first up: lemon curd.
The recipe is from Put ‘Em Up, page 174. I used 4 meyer lemons from the coop, one regular lemon. Zested the meyers, some of that zest went into the curd, the rest got mixed with salt as per this idea. 4 eggs from Anna & Naf’s chickens. The whole thing made 3 half-pint jars, and 3 quarter-pint jars.
It was unreasonably delicious when I licked the spatula (and the bottom of the pot), but the mixture separated a bit during canning. It’s totally fine when I stir it up before eating, and it stays together pretty well in the fridge, but I don’t think that it’s as jelled as it could be. This is either because 1) I didn’t strain it as the recipe said to do, or 2) I should have cooked it for longer. Sherri Brooks Vinton says it takes 10 minutes of whisking to thicken, other recipes on the internet say 20.
I’m going to try grapefruit for the next curd, and will probably cook it for longer.
(Photo above is not my kitchen. It’s from binah06, on flickr)
I have awesome friends, Karen and Sam, who got married this past September, at a Bowling Alley in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
At the wedding, I met a friend of theirs who had this rad hexagon paper piecing tattoo. (Please excuse the terrible picture). We got to chatting about hexagons; at that point I had never attempted making them because the whole things seemed so finicky and daunting and I was convinced that I needed to take a class to learn how to do them. But oh how I love the way they look! A few weeks later I sat down with the internet and a hand sewing needle and my bag of scrap fabric and figured it out. Of course, it was kind of finicky and tedious and the prospect of doing a whole quilt like this continued to seem daunting. I made a few random blob shapes and declared myself done.
Of course, at this point I still hadn’t gotten anything for Sam and Karen, and remembering the pillowcases I’d made for Jamie and Rufus, I decided that I’d do that again. Pillowcases are a great gift idea–hand made and lovely but not months and months of work. So I appliqued the hexagon blobs (well, one blob and two hexagon flowers) onto grey fabric, and sewed them up into pillowcases. I used some bird fabric and a chopped up old pillowcase (that had an interim life as a pillowcase skirt, that ingenious new-sewist project that is actually unwearable because people and pillows are very different shapes, as it turns out) for the edging, and voila! Pillowcases!
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