Sometimes a recipe sends you to another recipe, somewhere between free association and desperation. Last week (or the week before?), I was thinking of making a version of tajine from a Deborah Madison cookbook I love entitled Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. Alas, the recipe called for preserved lemons. I went to Wegmans in Geneva and telephoned both Canandaigua and Pittsford (what some call the Mother Ship and others the Star Ship). No preserved lemons. (My claims, while in Denver, that Wegmans has everything turn out to be false. And my decision not to buy preserved lemons at Savory Spice when I was there because they would be harder to transport than all the other wonderful things I bought both turns out to be another error. Or, perhaps fate driving me along.) No preserved lemons, though, turned into something of an adventure. Why?
LET'S MAKE PRESERVED LEMONS!!!!!!
So, back to Deborah Madison who, in fact, has a recipe -- and three bags of organic lemons and a bit of salt later, there is a beautiful jar of lemons in my refrigerator, slowly evolving into preserved lemons. (It takes 3 weeks according to Madison, not millenia.) A great thing to do if you have a plethora of lemons or if you intend to make dishes that call for preserved lemons. One more week, and I can return to the tajine with my very own preserved lemons, which keep, according to Madison, 6 months, so watch here for the plethora of preserved lemons to turn into a plethora of recipes with preserved lemons in them! (Word for the day seems tobe plethora.)
What do you do with lemons? What's your favorite lemon recipe? Where do you get your preserved lemons?
