One of the big problems with citrus trees is that you get a whole lot of fruit all at one time. There are two ways to deal with this–share the harvest and/or preserve it. Homegrown Revolution has done both this week by mooching some lemons off of a friend’s tree and preserving them by making one of the essential ingredients of Moroccan food, L’hamd markad or preserved salted lemons. L’hamd markad is easy to make. Here’s a recipe from Cooking at the Kasbah by Kitty Morse:

12 or more unblemished organically grown Meyer or other lemons, scrubbed
Sea salt
fresh lemon juice as needed

Pat lemons dry. Cut a thin dime-sized piece from both ends of each lemon. Set each lemon on end and make a vertical cut three quarters of the way through, so halves remain attached at the base – do not cut all the way through. Turn lemon upside down and make a similar cut through at a 90 degree angle to the first. Fill each cut with as much salt as it will hold. Place lemons carefully in a sterilized wide-mouth glass quart jar. Compress lemons while adding them until no space is left and lemon juice rises to the top. Lemons must be covered with juice at all times, so add lemon juice if necessary. Seal and set aside in dark place.

Keep for 4 to 6 weeks before using. To use, discard seeds, and rinse lightly if necessary. Once opened, store in refrigerator where they will keep up to 6 months.

In the photo you will see that we added some spices to our lemons. This is an optional thing. A traditonal spice blend would be something like 3 peppercorns, 3 cloves and one cinnamon stick.

Also, we found it impossible to follow the command in the recipe to cut the lemons this way and that, cleverly leaving them whole and stuffing them with salt. That just didn’t work because our lemons were too big to fit in the mouth of the jar while whole. You see, we’re using honkin’ big ghetto lemons, not nice little Meyers. So we cut them up into quarters and just made sure they were well coated in salt.

You can use your L’hamd markad in a variety of dishes, from salads to meat stews. You use them in a relish sort of way, as a salty-sour accent. We want to try chopping them fine, blending them with other tasty things, like garlic, and sprinkling them on everything from greens to pizza.

There’s also an expensive condiment you can recreate at home by blending together 2 preserved lemons lemons, 2 tablespoons dijon mustard, 1/4 cup honey, 1 garlic clove, salt and pepper. Blend in some olive oil until it gets the consistency of mayonnaise.

Moroccan cuisine makes a lot of sense in Los Angeles as the two places have similar climates and all the stuff that grows in Morocco also grows in Southern California–olives, tomatoes, fava beans, dates, and mint. The only thing we’re missing are the sheep . . .

Homegrown Revolution’s month of fermentation continues with the following bubbling containers–from left to right:

Rye Sourdough Starter
More info in a future post, but rye flour is much more active than a starter made with white flour!

White Flour Starter
We’ve already ranted about this stuff here and here. So far, much success.

Crème Fraîche
Special thanks to Susan of Northeast LA’s “culture club” for giving us some Swedish fil mjolk culture. We gave it some cream to feed on to produce a delicious batch of crème fraîche, though you can also make crème fraîche with buttermilk .

Filmjölk
Once again, more filmjölk given some milk to feed on thus producing more . . . filmjölk. More info here.

Lacto-fermented Daikon Radish
We’ll report the results. In the meantime read all about lacto-fermentation from an excerpt from the book Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats.