Harvest Monday - March 5th, 2018

 

Not to brag, but the fruit tree varieties at this property are very underwhelming. 

This post is part of Harvest Monday at Our Happy Acres. We finally got a week of winter here so my garden had a rest while I dealt with the 50lbs of kumquats that even the critters aren't interested in eating.

My first marmalade attempt a few weeks ago was both visually disgusting and texturally repulsive.  (Shout out to NYT Cooking for leaving a gap in their paywall so I could access their article on making jam. It was very helpful when I was sending SOS messages into my google search bar.)

Not for human consumption.

The second time around I made some adjustments - like if you smell sugar caramelizing it's a sign that you've cooked it for five minutes too long, not a sign that you need to cook it for 20 more minutes. 

Better.

Acceptable for humans to eat. 

I used this recipe as a rough template and then used a hot water bath at the end. I also threw in a few Criolla Sella peppers. They have an extremely disappointing taste (I got them in a seed swap from someone who had never grown them) but have a fruity, tropical smell that I was into at the moment.

The oranges are sweet, but have poor eating quality, so those were squeezed into yard juice and also sliced really thin for a breakfast salad made with Renee's mesclun mix.

The grapefruit tree produces fruit that smell better than they taste, but it's become an integral component of my Old Fashioned recipe that I originally ripped off from a fantastic bar in Silver Lake and have been perfecting over the years. I sliced them and threw them in the oven on a wire rack for 10-12 hours.