Meyer Lemon Marmalade

A super-simple recipe from Farmer Monte in the LPO newsletter. I got a Meyer lemon tree this year, which I'm growing in a container indoors, and it has little baby lemons on it right now! The flowers smell wonderful, and I have high hopes for the fruit, but unfortunately it has a nasty case of scale* that I need to deal with soon.

1 pound Meyer lemons
2 cups water
2 cups sugar

Juice the lemons, discarding the seeds. Slice the lemon rinds very thinly, or chop very finely. The finer you chop them, the shorter the cooking time.

Place the juice, rind, and water in a small saucepan and boil until the rinds are tender, about 20 minutes. Serious marmalade-makers would soak it overnight, but I didn't. Add sugar, then simmer another 30 minutes or until the rinds are soft, it is quite syrupy, and begins to turn a nice amber color.

Note: On the first batch, I thought I would leave out the water and I just cooked the rinds, juice and sugar in the pot all at once. This was a mistake, because then it took about 3 hours for the rinds to soften. It needs a period of cooking in water without the sugar, because the sugar actually draws moisture out of the rinds, keeping them hard.

*Scale is a strange insect, kind of like an aphid or fruit fly in the juvenile stage (they fly around) but as an adult it attaches permanently to the stem of a plant and develops a protective shell over itself. This makes it difficult to kill! And they breed like crazy indoors. The only thing to do is to scrape the adults off with your fingernail or a toothbrush. I scrubbed the entire tree (it's pretty small) with a toothbrush, and a few drops of Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap in about a cup of water. Next I will spray it with neem oil (an organic insecticide derived from the neem tree in India) to kill any juveniles that might have been out and about, thus missing the blitz. It kills on contact, so hopefully this should do it!