amethyst73 | Adventures With Lemons

The area where we live had truly beautiful weather this weekend; temperatures were in the 60s and 70s. I was outside doing some weeding Saturday afternoon when a neighbor's little girl passed by with a paper bag in her arms. "Want some lemons?" she asked. I looked up at her and replied that sure, I'd take a couple. "Okay," she said cheerfully, continuing down the street. "I'll be right back with your lemons!"

I went back to my weeding. There had been some rain earlier in the week, and the warmth and the wet had brought up a whole new crop of oxalis, a plant that looks kind of like clover. It's a weed that's astonishingly good at spreading itself: it can grow new plants from bits of root left in the soil, it can have sex like other flowering plants, and it can reproduce asexually by means of little bulb-like appendages it grows on its roots. It's horribly pernicious stuff. Anyway,I dug and pulled a few minutes more before the little girl came skipping back, again with a paper bag in her arms. "Here's your lemons," she panted as she handed me the bag. "We're pruning our tree, and we've got this huge bag of lemons that we don't know what to do with!"

I thanked her as I received the bag. From its heft (and from the girl's comments), it clearly contained significantly more than the 'couple' that I'd said I'd take. I looked in, and sure enough there were around a dozen of the things. I stepped inside and told the huz that we needed to do something with lemons for dinner that night.

Interestingly, the lemons that we had been given were not the standard bright yellow fruits that are commonly seen in your local grocery. These fruits were lemon-shaped and smelled lemony, but their skins were quite distinctly orange. These were Meyer lemons, a cross between a true lemon and (probably) a mandarin or sweet orange (Wikipedia). The fruit is hard to find in groceries even out here, but plenty of folks have Meyer lemon trees in their yards as our neighbors do. As one might guess, Meyer lemons are sweeter and have a fruitier flavor than their true lemon cousins, but they can be used in essentially the same fashion in cooking.

It was time to hunt for recipes.

The huz had the brilliant idea of trying to make lemon ice cream. It was not difficult to find recipes on the web:

Lemon ice cream

1 C milk
1 C cream
1 C sugar
~1/3 C lemon juice (we just took the juice of one lemon)
1 lemon's zest

Mix zest with sugar, mix in lemon juice, then mix in milk and cream and freeze.

When we've done non-egg ice cream recipes in the past, the ratio of sugar to liquid has generally been somewhat lower (~1/3 C sugar to 1.5 C liquid, more or less), and the ice cream has frozen quickly and become brick-solid after one night in the freezer. The high sugar content of this ice cream is presumably what's responsible for the fact that it's frozen firmly, but is still pliable enough to be served relatively easily. WARNING: May cause sensations of total lemony bliss, causing one to eat far more of this delectable dessert than is technically healthy. We plan to serve this for dessert the next time we have friends over for dinner.

For dinner that evening, we did a chicken scallopini with lemon-caper sauce that we've done before (I'll be happy to post the recipe if anyone wants it, it's pretty easy too). It was very tasty. :)

However, these two dishes took care of only two of our dozen or so lemons. What next?

On Sunday, we did a search for 'lemon pasta' on epicurious.com, and came up with (among others) the following promising-looking recipe:

Angel Hair Pasta with Peas, Prosciutto, and Lemon

1/2 pound angel hair pasta

1/3 cup whipping cream
1 teaspoon grated lemon peel
1 cup shelled fresh peas or frozen petite peas
4 ounces thinly sliced prosciutto, chopped (about 1 cup)
1/3 cup dry white wine
4 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1/3 cup grated pecorino Romano cheese (about 1 ounce)

Cook pasta in large pot of boiling salted water until tender but still firm to bite. Drain; reserve 3/4 cup pasta cooking liquid.

Simmer cream and lemon peel in heavy large skillet over medium heat until slightly reduced, about 1 minute. Stir in peas, prosciutto, wine, and lemon juice. Simmer 2 minutes. Add pasta and cheese and toss to coat, adding enough pasta cooking liquid to moisten. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Makes 2 servings; can be doubled.

We decided to do two things: (1) double it, as half a pound of angel hair didn't sound like very much, somehow; and (2) substitute skim milk for the whipping cream, as we'd already used a cup of whipping cream earlier in the weekend, and didn't feel like using yet more. Looking back at the ingredients list now, it occurs to me that it might be intended as a kind of alfredo sauce: cream, prosciutto, peas, a little cheese... well.

The angel hair cooked up just fine, and quite quickly. The huz put the milk and the lemon peel in our big frying pan. Prior to stirring, the arrangement reminded me of a giant fried egg: the lemon peels were in a neat round pile in the center of the pan, almost exactly the color of an egg yolk, and were totally surrounded by the white of the milk. I was tempted to take a picture of it because it was so pretty, but did not yield. After all, there was cooking to be done!

Knowing that one could accidentally curdle milk rather easily by heating it too much, I heated the mix of milk and lemon peel verrrrry gently, and got it to the point of steaming slightly but not boiling. It took a little longer than advertised to reduce the volume, but that was fine. The milk needed to stay liquid, and liquid it stayed. Then we began adding the other ingredients, starting with the large-ish amount of wine. The wine that I'd stuck in the fridge when we'd gotten home from the grocery so it would be nice and cold for drinking with dinner.

Now, class, we begin the science part of this discussion. Alcohols, such as isopropanol and ethanol (two alcohols commonly found in both laboratories and the home), have the ability to aggregate many sorts of dissolved polymers and bring them out of solution. Both the abovementioned alcohols are commonly used in biological labs for precipitating nucleic acids, in fact. However, they are generally used for DNA precipitation when all the proteins have already been removed from solution by some other method. Because alcohols can, of course, also be used to bring proteins out of solution.

Class, do you know what milk largely consists of?

Yup. Protein!

Adding 2/3 of a cup of fridge-cold wine all at once to a pan with about 1.5 cups of very warm milk was, in hindsight, undoubtedly not what the author of the recipe intended. The milk curdled instantly - it was really quite impressive! One moment there was this nice evenly white solution with orange bits distributed evenly throughout, and the next moment there were all these large clumps of white stuff with orange bits stuck in the middle. If the orange peel and milk had resembled a large fried egg at the beginning of the process, it now strongly resembled an egg that had been scrambled! As my mom commented, we inadvertently made cheese.

..Oh yes. It tasted fine. But if anyone out there has ideas as to how this should have been done, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Meyer Lemon Bars

Crust:
1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup confectioners' sugar
1/8 tsp salt
4 ounces (1 stick) unsalted butter, cold and cut into 1/2 inch pieces

Filling:
2 large eggs
1 cup superfine or bakers' sugar
2 tbsp all purpose flour
1/8 tsp salt
2 tsp finely grated meyer lemon zest*
1/4 cup freshly squeezed meyer lemon juice*

Preheat oven to 350F. Butter and line an 8-inch square pan with parchment paper.

To make crust:
Combine flour, confectioners' sugar and salt in the bowl of a food processor. Add butter and pulse until the mixture is pebbly. Press evenly into the bottom of your prepared pan. Bake until lightly golden, about 18-20 minutes. Set aside crust.

To make filling:
In a medium bowl, whisk together eggs, sugar, flour and salt. Whisk in lemon zest and juice until well combined. Pour over crust (it's okay if crust is still hot). Bake until filling is just set, about 15 to 18 minutes. Cool completely before serving. Dust with confectioners' sugar if desired.

* Note: I use meyer lemons (because we have a tree in our garden). Meyer lemons are less tart than the Eureka lemons found in the supermarket. The lemon bars will be a bit tarter with Eureka lemons, but you can increase the sweetness by adding an additional 1-2 tablespoons of sugar to the filling.

[EDIT 11/22/07: Buttered the pan, no parchment paper; re-buttered top portion before pouring filling - worked pretty well. Required 1.5 lemons to get 1/4 cup of juice; zested the extra half lemon and added that to the filling. Makes filling REALLY wonderfully lemony!]

Given how much I like lemon bars, it is somewhat surprising that this was my very first time making them. I read the instructions, shrugged, buttered the pan, then put in some parchment paper. I noted that the paper didn't want to lie flat, so I slit the corners and folded the pieces across. Pretty much everything went fine. The crust (which I was surprised to see called for no liquid at all) browned nicely. The filling took rather longer to cook than expected, but since I didn't measure the amount of lemon juice but merely rounded the amount to the nearest lemon (i.e. one), there might have been some extra lemon juice around. The whole process of making and baking was surprisingly fast: it took only about an hour and twenty minutes, start to finish.

The bars are fragile, sticky, and quite tasty. They're also kind of stuck to the parchment paper, and the whole affair stuck to the pan some too. Should I have buttered the parchment paper rather than the pan? Should I ignore the parchment entirely the next time I do it? Again, advice is welcome.

I think we're down to only eight or nine lemons now.