All posts tagged: citrus

cured lemons

My pickling and preserving ambitions have now exceeded the limitations of my fridge. There are jars of dilly pickled carrots. Homemade limoncello. Seville marmalade, of various sorts and peel stripes (grapefruit, lime, blood orange – oh my!). The old bars of my fridge shelves are sagging under the weight. And I can’t stop. There are too many things to make. One of my favourites, which has been out of commission for a while, are the cured lemons from The Palomar Cookbook, gifted to me a few Christmases ago by my brother and his girlfriend. The Palomar itself is a restaurant in London serving the food of modern Jerusalem, by way of North Africa, Spain and the Levant. And the book – a labour of love, with input, recipes, and techniques from different members of the team – is a collection of some of the restaurant’s great dishes. Some you might recognise, like labneh and fattoush, others you might not, but you’ll soon clamour to make, like the scallop carpaccio with “Thai-bouleh” (which swaps out lemon …

chapter 4: of marmalade and madness

“I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It’s amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.” DH Lawrence My blues at the start of 2017 weren’t forward-looking (that came later) like DH Lawrence’s. They were defiantly fixed in the present, conjuring memories of the past. I lost someone I loved dearly in January. It was unexpected. And it carved out a hollow space in my heart. Around the same time, I smashed my knee on an icy patch of pavement, making it hard to walk, stand or hobble. It was dark, it was gloomy, it was the deepest patch of winter and I cleaved to it. Wintry Glasgow was a solace. An ever-present, but patient friend. The air was sharp, blustery, harsh. The city didn’t ask anything of me; it practically begged me to stay inside. The winds and rain hit at my window, reminding me it was out there, but telling me to stay put. My world, understandably, became a …