🍋 Preserved Lemons and Tagines

+ National Women’s History Month & an Extraordinary Woman in the making: Ilaria Felluga

I have a food sharing thing going on with a small group of friends. We all love to make jams, cakes, and delicious savory dishes, and always share what we make with one another. If one of these friends gifts me a jar of jam, I'll usually make something else and pack it up in that jar for her. 

Linda just gave me a bag of great jars - some of them I use now for my mother yeast. In a couple of the other jars, I prepared some preserved lemons that I'll be giving to her.

I'm not sure why I haven’t made preserved lemons this year until now because our prolific lemon tree produced a hundred plus lemons, most of them still hanging on the tree.

Once you pick a lemon, the natural oils on the skin start to dry up right away. If you pick lemons only as needed, they maintain their natural oils and juiciness.

Linda had never heard of preserved lemons, so I’m excited to share these with her. Lemons can be used in so many ways and we use them every evening for salad dressing and of course, for lots of desserts.

Preserved lemons are salt-cured, and as time goes by, they leach out their natural juices. When you want to use a preserved lemon, just remove it from the jar and scrape out the inner pulp; it's the skin you're after. Preserved lemons are wonderful in tagine dishes, and thinly sliced strips of preserved lemons are a delicious addition to a grilled cheese sandwich, tuna fish salad, and other salads.

If you decide to make preserved lemons, use untreated lemons. If you don't have a lemon tree, you can probably find untreated lemons at your local farmers market.

The recipe: