hrj

I was crowdsourcing preservation ideas on facebook and one of my friends suggested a recipe for pickled kumquats. Another suggested a lemon chutney as a basis for experimenting with the citrons. The two recipes were relatively similar and I adjusted the spices somewhat for my own tastes. (E.g., tried long pepper, cubebs, and grains of paradise instead of black peppercorns in one version, and no chilli peppers.) So a few weeks ago I processed the citrons and have been sampling them in various contexts. They're ... interesting. I think I'm still getting used to citron as a taste. It's very distinctive and I have to remember not to expect lemon or orange or the like.

This evening I did a slightly different version with about half the remaining kumquat crop, which made up about 4 8-oz jars. The premature taste test (one piece dropped on the floor -- I rinsed it off but wasn't willing to put it in a jar that I want to have shelf-life) was quite pleasant, though not as spice-flavored as I hope it gets after sitting for a while.

Both variants of the recipe are sweet pickles: vinegar-sugar base with a little salt plus spices. When I adjusted the spices, I was thinking of my mother's watermelon rind pickles, though her recipe used oil of cassia and clove oil so they were a bit more intense than just using the dry spices.

The trick is integrating the results into my meal planning. It always seems to take extra effort to remember to *use* my various preserves. Plus, there's the vague thought that I should "save them for special occasions" which... hah, how often do I have special occasions? I'm great about consuming my produce fresh, but once it's been preserved it sort of slips out of my awareness.

That's why I'm a bit concerned that I need to find more space to store all my canned/jarred goods. They've outgrown the one kitchen cabinet dedicated to their storage. The natural choice is to do some condensing of the fabric/craft storage in the garage and use some of those shelves, but then I worry about "out of sight, out of mind" applying even more.

But the pickled kumquats are sooooo good. And I already like to put fresh kumquats in salad, so there's an idea.