Preserving summer

One of the many great things about living in Australia has been the amount of food that is literally growing around me.  It would seem that most people here have a fruit tree or two in their gardens.  For me seeing citrus fruit growing merrily used to be a very much Mediterranean holiday thing, now even in the cold June weather my local garden centre has a load of fruiting trees. 

A few people I know have had problems in using all the fruit they have, and now in the chill of winter I'm really happy that a work colleague back in February had a load of lemons to offload.  

Rather than the more typical lemon curd, I really wanted to try preserving some lemons.  I've got a few recipes that require them (they a great put in foil with white fish to bake) and I love the flavour they add to plain cous-cous.  Typically it's small lemons that are preserved, but I thought I'd have a crack with this large ones.  I found a few methods for preserving them on t'internet, these are the steps I took.  

First I picked out the better lemons, about half of the batch, and the other half I juiced to make the brine later.  The picked out lemons I cut into segments, not completing the cut so they still stayed together, then I put them into the freezer overnight. 

Ready for the freezer

Thawing in the morning.

After letting the lemons thaw completely the next day, I packed them with table salt, rubbing it into the flesh and into each segment cut.  They fell apart a bit at this stage, so I ended up packing them in halves as layers into sterilised jars. 

I sterilised the jars by popping them in a hot oven for 10 minutes.

The finish products, a little bit of summer in a jar.

Between each layer I sprinkled some peppercorns, and I got about 4/5 layers in each jar.  Once nice and full I covered the lemons with the juice I had squeezed earlier to make a brine for the preserves.  I let them sit for a month in a cool cupboard before tucking in to them.