How to cremate a lemon

Let me start by saying that I am, in no way, blaming my cooking problems on the country of Namibia. Anyone who took organic chemistry with me at Graceland knows that I easily drip, spill, make serious mistakes, and sometimes blow things up. I cook the way Tristan goes through life at the moment--full of energy with little consideration for the possibility of negative events.

In a previous post, we asked people to give us recipes for lemons because our lemon tree had a serious case of overproduction in full progress. Never had a lemon tree before...

So, this week, we harvested many of the lemons and decided it was time to try some recipes. We had a recipe for lemon cake, lemon curd, lemon bars, and a suggestion to make lemon jam.

I started with lemon bars, because we had a faculty party to attend--what could be better than showing up with lemon bars in the middle of winter?! The results: the recipe was very easy, and in anyone else's hands with an oven that cooked in a somewhat predictable fashion, it would have turned out very well. But, as you can see in the photo at right, I produced Cremated Lemon Bars.

We've been struggling with our oven all year--it is a 'fan-assisted' oven, and (of course) has temperatures labeled in C, instead of F. It takes a while to heat up, but once it heats up, it appears to go to somewhere close to 450F. Kind of like trying to cook with a blow-torch.

Having the experience with the lemon bars, I decided against trying the cake. It looked like a lot of work for the eventual probability of burnt cake.

So, I tried lemon jam. Benefit: would not have to come close to the oven. I found a nice, easy recipe for lemon jam (click here for recipe), and boiled the lemon slices added the sugar and bottled it up. Pretty darn easy. Problem: it didn't set. I googled "how to get jam to set" and found this nice site that talks about the acid and pectin content of fruit. Lemons have almost no pectin, and I didn't have any pectin to add. So, the site recommended adding gelatin. I didn't have any plain gelatin, so I added two packets of "raspberry jelly" (southern Africa for 'jello') mix that we had on hand.

In our kitchen, you never know what color things are going to turn out. Yellow lemon bars? No, black. Yellow jam? No, pink. We'll keep experimenting with the lemon recipes, and let you know how the jam (still cooling) tastes--lemon/raspberry?!

It may be worth mentioning that before I was writing this post, I whipped up some quick bread and stuck it in the oven. It was supposed to bake at 350F for 45 minutes. I set the oven on its lowest setting of 100C (which equals 212F--it's boiling point) and left the room. In 15 minutes, I had burnt the bread. The struggle continues.