The Muse of The Day

The Last Drop of Lemon Syrup

OK, so what to do with the leftover syrup from making candied lemon peel from the last post is on the agenda for today. Below you see the jar I had leftover after making the batch the other day. I happened to have a little bit more in another jar, as well, I just didn't photograph that bit in this picture. There are many things you can use the lemon syrup for: lemon drop martinis, simple syrup for margaritas, a sweetener for your cup of tea, add water and lemon juice ice cubes to make lemonade, add it to yogurt, drizzle it over fresh fruit, etc., but I am going to show you what I did with it.

After your first time making the candied lemon peel your syrup will look like this:

A pale lemon yellow color, reminiscent (to me) of the color of Lemoncello, the spirit made from mixing vodka with lemon zest. I have yet to try making my own, and I am sure it is easy to do, I just haven't gotten around to it since I only occasionally will drink a glass of wine, I find it to be extra work to make some liquor thing - and who needs extra work? I must add here, though, if I DID make it , and it was AWESOME, perhaps I wouldn't consider it extra work at all. Will have to see what time brings to that issue. Anyways, my point is that it is a very light lemon color. If you take a batch of lemons (California Meyer being the first choice), thinly slice them and put them to boil in the lemon syrup,

leave them in the boiling syrup for 10-15 minutes until the rinds are really soft,

and then store the left over syrup from that batch of cooking. The next time you go to use it, you will see that your lemon syrup will now be a deep golden, almost honey colored hue:

I actually was able to make two batches of the lemon slices with the leftovers of the initial sryup. The slices don't have to boil as long as lemon peel because you are not looking for the "chew" consistency to be the same. You want it softer. Leave the syrupy lemon slices to dry directly on parchment paper. After just a few hours on the counter, long enough so they are nice and cooled, you can stick them in a jar to use later. I would keep that jar in the fridge, just in case. WARNING  WARNING: if you eat ONE slice now, you may not have any slices left for any further cooking adventures. This happened on my first batch of lemon slices. After just one try, the girls and I ate ALL of them. We had to wait for another day to buy more lemons and continue with the dessert plan.

The leftover syrup from the third time using it (lemon peels, then two batches of lemon slices) turned this beautiful amber color. It is hard to believe, isn't it? None of the pictures in this post have been Photoshopped so you can get an exact feeling of what things were looking like in my kitchen. Talk about mesmerising. Of course, by the third go around, my jar size had gotten considerably smaller as most of the sugar syrup stayed on the lemon slices. Also, I must add here, the third jar of syrup is not as sugary sweet as the first jar because it has been made with the pith on the lemon. I actually liked it more, it had a sweetness with bitter undertones to it. I thought about making grown up lollipops with this third jar, but the syrup didn't last that long in our house.

 

Get ready. The next photo is the stuff my lemon dreams are made of.

 

Lemon Ricotta Cake coated with lemon syrup (I skewered holes into the cake layer when it came out of the oven and drizzled, and redrizzled, lemon syrup all over it. I then, delicately placed the soft syrupy lemon slices over the cake. Being so soft, the lemon slices were not a problem to cut through with a small sharp knife. My husband, whom I do love, wasn't keen on eating whole lemon slices, he is kind of funny that way. Oh well, we have a fix for that. When trying out this ricotta cake thing I doubled the recipe so I could try it two different ways. He got his own separate little cake.

I must say that even though I still prefer the one with the lemon slices, both visually and for eating, I gave his a try and ... yes ... it too qualifies as a lemon dream.

 Hope you get to make some lemon dreams of your own.

Carolina 

Lots of Lemon Love

It is citrus season in California. That means it is time to make candied lemon peel in my house.

Even though I live in the boonies, I can hop in the car and "find me" some perfect meyer lemons this time of year. I don't buy just 2 or 3 lemons. I buy loads of them.

The first thing I do, after recuperating from my drive to get them is I admire them, smell them, pierce their golden skins with my thumb nail and find myself lost in the intoxicating aroma. It is better than a kiss.

Then I get to work.

I wash them with luke warm water, rubbing the lemons as I go, making sure each one is nice and clean. While I am at it, I wash all of the ice cube trays that I keep in the storage pantry. Since I have an automatic ice maker in my fridge, I don't use these that often. A quick rinse is called for in case a little dust has collected.

Next, I cut them in half

... again I take in their aroma. I used to have a prolific meyer lemon tree in my garden when I lived in Florida. The sweet scent it gave off was totally magical, but the flavor was simply not as pronounced as these little meyer lemons that we get from California. I am envious of all those with California residency. On occasion, in the hire end markets I travel to, I will find equally good meyer lemons from New Zealand, yum. This year I even saw a batch come from Chile. When California, though, goes into citrus mode, we have a plethora available to us and I fill the produce bags with as many as I can afford.

Next up, I juice them.

I pour all the juice into the ice cube trays and put them in the freezer. When they are all frozen I pop out the cubes into a bag that I keep in the freezer. When I am cooking or need lemon juice for lemonade, I just grab from that bag. When we lived on the boat, I had to prepare lemons like this because there were areas that didn't have good lemons, or any lemons at all for that matter. We used to have a locker type freezer under the bunk in the pilot house. Whenever the weather was bad, and we both had to be on watch, one of us would catnap on that bunk. Every time I lay on that bunk, I used to think of the treasure trove of goodies that were in the freezer beneath me. Let's get on with it.

When you juice the lemons, juice them "hard", meaning go as far as you can towards the peel. The less of the white stuff, the sweeter your candied lemon peel will turn out.

Next. Put the peels in a big pot of cold water and bring the whole thing to a boil. Once it is boiling, turn your heat source down to a simmer, you want to simmer the lemon peel (or any other citrus peel) until it is nice and tender ... gushy almost ... to were you can easily pierce the peel with the tip of a sharp knife.

Once your lemon peels have reached that stage, drain them in a colander and run them under cool water. Once they are cool enough to handle take a spoon and scrape out any of the white pith that remains and has come loose from the peel.

You will have a lot of pith scooped out by the time you are done with all the lemon peels. I am always surprised by how much comes out. Don't worry if your lemon peel begins to tear, or even if it tears completely. It will all be good in the end.

Once you have scooped them all, cut the lemon peels into strips. How long, and how wide, is irrelevant. Put them in a pot with a two to one ratio of sugar to water. For all these lemons I used 4 cups of sugar, to 2 cups of water. Bring it all to a boil on medium heat.

Once the peel starts to look see-through, raise the heat to high, making the sugar syrup reach 230°, also called thread stage (when you pull the spoon from the pot, it creates a thread that doesn't fall off the spoon.) I don't get too hung up on the actual temperature, but I put this photo in for those of you who HAVE to be precise. Basically, what you want to see is a whole lot of bubbling going on.

Once you get the sugar to that stage, it means the sugar will adhere to the little pieces of lemon peel and give it a nice "chew". Use a slotted spoon to remove them from the hot sugar and place them on a cooling rack that is placed over a piece of parchment paper. The paper will catch the drips so it doesn't make a huge mess on your counter. When I do a huge batch, I place the parchment (and rack) on a cookie sheet (tray), that way I can move all the trays around my kitchen, making room for more trays, or making room to make the next meal that my family needs.

They might stick together as they cool. Don't fret. Mine always do. I just pick them apart once they have cooled down.

Once they cool you have a decision to make.

Gently toss them in a bowl of sugar or not. Supposedly this helps keep the little pieces from sticking to each other. I think the extra sugar is over-kill.

 

Place the sugar syrup you have left into a mason jar. Keep it in the fridge. This post is getting a little photo heavy, but on my next post I will show you what to do with that syrup. Stay tuned.

Ok - I gotta go get the girls from school. One last photo before I go.

Trust me, these are well worth the effort.

Carolina

 

Three Paintings From The Past

We have had a patch of rough weather - tornadoes, driving rain, and the unit that heats my studio and the rest of the bottom floor has gone on the blink. I had done everything in my power to insure that Sunday would be a sewing day. I had cleaned the house, top to bottom, on Thursday, I had gotten all the food shopping and errands done on Friday, I had a cooking marathon all day Saturday so that there would be plenty of leftovers, and all in all I was ready for my sewing jaunt on Sunday. Now I am sitting in my studio writing this, I am dressed like I belong inside Dr. Zhivago's house. I am waiting for the little portable heater to heat up the room, every possible light bulb is on, and we have put in a call to the heating people. I thought I would share some color with you today since I so enjoyed my Sunday morning spent perusing your blogs. Below you see three paintings I have in my "stash". 

This is one of my daughter, Nica May, the egg shaped rock above her head was a recurrent them in a series I once did. The theme was based on issues of being born, or rather reborn, into who you will become. The painting (30" by 40") sits on one of the shelves now of my studio. I like to see it every time I leave the studio.

 

 

Next up is a three piece painting ( it is about 8 feet tall) on motherhood. I often feel that as a mother and artist, if I may be so bold to call myself that, you are split, physically, mentally, and emotionally, but you must still walk forward towards the light. You feel like your creative self (represented by the bowl) never gets filled and is in a permanent state of being empty. 

 

FInally I am showing you a painting of the tea accoutrement and my pencil box that I used to keep in my studio when my studio was not located in my home. I loved this little painting (24" by 20" if I remember right.) Somebody bought it and gave it as a gift to a friend who was dying of cancer. The friend died a month later and I wondered if the painting ended up in a garage sale some where. I take solace in the fact the painting was most probably one of the last gifts they got to open in their lives, hopefully it brought a little smile to them.

 

All this cooking and driving I have been doing makes me miss painting. Of course, I can't just blame it on the cooking and driving. Maybe one of these days I will burst and go back to painting. For now there is a sewing project waiting to be tackled. I am going to go sew.

Have a good Sunday.

Carolina

Learning To Eat, Starting With Breakfast

Late last night I started reading a new book called Women, Food, and God. I also finished it. 

I found out about it during my recent bout with the-cold-from-hell and was forced to never ending days of bed rest and internet hopping via my iPad. Last night, while I was reading the book, I kept underlining sentences that jumped out at me, when it got to the point that I had more than 5 sentences underlined, I started listing the pages that I need to go back to and reread.

Things were getting out of hand. I put my pen down and devoured the rest of the book. Now I am here telling you about it. In a nutshell it is a book for all people who struggle with eating issues. Some suffer with bulimia, others with anorexia. I suffer from neither. Some folks diet hop from one ridiculous encarcerating diet to another making bird food look like a gourmet feast. That is not me either - too much suffering going on there. Some eat without stopping, completely out of control. Not me. So why was this book so awesome for me if I have none of those food issues? I fall into the "and-then-some" category, if there is such a category. I eat, out of pleasure and nutrition, fantastic, healthy food ... and then some. The "and-then-some" has gotten me into trouble so much so that I see that there needs to be a change because it is taking a toll on more than just my continuosly upclimbing size in Levi's. Who am I kidding. I don't even wear Levi's anymore, thank the Lord for Chicos. My problem is that I eat even when I am not hungry. I eat out of boredom (my days aren't my own anymore as I have become a human taxi), frustration (remember I am the parent of two teenage girls), desperation (the economy did a number on us that we are still trying to recover from), lack of a consistent schedule (like most parents driving their children from here to kingdom come with their varied activities), desperation (I feel woefully underutilized in my current mind-numbing role), and I also eat because I have a serious case of "I-just-spent-two-hours-cooking-a-massive-healthy-meal-for-my-entire-family-and-it-is-dinner-time-and-that-is-what-you-are-supposed-to-do: eat-it, plus my blog is about food. Wow. Craziness. It is obvious that all the food that goes in and can be listed on the "and-then-some" side has zero to do with hunger, or rather with hunger for food.

Deep breath. Having begun my other blog, getting an injury and not following through, has me feeling like a loser. You can not imagine how much I have been beating myself up over this. The extra ten lbs. I have gained since my last post there, is solid (my fat is solid at room temperature) proof that I turn to food to sooth whatever ails me ... and I must say my lack of coming through on that blog is definetly ailing me. How to juggle writing about food here, on The Muse of The Day, dealing with not hitting the mark in other areas of my life, and in general the nearing onslaught of menopause and what that means to my weight, has kept me from writing anything near resembling your standard New Year's blog post. Don't feel sorry for me. I don't need sympathy. I need to figure my way out of this damn hole. And so in comes this book, Women, Food, and God. I feel a great sense of relief, now that I can see the path.

Deep breath number two. And so I begin, again, with the brain fog beginning to clear. I know now what I have to do and how to go about it. I won't go into the details of the how-to that are in the book. Suffice it to say, if you need it, the path, buy the book. Read it. Those of you who don't need the help can focus on the second part of this post: a recipe for breakfast granola.

My original post was going to be about Heidi Swanson, of the blog 101 Cookbooks. It wasn't until I started tackling her second book, Super Natural Everyday, that it dawned on me that her cooking is vegetarian. I don't know why it never occured to me. I guess I just didn't miss it, the meat stuff I mean. Her food is good. Really good. Basic and simple. 

I recently made her granola. Like all her recipes, it turned out just the way she said it would.

I tweaked the ingredients a bit by using a variety of dried fruits and I skipped the salt. Not a big enough difference to say I reinvented the recipe, and besides - it's granola. Granola has been around for a long time, there are plenty of recipes out there that are nothing more than variations on the theme.

What I like about Heidi's recipe is that it is not too sweet. Although I have a healthy sweet tooth, I don't want all that sugar in my breakfast. Yuck. Not first thing in the morning.

The recipe makes enough for me to have 2 weeks of breakfast and share a bit too with the rest of the family, although the girls prefer something else.

The thing I like about granola, is actually the fresh fruit I put on top. Try as I may to "go local" I can't resist the blueberries coming from Chile this time of year, or the strawberries that Florida is sending our way.

Granola is not the only thing I like for breakfast, but I liked it enough to paint a recipe card out of it. I tried to make it visually easy to "see" the recipe, so I wouldn't have to "read" the recipe, but rather, at a glance could see what I needed to do with the ingredients. I actually prefer having my recipes on these cards instead of being written out to then n'th degree of precision.

So, I will be here, trucking along, thanking the heavens for aligning the stars for me so that can I relearn how to eat.

Loving all of you,

Carolina

Did She Really Say "Let Them Eat Cake"?

If you read my last post about the special drink, I urge you to try it. It really does taste refreshing and nothing like what you would imagine those ingredients to taste like. Yesterday, somehow or another, for 45 minutes I actually managed to feel a bit better. I mustered up the stamina to make my girls an after school snack - a cream cake in my new Bundt cake pan I received from my mother for Christmas (thanks Mami). As head chef in this household, I must try everything first. When it was out of the oven and "somewhat" cooled, I sat down with a slice of it and a cup of tea.

 

It amazes me how something so simple can taste so satisfying. Being that it used the special Nordic Ware Bundt cake pan , and everything went in all at once and came out looking ready to be eaten, no frosting involved, the whole thing was a snap to make - good thing because I didn't have much energy to begin with.

 

Although I am sharing with you my "cake making event", what I really want you to know about involves the link below. I have never (OK maybe not "never", but at least in the last ten years) have been sick for this long. Frankly, it is really boring being sick. I am used to doing so much in a day that to just sit there and do nothing was driving me crazy. Regular TV seemed pointless and annoying. I somehow, in my ipad hopping found out about this british food show that, in a very funny way, combines food and history. This show,The Supersizers, goes through, and the hosts eat their way through, different periods of history with the main emphasis being on the unique foods, mannerisms, and traditions related to food, that the people of the era ate. I started with the Shakespearean (Elizabethan) era and have been working my way to more current times. I must tell you that I am fascinated by this program series. If you are sick, in bed, with the flu, it is a must see if you are in a foodie mood. Below is the link for the one about Maria Antoinette.

 

After being home-schooled for most of their lives, my girls finally experienced the sensation of having to go back to school after Christmas break. Neither one of them was that thrilled to go back, even though they love their school. Their vacation simply wasn't long enough. I remember that feeling. I hated going back too. I tried to make it better for them by having this cake ready to great them when they came through the door. It felt good to just do a "Mommy" kind of thing.

Here is the recipe for the cream cake. I hope you can click on it and see it big enough on your screen if you are going to try and make the cake. If you have difficulty seeing it well enough, let me know.

In the midst of writing this post I felt a rush to "paint" the recipe and add it to my watercolor recipe box.

Ok. Now I am exhausted and I am going back to bed.

Carolina

 

Mama Needs A Drink

Although 2011 was a good year, I have to say I am glad it is over. This post will be super brief as I am dealing with the worst case of the flu I have ever had. I have been dragging around now for 4 days, with a box of tissues under my arm. I feel lousy. I had hoped to start the year off with a big post on New Year's resolutions and all ... but it just ain't gonna happen. I am sick as a dog.

I made myself this drink in hopes of feeling better. The ingredients go in the blender in the following order:

grapes, 1/2 banana, 1/2 green apple, handful of kale, handful of wheat grass, small handful of watercress, 2 teaspoons Agave, large handful of Spinach, slice of lime (peel & all), a cup of frozen pineapple, a cup of ice.

I am not sure why, but it tastes really good.

I should have this regularly.

I hope none of you get this flu.

Happy New Year.

I miss you.

Carolina