Homemade Holiday Gifts

We decided to continue to check out of "the system" by making most of our gifts this year. We made candied lemon peel, apple butter and lemon curd. Some successes here and some mild failures follow:

Candied Lemon Peel

This one is easy and helped us to get rid of the lemon peel leftover from Jim's Vodka and Soda with Lemon. We throw most of our vegetal matter into our worm bin, but the wormies don't much care for strong citrus. We collect our peels in a large ziplock bag in the freezer. Once the bag in getting close to full, it's time to candy your peels. The recipe is from Maggie Beer and Stephanie Alexander's Tuscan Cookbook. It's not online, so we present it here.

• Using a paring knife, remove the peel from the leftover flesh.
• In our first batch, we kept the peel in quarters and cut after. Some of the peels were too rubbery to jar, so in the second batch, we pre-cut the quarters into strips and moved to the next step.
• Boil your lemon peel with two changes of water to remove the bitterness in the pith.
• Weigh the peels and add an equal amount of sugar and the lemons back into the pan.
• Cook on low heat until the sugar is dissolved
• Drain (we reserved the lemony sugar for something else) and dry for a few days out of the way of ants.
• Roll the peels in castor sugar and jar. That's it!

Apple Butter

Jim scoured the interwebs for appropriate recipes for apple butter and ended up with a free-wheeling, seat-of-the-pants recipe that seemed to turn out alright.

Most recipes that "made sense" had you core and then cook the apples with the skin on and then reomove the skin with a food mill. Because we don't own a food mill, Jim peeled six Granny Smiths and six Jonathan, cored them, hit the skin with the Cuisinart and wrapped half of the chopped skin in some cheese cloth. Peta thought that adding all of the skins would add too much astringency and was probably correct. [For the second batch, we added the long peels into the crockpot and pulled them out after the cooking was done. This technique is not recommended since some peels were left behind. Bummer and sorry to all of our recipients.]

All of this went into the crockpot, filling it, on high and it cooked down for several hours. It started to break down so we added a bunch of cinnamon and lesser amounts of nutmeg, cloves and allspice (all pre-ground). Then we added a pinch of salt and sugar to taste. Sorry, but that's what we did. No measuring cups here. This mixture cooked on low all night and in the morning we'd wake up to the lovely smell of very much reduced apple butter. Slather it on the Crusty Bread that we've blogged about elsewhere and start your engines!

P.S. We got about four half-pint jars from each batch of 12 apples.

Lemon Curd

We used Alton Brown's recipe and things didn't work out as well as we had hoped. Regrettably the sauce didn't seem to thicken the way it ought to. The lemon curd ended with dense "correct curd" consistency at the bottom of the jars, whilst the top was a light 'mousse' consistency. The taste was fantastic, but the image was not. Peta is gearing up to make this recipe again in the new year, in the hopes that it can be the correct consistency throughout. She is working on the theory that the mixture did not heat correctly - so we will keep you posted!