Sunday, February 24, 2013

Sunday Cooking - Ginger and Citrus

As the weather is still wet and blustery, I spent today in the kitchen.  A couple of weeks ago, a friend at work gave me a couple of pounds of ginger that I decided to deal with today.  I also noticed quite a number of lemons on the tree that were ready to pick, so I added them to some wildly sour hybrid citrus from my son's house.  A lot of produce to deal with, in other words.

I decided to peel the citrus and use the juicer to make juice from the fruit.  The peels went into a solution of water and sugar which was boiled down to syrup.  The peels are drying on a rack, the simple syrup is jarred, and the sugar drips remaining will be saved as well. 

I peeled the ginger (quite a task) and sliced about half a pound of into paper thin slices and cooked them in a rice vinegar and sugar solution until they turned pinkish and translucent.  I chopped the rest and cooked it in 4 cups of water and 4 cups of sugar until a syrup formed - the chopped ginger is now drying and the syrup has been jarred.  It's a spicy sweet syrup - I think I will add it to my tea, or use it for a dip for oven fried chicken or in ginger snap cookies.   The pickled ginger can be used as a garnish with sushi or in a bento lunch.  Yum. 

The crockpot is full of chicken waiting for a shoyu sauce, the lamb is doing well, and I can't possibly worry about my garden until it stops pouring (if I have any garden left and it hasn't washed away.) 

My kitchen smells very good, and I feel like I accomplished something - always a good feeling! 

3 comments:

Deb said...

Oh no Nancy, you can't put "the lamb" in the same sentence
as your crockpot!!

From Beyond My Kitchen Window said...

I love the smell of ginger cooking. What a great way to use all your lemon rinds too.

NancyDe said...

Usually, I make lemon marmalade, but we don't actually use a lot of it - not big jelly eaters - so this was a good experiment.