Turkey Time: Sour

Okay, okay. I know I haven't updated this blog in almost a year, but in fairness, I've been a lot better about updating my Christie blog infrequently. I'm still in Turkey. I'm still teaching - they let me stay another year - was there any doubt? But I don't want to talk about Turkey or teaching in this post. I want to talk about lemon pickle.

After shying away from jars of citrus pickles lining the aisles of the Indian section of the grocery store for years, I finally had some forced upon me. John and Michelle gave me a jar when they left for Zambia. This one, lime pickle, looked pretty good (by pretty good, I mean, there wasn't a grease stain on the label, it wasn't a dusty jar, and it looked edible. Needless to say, after partaking of some with my Lahori style chicken curry from my cookbook by Suvir Saran, I was won over. When I read up on Indian pickle and found that the aging process is a huge factor in the excellence of the flavor (Saran boasts owning a 40 year old jar of lemon pickle), I became more comfortable with the look of it and regretted not picking up a jar for one of my colleagues when I was in Kerala last year.

Well, my jar from John and Michelle is starting to run out so I decided to consult Suvir's book and see just how hard it might be to make this myself. The recipe looked straightforward enough so I ran up to the market on Hatay and picked up a dozen lemons. One turned out to be rotton so my pickle will be one short. I began by halving the lemons lengthwise and then cutting the halves in half and getting 3-4 wedges from each. Then I put them on a paper towel lined baking sheet and set them on my balcony to dry out in the sun (having reserved the lemon juice produced from cutting them up).

Next, I mixed up some whole and ground spices - this bit turned out to be a dodg-

Oh wait! I forgot to mention the most important part of the whole lemon-cutting portion - I sliced a good portion of the tip of my thumb. I'm standing at my marble counter slicing away when my knife slides a bit too far to the right and goes right into my thumb tip. As you can imagine, the lemon juice felt great on the new wound. I threw stuff down, staunched the bleeding (none got into the lemons I'm happy to say), disinfected the wound, bandaged it and went back to slicing.

-y undertaking as I don't have a proper spice grinder. I tried my mini processor but it didn't do much. I then resorted to my bamboo mortar and pestle (with the pestle that is entirely too short so my knuckles get a bit of a grinding on the side of the mortar). It took a bit, but I got most of it ground up.

I ran it through a sieve just to get the bigger, ungrindable bits (mostly cardamom pods). I added that to the salt which is sitting in a bowl waiting to receive the lovely lemon slices once they've spent their day in the sun.