Lemony Zest :: Kim Lewandowski

Several years ago, Dan and I, along with my good friend Barbara, took a trip to the Grand Canyon. I took this photo at the South Rim of a group of tourists with a guide. It’s really hard to portray the Grand Canyon in photos. It’s so majestic and almost seems to surround you, even when you’re standing on the rim, that it’s easy to understand why it’s one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World.

This is my contribution to Photo Friday. This week’s theme is Downward.

The vegetable garden is coming along beautifully – we got lots of gentle rain last weekend, which gave them just what they needed at just the right time. We’ve been harvesting some of the cool-weather crops for a few weeks now.

When garlic sprouts in the kitchen, I’m tempted to put it right into the garden. But if I do that now, when it gets hot for real, it will just fade and dry out. So we have to wait for fall. But here’s one we planted last fall that’s ready to pick. And lots of yummy Swiss chard is out there, too, for adding to salads or sauteeing with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

Garden Garlic

The chives have lovely lavender blooms right now – perfect for topping a salad. A little sprinkle of chives on top of almost any savory dish gives a mild oniony flavor without the bite of raw onion.

Chive blossoms

And here’s the most recent resident of our urban farm – Tiger Gnome, a gift from my mother-in-law to the evergreen Detroit Tigers fan in our house. Peeping out from the green-bean plants, he keeps a very close eye on the goings-on out there. Hopefully he can keep Pippen from lying on the newly planted tomatoes.

Tiger Gnome

So the 2012 garden is well on its way.

Someone posted this to a cooking site I like to visit. It’s a free e-book with two chapters – Chapter One is a biographical sketch of George Washington Carver, the famous African-American scientist, botanist, educator, and inventor and Chapter 2 is his book “How to Grow the Tomato and 115 Ways to Prepare it for the Table.”

You can download it here: “How to Grow the Tomato and 115 Ways to Prepare it for the Table” (PDF) by George Washington Carver.

A couple of years ago, after I admired it in the Le Creuset outlet store in Williamsburg, Dan gave me a beautiful tagine (Moroccan cooking pot) for Christmas, along with a Moroccan cookbook. I haven’t used it a whole lot, but it looks great in the kitchen

I want to use it more, but it seems like most of the recipes call for preserved lemons, which I haven’t been able to find around here. Preserved lemons are used as a flavoring in Moroccan cuisine, especially stews. The preservation method softens the lemons skins, like watermelon rind pickles, and gives a sharp lemony-salty kick to the dish.

It costs $10 for two preserved lemons in a jar from an online source, which seems like a lot to me. So I’ve just kept putting it off. I’ve thought about making my own preserved lemons; there’s a recipe for them in the book. But I’ve felt uncomfortable about the idea. Would I poison us?

But then, if you look at the recipe, the lemons are brined for a month in pure lemon juice and salt. Not much could survive that environment. And since I canned homemade salsa, watermelon rind and hot peppers last summer, I feel a lot more comfortable about preserving food at home.

Then in January, Andrea of Andrea’s Recipes wrote a blog post on making preserved lemons. A couple of weeks later, another food blog I follow, Food in Jars, posted an article on preserved limes that referred to a previous post on preserved lemons. The article on preserved lemons had over 70 comments where people described different ways of using the preserves.

So finally, on March 4, I made preserved lemons. They’re still softening up in the fridge, but they should come out nicely in another 10 days or so. And they’ll keep for at least a year. Can’t wait to start using them.

Preserved Lemons

Adapted from “Cooking at the Kasbah: Recipes from My Moroccan Kitchen” by Kitty Morse

The traditional method for preserving lemons involves cutting the lemons a different way and sprinkling salt into the cuts; I found it awkward, so I just cut the lemons into wedges. This also makes it easier to remove a small amount for a recipe.

• 1 dozen lemons, five cut into eight wedges, the rest reserved for juicing (I bought organic lemons, since we’re eating the rind)
• 1/2 cup pickling salt or fine sea salt (kosher salt isn’t a good choice because you want the salt to dissolve quickly)
• 1 quart-size canning jar

Place the salt in a medium bowl. Press both sides of each lemon wedge into the salt and place into the canning jar. Juice the remaining lemons until the juice covers the wedges in the jar. Cover and refrigerate. Turn the jar gently every few days to redistribute the wedges. They’re ready to use after 30 days.

I took this photo of a hyacinth in our yard when I was taking a photography class at the Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. It turned out so beautifully that I framed it and hung it in my office.

I used my GorillaPod mini tripod to set up this photo. I love that thing – the flexible legs can wrap around anything, I can set it up on a table or the ground, and I often end up carrying my camera around with it, which sometimes makes it easier to make a shot. Cool tool.

This is my contribution to Photo Friday‘s weekly photo challenge. This week’s topic is Floral.

There are so many things I’m interested in, it’s hard to keep up with all that I want to do. Over the weekend, I discovered this site – “Creative Every Day” – which offers kinship and support for doing something creative every day. So I joined, and while I probably won’t post something every day, my goal is to do something creative every day and post at least weekly.

Gardening, cooking, writing and photography are some of my passions. I’m also redecorating a bedroom and planning to redo part of the backyard. So there are lots of opportunities for creativity this year. Here goes