Howdy everyone! How was your Christmas and New Years? We enjoyed lots of time with family, good food, and got spoiled all in shorts and tshirts!  Which is crazy to think back on considering the constant state of cold I’ve been in all day. Our temps haven’t gotten over 27 today! 😳 And we don’t even have any snow to show for it.

But when the temps have kept us indoors, we’ve found ways to keep busy. And thanks to a big haul of oranges and lemons from PawPaw’s trees, it’s been easy! We’ve had such success with our experiments, I thought I might as well share. This falls under the homesteading category, after all.

Most years, it seems only one type of citrus produces at a time in abundance. This year, each tree went bananas! We got as many oranges as we did lemons and, frankly, it was overwhelming at first. Usually I get just enough oranges to make juice for a week or two. Or squeeze lemon juice into ice cube trays to use in my water or in cooking. With this haul, I wanted to get more creative. This is what I STILL have left of a FULL box after all the fun. We started with lemonade and I finally found a recipe that works perfectly. The kids aren’t exactly thrilled the “chunks” (tiny bits of pulp) in their drink, but mama don’t have a strainer small enough yet. They’ll survive.

The Recipe for Our Perfect Lemonade:

• 1.5 cups lemon juice
• 2 cups water
• 1 to 1.5 cups sugar (I usually scale back the sugar in almost every recipe I find, so 1 cup keeps it sweet but definitely more tart)

Method: bring water and sugar to a boil until sugar is dissolved. Pour into a heat safe pitcher with the lemon juice. Fill pitcher rest of the way with more water.

We made two batches and stored both in the fridge; one in a washed out orange juice container and the other remained in the pitcher. I still have left over lemons to make freezer cubes as well!

The oranges had me take to Pinterest to find a way to preserve them. I’ve never liked marmalade and that was the only thing that came to mind until I found you can make just plain ol jam with orange juice! No chunks for my weird texture thing to get grossed out by! 👍🏻 I’ve been finding mason jars everywhere in this house and in the barn, so with a purchase of lids and pectin I was ready! It took a lot of oranges to make 5 cups of juice, but that was kind of the point, right? The process was super easy. I’m storing mine in the fridge because I don’t own a processor…yet. But due to the heat and the jars themselves, they all self sealed while cooling on the counter. But to ease my nerves, they will remain in the fridge. This is the recipe we followed. On batch one, I scaled the sugar back by a cup. After tasting batch one, the second batch got scaled back by 2 cups. I like tang more than sugar 😉.

Both batches turned out so good! The consistency was great after cooling, which surprised me considering how liquid it was going in! I am definitely hooked on this canning gig. I can’t wait for these fruit trees on our property to produce! Hopefully I can go canning crazy on peaches, plums and pears!

I should add that while typing this post, a cute flurry of snow showed up and we hurriedly enjoyed as much as we could before the cold was too much. I can still see an occasional fleck float by while I sit here and thaw. 😄

-Lindsay