By the time February rolls around, winter has usually worn out its welcome around here. The holidays are over, the days are still short, and there’s a long stretch of cold, dark sameness ahead that can make even the coziest kitchen start to feel a little too quiet.
So we do what any sensible northern people do when the calendar stops giving us reasons to celebrate: we invent our own.
We’ve got Mole Day (a spring celebration of life underground, where we eat root vegetables, turn the compost, and dig in the dirt) and Moon’s Night (the full moon closest to the summer solstice, when we camp out and stargaze). There’s Mountain Day in mid-August, where we hike the highest mountain we can, and Pepperinox in late August, where we roast Hatch chiles all day and make salsa (because August doesn’t have any holidays of note, we gave it two).
And many more, too many to list. We really love our holidays, festivals, and feast days, even if we’re the only ones in the universe celebrating.
But the one that really carries us through the darkest part of the year is our annual Citrus Festival, the bright, fragrant antidote to mid-winter gloom. Mandarins alone could carry a whole festival, but they’re just the beginning.
It’s not just an excuse to gorge on Sumo mandarins and call it a tradition. Wait, who am I kidding. It is definitely that.
But it’s also when we put up our year’s worth of citrus by running it through the canner as juice, jelly, and marmalade, packing it into fermentation jars to cure, and sending batch after batch through the dehydrator and freeze-dryer.
Citrus in Vermont has always been a thing. About a hundred years ago, local food co-ops around here actually started as citrus buying co-ops, with neighbors pooling orders to bring up a whole truckload from down south for preserving.
Those co-ops eventually became the grocery stores we know today, but the ritual itself goes back much further.
Bringing citrus north in winter is as reliable as the seasons, a thread that runs through old-time rural life, too, all the way back to the days when people planned for months ahead and made the most of whatever could be hauled in when the roads allowed.
Here in Vermont, it’s always had a rhythm to it, a give and take. In the settler days, farm families would walk all the way down to Boston, driving turkeys to the market, and then, like clockwork, they’d bring the citrus up later in the winter for preserves.
So welcome to this year’s Citrus Festival. It’s our little bright spot in the middle of winter.
On Creative Canning, I have a whole category for citrus canning recipes, with idea lists for lemons, limes, and oranges, and everyone has their favorites.
My son loves citrus sections canned in syrup, especially mandarin orange sections, and we remove every last bit of pith so they’re sweet and they pretty much glow in the jar. My daughter loves orange slices in honey syrup, put up with the peels intact, and they go into her tea party cups.
My husband is partial to lemon marmalade, and he really loved the Buddha’s Hand marmalade I made last year too.
My favorites are lemonade concentrate and limeade concentrate because they taste so darn good, and they’re absolutely indulgent when I come in from the garden mid-summer, exhausted and dehydrated. It’s like a gift I can give my future self.
I’m also really loving the lime pickled onions we’ve just started making, and they’re excellent on tacos.
Since I’d never canned orange juice or grapefruit juice, I decided to do a big batch of straight juices this year. I got a really lovely cast iron and stainless citrus juice press, and it is so much more efficient at juicing citrus than any other method we’ve tried. I’m getting double the juice out of everything these days, so I figured this would be the year to give it a go.
I’ll say that even with great yields, canning citrus juice isn’t really worth it. If I lived down south and had a yard full of trees perhaps, but I think my time here is better spent elsewhere. Still, I’m happy I tried it. One more thing checked off my canning bucket list.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be just canning recipes. The dehydrator is running too.
Dehydrated citrus slices are wonderful in simmer pots all winter long, and they make the house smell amazing. Smell is one of those little things that makes a house a home, and simmer pots go a long way to making long winters cozy.
My husband really wants traditional mincemeat pie and my daughter is excited about learning to bake panettone, both of which call for candied citrus peel. Those are also great in all manner of baked goods, and my son likes to eat them right out of the jar for a treat too.
He calls them orange candy, and I actually never told him he’s eating peels (shhh…).
This year, I’m also making batches of an Italian-style candied citrus peel in syrup. Giulia Scarpaleggia has a really lovely tutorial on how to make them, and you can almost taste them just looking at her pictures.
If you want to try something that’ll really change the way you cook, you should try making salt preserved citrus. It’s really simple, and all you’re really doing is packing citrus in salt so it ferments, kind of like sauerkraut.
The taste is hard to describe. Like citrus, but more.
More complex, more full, more everything.
They’re amazing in marinades and dry rubs for meats, or in salad dressings, but they’re also delicious in desserts, like literally diced up on top of ice cream, and in baked goods. You can make it with any citrus, but salt preserved lemons are the most well known, and they work really well in with lamb or goat, as in this slow roasted shoulder recipe.
And while this year was crazy busy, and my family is a bit “short staffed” due to injury at the moment, I’m just not willing to give up one of my very favorite parts of winter.
It’s not just a kitchen project, it’s a bright spot in the middle of winter, and a reminder that even in the darkest month of the year we can still make something that tastes like sunshine. We start with a pile of fruit on the counter, and we end with shelves full of jars and the house smelling amazing.
And even when the last jar is sealed and the sticky cutting boards are finally washed, nothing really goes to waste. The seeds get saved too, with a few planted for future indoor citrus trees to pass along to friends. Our greenhouse will be filled with baby trees this spring, growing right alongside our seedlings, and I’ll remember our citrus festival every time I water them well into summer.
Though many of those babies will get given to friends, citrus are still really generous with their seeds, and the rest dried and tucked into little pectin satchels for old-fashioned jams. The seeds have incredible amounts of pectin, and I dehydrate them and keep them in a jar for helping jams set all summer long.
With pectin at $6 a box, a few tablespoons of these babies are worth quite a bit.
So here’s to citrus season, sticky fingers, and jars that glow on the shelf. If you’re preserving along with us this year, I’d love to hear what you’re making, and what your “must do” citrus project is when winter starts to drag.
Until Next Time,
Ashley at Practical Self Reliance & Creative Canning
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