local, seasonal citrus

Maybe it's that I was coming down with a head cold, but about halfway through this last week I found myself craving citrus fruit. If all California is your food shed, there are many choices. Around here I've seen a few orange trees, but by far the dominant variety is the Meyer lemon - that hardy cross between a lemon and a sweet orange.

I have a gift of lemons in my kitchen right now, from a very prolific backyard tree. Just to smell them and see them in their blue glass bowl is edifying. But I've been looking for some fresh ideas of what to do with them, so was pleased to find this article in the LA Times:

http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-meyerlemons16jan16,1,7792191.story

Now I need to say that some of these suggestions don't work for seasonal here, even though the lemons are. I doubt anyone is putting lemon juice in their children's hair and taking them to the beach today on the Sonoma Coast. It's not particularly cold today, but it is wet and blustery. My popsicle molds are put away until next summer, and the cold drinks don't appeal much either.

Some of the ideas are no respecter of local either. I hope no one here or in Los Angeles runs out and buys Maine lobster to go with their lemons. Getting some crab I understand, but finding that one of the best free things in life is backyard lemons, and then pairing it with 3000 mile seafood seems quite contradictory.

And would my dentist find using lemon juice as a dentifrice very smart?

I'm taken with the idea, though, of putting some meyer lemon zest in oatmeal bread or rolls, and even more taken by the pairing of meyer lemons and cardamom as seasonings in both sweet and savory. Or bringing back pomanders, and using meyer lemons for them. And I think when searching for ideas for using the lemons in baking, I am going to look at recipes for oranges, too, and just substitute the meyers.

And given this headcold, it's a lemon, juiced, plus local honey, hot water, and unlocal whiskey at bedtime for me tonight.

The only remaining dilemma is whether to do some preserving or not. Marmalade or limoncello? I told myself I needed a break from the too many baking and preserving adventures of summer and fall, and am rather hoping, giving the press of my several jobs and commitments, that I can stick to simple cooking of meals for a while.

Our conflicted way of food

I've been wanting for some time to write about attitudes toward food in our American culture, but have been mulling over just where to begin and what to say.

Then this weekend I noticed that our seasonal confusion now extends to confusing times of feasting and times of fasting. Used to be we had lots of advertising and editorial copy in the various media about feasting until the New Year, when the ads and features about exercise and dieting began. Gradually this moved backward until one could see the diet and exercise pitches beginning on Boxing Day. This, more than anything, signalled that the Christmas season was dead except liturgically. Now it seems that the diet data comes right along with the recipes for butter cookies. The Saturday after Thanksgiving I turned on the tv a few minutes in advance of something I wanted to watch and stumbled upon a segment - on one of those shows that fills the gossip column niche - on how to take off the pounds gained on Thursday.

So I want to know - who gains multiple pounds in one day? Surely that is only possible for chronic dieters and the dehydrated? And who weighs themselves the day after a major feast? And I want to know why we must jettison the leftovers and get all puritanical right away?

Are we afraid of food? afraid of pleasure? afraid of losing control? Or we are just determined to make ourselves miserable and never enjoy anything?

Actually, I have been wondering if our life circumstances are so out of control, or seem to be, that one of the few places we feel we can exercise control is over our food choices. Is this a motivation for both the addiction to diets and the interest in fresh, seasonal and local food?

I want to think that the latter is somehow more positive than the former because it allows for seasonal celebration and choosing foods for taste, not just for caloric, carb or fat content.

But I'm still mulling.

Open season for canning

I've ordered a box of apricots from the Fruit Group in Cotati which I hope to pick up on Thursday. This is a fairly sweet deal - a family with orchards over in the Valley who take orders and then provide the fruit in quantity for those of us who like to make preserves, etc. , and don't grow our own here in this coastal county. Last year the nectarines I bought were actually ripe, far better than supermarket fruit for less than $1 per pound. I gave some away, ate some, and made chutney and preserves.

I finally read Barbara Kingsolver's paean to home canning tomatoes in the May-June Mother Jones. (Haven't afforded the book yet, and there are more than 200 people on the waiting list at the library.) She's right on about a couple of things, and says them better than I would have.

"I think of canning as fast food, paid for in time up front."

and, of frozen tomatoes,

"Having gone nowhere in the interim, they will still be local in February."

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/05/seeing_red.html

Extending the season of our local food supply is what preserving is all about, to add variety when all that's in the market are root vegetables and apples. That's the way it was in my New England childhood before supermarkets stocked air freighted produce. Summers were punctuated by family parties to get the bumper crop of green beans or strawberries or tomatoes into the freezer. A task I took on around age 12 was foraging for wild strawberries, blueberries, thimbleberries, beach plums, rosehips, etc. - anything that I could make jelly or jam out of.

There's a persistence in this. In a month or six weeks I will go out in the hedgerows after one of the few things that are free in Sonoma County, blackberries, and love every moment of the tedium of making old fashioned seedless jam from them.

My mother didn't actually do much canning, as both she and her mother were always fascinated by new ways of doing things, and preferred freezing. Certainly the quality of some things - like the green beans, for example - were better preserved with proper freezing in a 0 degrees chest freezer. But canning, for those things that can easily and safely, and drying for some things, work okay, and are less energy intensive in the long run than freezing. When you can or dry, all the energy inputs for preservation are up front, and then things last a long time without losing quality.

The season for apricots is fleeting. I can buy good quality dried California apricots year round, but I'm fantasizing about just what kind of preserves or condiments I will have handy in my pantry to brighten meals next winter.