Nerd Alert! It’s the Earliest Spring in 400 Years What’s cooking? Candied Kumquats, Candied Meyer Lemon, and Triple Citrus Marmalade

Kitchen Goddess note: I know I said this post would be up on Friday, but I forgot that the Spring National Bridge Tournament would be running, so instead of writing, I’ve been online watching the play in the prestigious Vanderbilt Knockout Teams. You heard me right – bridge hands. That’s how big a geek I really am.

When you finish reading this post you will know more than you thought possible about the vernal equinox, otherwise known as the First Day of Spring. If you’re not interested (what??!!), you can skip directly to the recipes for citrus. But then you may never know why spring doesn’t arrive on March 21st any more.

You probably already know the vernal equinox is the day when the sun rises exactly in the East and sets exactly in the West, so that daytime and nighttime are very nearly equal. The earth’s tilt on that day is 0º.

Now the wonky factor increases. You certainly know that we correct for minor flaws in the 365-day year by adding in a day to February every four years. So years divisible by 4 are leap years (in addition to being U.S. presidential election years – but let’s not go there today). What you might not know is that years divisible by 100 are not leap years. (Wait – most wonky coming right up.) So no February 29 in 1900 or 1800 or 1700. But if a year is divisible by 400, we get leap day back. That’s why we had one in 2000.

The point here is that solstices and equinoxes do a little bit of creeping ahead throughout each century, and then at the end of the century, the loss of leap day adjusts for the creep by pushing them back. But we didn’t lose the leap day in 2000, so the equinox has kept up its 100-year-old crawl forward. In 1947, for example, the vernal equinox was at 5:12 a.m. on March 21.

This year, depending on your time zone, the first day of spring begins sometime on either Saturday, March 19th (today!), or Sunday, March 20th. For the Universal Time Coordinate (formerly called Greenwich Mean Time), spring begins at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday. For us here in Austin, it starts at 11:30 p.m. tonight, and for my New Jersey daughter-in-law, who has been counting the days since some time in January, the shift happens at 12:30 a.m. on Sunday.

The bottom line? This will be the earliest First Day of Spring since 1896. (And I want to thank the folks at almanac.com, home of The Old Farmer’s Almanac, for all this great information.) Now, aren’t you glad you stopped by?

Citrus Delight

Another really great thing about March is that the season for citrus fruits is still happening. I was in my local fancy grocery store last week and was almost overcome with the fun variations on oranges, lemons, and limes there. Today’s collection includes Meyer lemons (thinner skinned and sweeter than regular lemons, and one of my all-time favorite dessert fruits), sweet limes (larger and thinner skinned than regular limes, and so mild you can eat the skin), and kumquats, which are completely new to me. But it’s my year of eating dangerously, so I decided to try them.

Do you know kumquats? Small, sweet-tart, and tender. Eat them whole, but watch out for the seeds. So I was thoroughly enjoying them raw, but was wondering what I could do to prolong the experience. Then I saw a recipe for candied kumquats. They looked so darling and jewel-like that I had to try it. My, my – they are yummy that way. Add them to your morning yogurt or cottage cheese, spoon them over vanilla ice cream, or add them to a smoothie. I’ve tried it all. And my goal of extending their life in my kitchen is failing miserably, as I keep sneaking into the fridge to spoon a couple out of the jar.

It was a snap to candy the kumquats, so I decided to candy some Meyer lemons, too. Candying citrus is like falling off a log – ridiculously easy. The candied lemon slices look like pieces of stained glass, and they’re terrific in all the same ways as the candied kumquats. And whatever you do, don’t throw away the candying syrup from either fruit. It’s a wonderful addition to tea or with a glass of seltzer, and it’s great in cocktails.

I didn’t candy the sweet limes, but I’m sure they’d be good that way, too. Mostly, I thought the three fruits would have a delicate beauty all together in a marmalade. Plus, I really wanted to add my French ginger liqueur into something. So that’s the third way I dealt with my bounty.

Get out there and – while the season lasts, which for most citrus fruits, is through the end of March – try one of these treatments. The fresh tastes are just the thing to bring spring into your kitchen.

Kitchen Goddess News Flash! Apparently Sam Sifton of The New York Times heard about this post in advance, and has put a piece on caramelized citrus in this week’s Times Magazine. He’s such a copycat. So if you want a slightly different take on candying your citrus, check out his piece. The Kitchen Goddess is quite the trendsetter, don’t you know?

Candied Kumquat Slices

Makes about 1½ cups, plus syrup.

Ingredients
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
15-20 kumquats, sliced and seeded (seeds saved if you plan to make marmalade)


Preparation
In a medium-sized saucepan over medium-high heat, stir together the sugar and the water until the sugar is completely dissolved. Add the kumquat slices and bring the mixture to a boil. Immediately reduce the heat to a simmer and continue to simmer the fruit, stirring occasionally, until the syrup thickens slightly, 10-15 minutes.

With a slotted spoon, remove the kumquat slices to a jar and add enough of the syrup to barely cover. Save the remaining syrup separately. Cool the syrup and kumquat slices before storing in the fridge.

Serve on plain yogurt, cottage cheese, or vanilla ice cream, or try some on bruschetta with goat cheese or an aged gruyère.

Candied Meyer Lemon Slices

Ingredients
2 cups sugar
2 cups water
3 Meyer lemons, thinly sliced and seeded

Preparation
Combine the water and sugar in a medium-sized (10 inches wide) skillet, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Bring the mixture to a boil and add the lemon slices. Reduce the heat and simmer the fruit for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally..

Remove the pan from the heat and allow the lemon slices to cool in the syrup to room temperature. Move the slices to a rack (sprayed with PAM) to dry somewhat. (The slices won’t actually dry, but you can layer them in a plastic container and store them in the fridge.)

Triple Citrus Marmalade

Adapted from Gourmet Magazine, December 1999.

Makes 4-5 cups.

Kitchen Goddess note: This recipe needs a day of rest between assembling and cooking, to let the natural pectin in the seeds do their work.

Ingredients
1½ pounds citrus fruit (I used kumquats, Meyer lemons, and sweet limes)
4 cups water
4-5 cups sugar
1½ teaspoons French ginger liqueur (or whatever flavor you like)

Special equipment: small cheesecloth bag or a piece of cheesecloth with string

Preparation
Slice the fruit thinly (about ⅛ inch wide), and save the seeds in a small dish. For the larger fruit, you may want to quarter the fruit before slicing it.

Put the fruit into a large saucepan with the water. Tie the seeds into a cheesecloth bag and submerge it with the fruit. Cover the pan and leave it for 24 hours at room temperature.

The next day, remove the bag of seeds and squeeze it to get as much of the pectin (that jelly-like substance you’ll find surrounding the bag – it’s what promotes the gelling in the marmalade) as you can into the fruit mixture. I used a lemon squeezer to press it.

Bring the water and fruit to a low boil over medium heat and cook it 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in a cup of sugar per cup of fruit/water, and continue to stir until the sugar dissolves. Bring the mixture back to a boil and cook another 15 minutes.

Test the readiness: While the fruit is cooking, stick a small saucer into your freezer. When the 15 minutes is up, dribble a teaspoon of the mixture onto the plate and let it rest for 2 minutes. If it gels, you’re done. If not, crank the heat back up and cook an additional 5 minutes.

Ladle the mixture into jars. If you want to keep them longer than a couple of weeks, process the jars as you would for any jam or jelly. Take a look here for the Kitchen Goddess’s modus operandi on preserving. Jam or marmalade in properly processed jars will keep at least a year.

Yellow Foods for a Gray Day What's cooking? Meyer Lemon Curd and Meyer Lemon Mousse

Yesterday was one of those dimly lit days in Austin, with a light drizzle from dawn to dusk. And my Valentine’s Day tulips struggled to last the full week. I’m not complaining – we can certainly use any amount of wet in our streams and lakes, and I’ve been thrilled to have the tulips for however long they make it. We don’t get much winter here in Texas, so I’m always grateful for the days that offer an excuse to watch old movies or straighten up my office or just read a book. My husband watched a marathon of games on the soccer channel. To each his own.

Maybe the best thing about such days is that I can head to the kitchen and – without an ounce of guilt – root around for something new to cook. I checked the fridge contents for inspiration and realized that my Meyer lemons were nearing the same state as the tulips – looking a little peaked, as my Louisiana grandmother would have said. Must be time to make lemon curd.

I have a tiny Meyer lemon tree that squeaked out 11 yellow orbs this year – not bad for a plant its size. But my wonderful neighbor, Lynne, has two trees not much bigger than mine, and hers produced a bumper crop. I have to find out her secret. To manage her bounty, she squeezes a bunch and freezes it into ice cubes, giving her a source of fresh juice that lasts at least through spring; still, she had oodles left over, so she gave me some. What a good neighbor – better than State Farm any day if you ask me.

So, for the trivia lovers among you, Meyer lemons have been in the U.S. since the early 1900s, but weren’t “discovered” as a food until Alice Waters of Chez Panisse and – who else – Martha Stewart came along. Meyers are sweeter than “true” lemons – which are really just called lemons without any adjective – and were developed in China as a hybrid between lemons and some type of orange. Meyers also have a smoother, thinner skin than regular lemons, and if left on the tree for more than the 3-4 months they need for ripening, will actually turn orange. Lynne let me cut off two that she hadn’t bothered to harvest – imagine! – so here’s a photo of what you get if you leave them on the tree an extra month.

I have such a hard time bringing myself to do anything with these lemons – they’re so beautiful, with a fragrance that speaks of freshness without the heavy citrus scent of regular lemons. Sitting in a bowl in my kitchen, they’re a bit of still life art. But lemon curd is equally wonderful and almost as versatile as the lemons themselves, and for only a tiny bit of work.

If you don’t know about lemon curd, you are in for a total treat. A smooth, gelatinous, pudding-y substance that’s essentially lemon-lovers’ answer to peanut butter. It’s a spread, a filling, a topping – featuring a bright yellow color and a bright, sweet lemon taste. It keeps for a year if you freeze it, and a month if not. It’s not on any diet I know of, but in small quantities, what the heck....

So, first the recipe, then a few ideas for using it. Watch for the Meyer Lemon Mousse at the end.

Meyer Lemon Curd
Adapted from Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home

Yield: about 5 cups

1 cup Meyer lemon juice
6 large eggs
6 large egg yolks (save a few of the whites for the lemon curd mousse below)
1 cup sugar
9 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature, cut into small chunks

Kitchen Goddess note: If you can’t find Meyer lemons, use regular lemons and increase the sugar to 1¼ cups. Under no circumstances should you use bottled lemon juice.

In a double boiler, or a large mixing bowl set over a pan of simmering water, whisk the lemon juice, eggs, yolks, and sugar together constantly for 5-6 minutes. Just when you think your arms won’t move the whisk around the pan for even a few more seconds, the mixture will come together into a pudding-like consistency.

Remove the mixture from the heat and whisk in the butter one small chunk at a time, allowing each piece to be completely incorporated before adding the next. Kitchen Goddess note: The Kitchen Goddess cleverly used her metal KitchenAid mixing bowl for the double-boiler whisking, so she was able to move the bowl to her mixer for whisking in the butter. The Kitchen Goddess is both lazy and clever.

Using a fine-mesh sieve, strain the curd into a clean bowl to remove any bits of cooked egg. Some cooks – whose names I won't mention but you know who you are, Ina –  add lemon zest and don’t strain the curd. If you don’t strain the curd, you can end up with tiny pieces of cooked egg in it – yuck. Moreover, I prefer the smoothness that comes from straining, and it’s such a light, lemony taste that I didn’t feel the need for zest. Speed the straining along by stirring against the mesh with a spatula.

If you will be using the curd within the next day, cover it with plastic wrap laid on the surface of the curd to keep a skin from forming and refrigerate. If not, store it in jars in the fridge or freeze it in plastic containers. The curd will firm up considerably as it cools. Give it a good stir to loosen it up again before using.

* * *

And now for a few ways to use this delightful substance:

■ Instead of butter on a scone or pound cake

■ As a filling between layers in a cake

■ In a baked tart shell with fruit scattered on top

■ Swirled with plain yogurt for breakfast or with softened vanilla ice cream for dessert

■ As the basis for a lemon meringue pie

■ As the basis for Meyer Lemon Mousse:

1. Whip ½ cup heavy cream, with ½ teaspoon vanilla, until stiff peaks form.

2. Gently fold ½ cup Meyer Lemon Curd into the whipped cream.

3. In a clean bowl, whip 2 large egg whites, with ¼ teaspoon cream of tartar, until soft peaks form. Add 4 tablespoons sugar and continue whipping until stiff, glossy peaks form.

4. Gently fold the whites into the whipped cream-curd mixture. Spoon into individual sherbet bowls and chill for 1-2 hours before serving.

* * *

Finally, put some of the curd into a jar and take it to the generous friend who gave you the lemons. It'll brighten the day for both of you.