Simply Luscious Lime Sugar

So I know you’re asking yourself, “What in the world am I going to do with lime sugar?”  Well, not only will I be posting a recipe that calls for it soon, but once you’ve made it, you’ll be asking yourself, “Why have I never had lime sugar?”  It’s super simple, and amazingly delicious.  Not to mention it’s like an air freshener in a jar.  I should note that although I haven’t tried them yet, I’m sure orange, lemon, or even grapefruit would be just as fabulous. 

Here’s what you’ll need:

• 3 cups sugar
• 2 Tablespoons lime zest

Go ahead and zest your limes.  Obviously, the amount of zest you’re going to get from each one depends on what size the limes are.  Mine were fairly small, and I got about 1 Tablespoon per lime.  A really fine microplane works great for this because you want really tiny pieces. 

When you remove the zest, be sure to only take the colored part.  The white stuff is bitter. 

 

Put your sugar and zest into some kind of jar or container with a tight fitting lid. 

Put the lid on, and shake the dickens out of it.  Seriously, think of it like a shake weight and work your arms out for a full minute or two.  Not only do you want everything evenly distributed, but the sugar beats the oil out of the zest releasing all that lime goodness. 

Now just take the lid off and inhale.  It has to be one of the most amazing scents I’ve ever smelled.  After making fabulousness for which I made the lime sugar (and I made it with Elise Logan, so you know it was seriously good) I went on to find other uses for this amazing new creation.  I put some in my ice tea with mint, and I even sprinkled some on toast as you would with cinnamon sugar.  As good as Seeley’s cinnamon toast looked, I’m going to say it’s got nothing on lime sugar toast. 

You Jelly?

This is a mesquite tree.

Mesquite trees have thorns. Be careful.

Mesquite trees also make beans.

Lots of them.

Beans can be made into jelly.

Beans?? Yup. Beans.

When they're "ripe" you can hear the seeds rattling around inside them, but a couple green ones isn't going to hurt anything.

Bean Jelly. Not Green Jelly, the hilarious 80s band that did a cover of "Three Little Pigs" metal style.

And the best part is that the beans grow wild across the street from Recipe Guy's house.

Mesquite Bean Jelly

• About a gallon of mesquite beans
• Water
• 2 c sugar
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 1/2 package of dry fruit pectin

I hate using the "package" measure, but I'm not sure how much that was... the package says 49 grams, so I guess around 25? It looked like maybe 1/6 of a cup... I think.

Kinda.

Um, I forgot to do an Ingredients pic with this one, so I'm just going to keep typing like I know what I'm doing.

The best way to rinse the beans is in a sink full of water.

This also encourages any critters who have been munching on your beans to vacate them. Yes, there will be critters. This is wild food which means it's someone else's link in the food chain, and you're going to have to out compete them if you want to eat.

Pick through the beans and remove any that have holes in them or look like they've been nibbled on. We had about a 50% recovery: we picked about 2 gallons of beans to get 1 gallon of usable ones.

Break the beans into pieces, cover them with an inch or two of cold water (above the bean level), and bring them to a boil.

After about 5 minutes, it starts to smell kinda sweet, almost like chamomile tea. Once it's boiled for 5 minutes, turn the heat off, cover it, and let it steep for another 30.

Definitely tea.

There's a distinct floral aroma, that you wouldn't expect from beans.

Strain the beans. You can pause here in the process and refridgerate or freeze your bean tea if you've done enough for the day.

When you're ready to make jelly, dump the tea back in the pot and bring it back to a boil. Keep boiling until you have 1 1/2 cups of tea. The colour definitely darkens as you concentrate it. This isn't the best light, but it's a lovely reddish gold colour.

(you can check your level by either pouring hot tea into a pyrex cup to check and then back into the pot to continue, or: before you start, put 1.5 cups of water in your pot to get an idea of what that level looks like then dump it out and put the tea in to boil)

I think this is the point at which we made a mistake.

Not a cataclysmic one by any means, but the end product wasn't quite what we were expecting.

We didn't let our tea cool.

This messed with our pectin, which needs to start out cool and then be heated, not poured into a pot of boiling tea.

Oops.

So, let your tea cool. Completely. Like until it's not hot.

Neither of us have ever made jam or jelly before and had no clue ... Taneasha is laffing at us, I know.

Okay, so with your cool concentrated tea...

Put the tea back in the pot and add the lemon juice, sugar, and the pectin.

Stir this gently as you bring it back to a boil. The recipe we found at Edible Austin said to boil it one minute, but looking at the pectin package... I'm seeing slightly different instructions. So, in addition not to starting with boiling tea, read the directions. (freaking engineers, think they know how to do things without instructions... )

Keep it at a full rolling boil (this means that the boil doesn't stop or slow if you stir it) for one minute.

Pour your supposedly thickened jelly into a large clean jar.

You can actually see the tiny beads of solidified pectin stuck to the sides of the pot in this pic. That's where some of the missing "jelly" went, I think. Wouldn't have happened if we'd started with cold tea.

We aren't properly "canning" the jelly because we only made a tiny test batch, and we're pretty sure it's going to be eaten quickly.

Because although it has the consistency of syrup,

it tastes fucking awesome.

The floral aroma totally stayed, and there's a distinct flavour of wildflower honey. Amazing on biscuits and with late season peaches.

This was my first attempt at using pectin to gel anything. What have you canned?